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ravel i started teaching it last week on valentine s day of course my subtlety too smug by half but i think my first week on it content wise was one of the best lectures i ve given in recent years there s so much to say about that magnificently miniscule text one hardly knows when to stop i am now teasing through a possible article on it in comparison with graham greene s revision of it in a burnt out case though i m dubious about when i ll ever have the time greene once said that he had to stop reading conrad for twenty years for fear he would colonize his style but i suspect a burnt out case was a much more studied response to conrad than many of greene s critics have previously realized particularly in greene s transformation of conrad s persistent uneasiness into his or his character querry s discomfort the more time passes the more i want to teach shakespeare again i miss it immensely i keep inserting bits of shakie into my courses usually to surprisingly good effect considering the courses themselves but i want to be able to talk about literature passionately again my short story course with its heavy emphasis on modernist writing tends to disallow that simply because of the profoundly ironic nature of so much of it if i had my way i d establish myself as my own shakespeare department at current institution and build it from the ground up considering both conrad and shakespeare i was reminded of the simple fact and it is despite what others may say that the two greatest periods for literature in english were the renaissance and the modern 1890 1945 era the former s obvious but why the latter and it occurred to me today that it was in the modern age that for the first time writers could discover one another without really meeting in previous decades and centuries they would do so in centralized loci such as paris or london but with the technological advancements of the time and the mass production of texts reaching new capabilities authors could with legitimate excitement and or antagonism respond to other authors other movements other concepts without limitation moreover there were specific modernist projects goals aims this thing we loosely call post modernism for whatever its other virtues is pretty much toujours deja cynical about everything so no wonder it and its various subsequent posts has failed to find its genuinely crystallizing voices i m increasingly aware that my students really don t think of me as a capital t teacher i m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing i find it sometimes undermines the authority but it underlines the credibility especially as they don t put me into the pedestal based camp it often seems i m more like a residence don than a professor per se i m glad in most ways that i m seldom seen as the typical prof but it also disaffords me of some of the aspects so crucial to the imperious assertion of control that s often necessary in managing co ordinating large groups it reminds me though of something i find fundamentally distressing the extent to which most in my profession work upon assumed authority rather than earned authority it remains to this day that students of mine from ten years ago still go out of their way to see me somehow that s more intensely meaningful than any course evaluation ever would be i don t know that should probably just be my mantra henceforth i don t know intelligence ultimately defeats itself as does instinct one simply goes and moves like marlow s steamer through the stillness and the calamity one should be so zen and yet never tip one s hand posted by dr j at 2 17 00 pm 4 comments 28 january 2008 the beale world i have been reluctant to comment openly about the democratic and republican nomination campaigns for a number of reasons not least of which is the interminable ramble already being given them by media outlets in the united states cnn with its self proclaimed best political team on television as the network incessantly reminds viewers is by far the worst offender jack hammering away at the same events and issues with particularly pernicious vapidity but it s no less guilty than the panoply of other outlets passing off pointlessly speculative political yammering as insightful documentation and analysis the effects of all this prattle are two fold depending on one s response to it either one becomes addicted to it a junkie demanding one s daily fix or one becomes inured to it a cynic begging pleading for a reprieve from constant clamour i m convinced that if there is a hell at least one of its tortures is a steady stream of american political coverage a kind of promethean punishment for those unable to extract themselves from their couch potato related sins it d be a dantescan punishment by way of paddy chayefsky but a dantescan one nonetheless yet i think we may finally be entering the peace before the general election storm the worst of the acrimony and contempt seems finally to be petering out and the results coming largely to naught the republicans seem to be inching closer to accepting john mccain as their date to the prom hesitant as they may be about it while the clintonian implosion of the past few weeks has probably all but coronated barack obama as the democratic nominee today s endorsement of obama by sen edward kennedy may finally have tipped the scales in the latter in a stunningly scrupulous rejection of self interested slash and burn politics sen kennedy may well have directed democrats away from immediate immolation make no mistake this is a good thing democrats like hamlet are usually their own worst enemies destroying themselves rather than their opponents in recent weeks the clintons all but discredited themselves from the running not so much by any particular action but by demonstrating the willingness to return the party to internecine warfare and while that may have worked well enough in other circumstances the current ones demand otherwise people are mad as hell about politics as usual and they re not going to take it anymore but i think it s also about people being furious about the various forms of fury itself one of the reasons senator clinton was given a reprieve by democrats in new hampshire and nevada was the vulturous behaviour of media figures like andrew sullivan whose insistently vituperative derangement about the clintons was perhaps the best gift he could have given them sullivan though by no means alone in his position represents the kind of 90s vitriolic visceral and counter sensical monomania that fed american politics of the past fifteen years and people have seen where such thinking has led them the clintons similarly represent the win at all costs strategy and they re being rejected too though it s probably crucial that democrats are doing the rejection of them on their own terms and not those of others the same is true of romney whose over packaged say anything campaign is being received with relative ambivalence the media generally are being punished too with last minute mind changes and disingenuous self reporting it seems designed to throw all of that polling prognostication and general gotcha ism into disrepute the electorate seems to be asking you think you know what are issues are before immediately answering with a stern no no you don t there s a whole lot of whoop ass to go round and voters seem very much unafraid to dole it out howard beale would be proud and yet for all that anger for all that a pox on all your houses kind of fury the voters in both parties seem to be leaning toward the figures who represent at least some kind of integrity and some kind of trans party appeal mccain is about the only republican candidate with a chance of winning democratic voters while obama is the only democratic one capable of doing the reverse neither are ideal candidates but they serve in counter point to one another with mccain the voice of experience and obama the voice of youth i will not say hope a word now largely bereft of meaning in this context all those of ideas of political predestination that once surrounded clinton and giuliani are on the verge of being relegated to the historical junk heap and all the political calculus that had become conventional wisdom in recent years is already there it s as if voters have become cynical about wait for it cynicism and they re responding in kind as well they should it has been a long time in the coming and while this could admittedly be premature it s almost cause for dare one say hope posted by dr j at 4 33 00 pm 2 comments 22 january 2008 nodding off just a few short notes writing from one campus before i set out for another on the academy award nominations announced today conspicuously missing marisa tomei for before the devil knows you re dead donald pinsent for away from her and max von sydow for the diving bell and the butterfly when will the academy stop ignoring max he s the joseph cotten of foreign films in every bloody classic there is or so it seems and he s usually tremendous and yet nary a nomination c mon he s max von fucking goddamn sydow he had two scenes in that movie and yet every critic i ve read felt compelled to remark on his brilliance in them maybe the power of you know who compelled them pleasant surprises ruby dee and hal holbrook for american gangster and into the wild two performers capable of changing an entire movie with a single scene for mr holbrook it s about bloody time hal might actually win it in a year when it looks like non american talent will win big his nomination will allow the academy to assert its appreciation of home born legends foregone conclusions i think the top acting honours are set in stone it ll be julie christie and daniel day lewis do any of the other nominees in either categorty even stand a chance the academy is dying to reward julie christie as well it should her performance is absolutely heart breaking also look for tilda swinton to grab the award for michael clayton it ll probably be the acknowledgement the academy gives for not being able to reward it in other categories insult to injury after being robbed last year and maintaining the longest losing streak in oscar history you d think the academy would have had the grace to toss peter o toole a nod for ratatouille the poor bastard just can t catch a break he should have won for venus just as he should have won for lawrence of arabia wait for it forty five years ago look for no country for old men to win best picture i d be shocked shocked i tell you if it didn t why because it doesn t deserve to consider it the coens version of the departed best picture is always about cultural cachet and no country has it in spades right now striking the match will the writer s strike end in time for the ceremony count on it there s just too much money involved in the oscars for everyone to let it continue and disrupt the grand tradition so there we are dispute as you will must to campus number two it s going to be a long bloody day posted by dr j at 2 53 00 pm no comments 04 january 2008 collective commentaries one of the odder things about the english language is the panoply of words that act as collective nouns some are still in common use a litter of puppies a range of mountains a bed of flowers a class of students a crowd of people and some are just odd enough that some remember them just for their oddness like a murder of crows how some of them came to be or how they re ever used is curious and often fun stuff sometimes however they re just outright funny especially when they ve obviously been adapted to contemporary purposes here are a few samples from academic contexts a group of academics is called a faculty a group of assistant professors is a clamber a group of associate professors is a tenure a group of full professors is an entropy or an entrenchment you have to adore the progression some other related collectives a oversight of deans an essence of existentialists a lack of principals savour the irony a brood of researchers a drowse of underachievers a leap of overachievers and of course there s a nullity of nihilists say that ten times fast even the student year levels have their own collectives a plenitude of freshmen a platitude of sophomores a gratitude of juniors and an attitude of seniors better yet there are also fortitudes of graduate students and doggednesses of doctoral candidates all working on their angsts of dissertations lovely when language offers its implicit commentaries non frankly i think a group of doctoral candidates should be a delay or an insecurity even a poverty would do some other choice examples even though surely the catch of collective nouns is language at its most sly an ingratitude of children a rash of dermatologists a guess of diagnosticians a gross of farts a conjunction of grammarians a smear of gynecologists a thicket of idiots a spread of nymphomaniacs a tenet of palindromes clever indeed a babel or a babble of words many of these were surely invented only recently of course but one has to admire the elegance of them you can read amusedly through some sites through the link above reminds me though that i ll have to pick up james lipton s an exaltation of larks yes that james lipton which seems to have been the source for many of the above makes me wonder what a group of partial load professors would be a posse a parade a temper posted by dr j at 1 10 00 am 2 comments 28 december 2007 after christmas and disclaiming care so christmas has finally come and gone and with it the end of first term at new institution my workload has briefly subsided but the post class period demanded a mad dash of more than 80 hours of marking in a week and in many ways i m still recovering from it come january i ll have six courses up from five this term which augurs for a repeat of the end of term insanity unless i can figure out a way to coordinate a more professor friendly calendar rather than the student friendly one i ran with this time is that selfish probably but it s a necessary selfishness i fear that means though that i m going to have to be something of a so called hard ass next term i m sure that ll thrill my future charges onto another matter now and then something happens culturally that makes me feel very much like an odd man out particularly when critical and general responses are largely laudatory while mine is ambivalent or worse such is the case of no country for old men a movie i find myself unable to like certainly there are many admirable things about it including the performances the cinematography and the direction in many ways it s a study in stillness and silence which surely makes the interruptions of violence seem far more brutal than they otherwise might be it s also perhaps the most genuinely nihilistic film i ve seen in years even outpacing the dark comic cum revenge tragic before the devil knows you re dead so what s missing or what am i missing there s something passionless about the whole p...