Every so often I come face to face with the fact that I'm not all that fond of literature, at least not most of what is considered high literature. Case in point:

I read an essay that made me rethink my distaste for audio books. Previously, it had occurred to me that all my driving was just killing my reading time. I took classes at UNM for the 2009 fall semester, so for the last few months I've been driving to Albuquerque three mornings a week. Until now I had been listening to my poor overlooked CDs, but I was starting to feel the loss of time more acutely, and audio books are an obvious way to try using the down-time that driving requires. The essay convinced me to give it a try. "The audio book performance will influence my interpretation, but I can abstract from the performance interpretation to form my own interpretation, i.e., understanding and appreciation, of the work." So I decided to try it out, but the only audio books available to me easily were those in the St. John's library. As you can imagine, these aren't the kind you'd typically want to listen to during a drive. I passed up Herodotus, Dostoyevsky, Homer, etc. and decided on Dubliners. At least it's fiction and was written in English, the earliest story not much more than a hundred years ago.

I have read Dubliners, but long enough ago that I didn't remember almost any of the stories. Back then I had a sense that it was simply important to read. I don't really feel that now, but I have a generally positive opinion of Joyce.

And so I started. I felt distaste for the reader's voice, but as the essay suggested, it was a relatively trivial matter without much influence on my ultimate interpretation.

And that brings me back to the point with which I began: I don't like interpreting literature. The reasons are made more apparent than usual with Dubliners. I have nearly no aptitude for figuring out stories, on every level. I don't know what part of a story is supposed to be vague; I don't feel at all secure guessing at what I'm supposed to understand from things that are left vague; and I just don't enjoy trying. I have a hard time supplying what is missing, in literature and in life. I can't read between the lines any better than I can read Navajo. I find almost any level of vagueness displeasing and unsettling.

I feel quite the opposite when I read criticism of literature, summaries, and other people's interpretations (as long as they seem plausible). It makes no difference to me if it's Wikipedia entries, short essays intended to help students, or scholarly interpretations, I like it all even if I like some better than others. Reading literature itself is unnerving and often baffling experience. Reading about literature: now that I find fun.

Dubliners is anything but straightforward, and is carefully constructed to require interpretation, as are almost all modern texts. They are generally praised for this feature, and praised the more for being especially hard to understand (or "ambiguous" or "open to interpretation"). Whenever I read something like that I realize that I just don't like it.

In short, I am a philistine when it comes to literature. I am also, unfortunately, unable to accept this as saying anything but bad things about me.

There are perhaps two ways of describing teaching and learning in an appropriate
manner. The one is that of begetting and conceiving. The word of the teacher
acts as the form which in-forms the material of the learner's soul, in-forms the
capability this soul has, and transforms it into a knowing soul. This is, on the
whole, the Aristotelian view. The process of learning and teaching is a
generative one, and a great deal depends not only on the activity and
effectiveness of the teacher's word, but also on the receptivity and
potentiality of the learner's soul. The other way of describing teaching and
learning is that of soliciting and gaining insight from within. Through
questioning and arguing the teacher compels the learner to pull out of himself,
as it were, something slumbering in him at all times. This is, on the whole, the
Socratic and Platonic view. Here again a great deal depends on the quality of
the teacher's questions and on the quality of the learner's soul. But just as
questioning has its place in the Aristotelian scheme, begetting is an important
element in Socrates' practice. Learning from books, by images, through
associations, and whatever other ways of learning may be mentioned, falls easily
into the patterns of those two fundamental views. I doubt whether modern
psychologies of learning have added anything to them.

-Jacob Klein, On Liberal Education, a lecture delivered March 25, 1965

If I've ever read anything more tragically stupid, I'm sure I read it in another St. John's lecture.

Yes indeed, nothing better than looking over old emails at work to delete ones I don't need and realizing that I am occasionally a damn fine writer. Every so often I look up from my stupor of days and investigate my life, and I realize that I've lost the impulse to write. It never seemed like a big deal when I had it. I'd write long blog posts and emails and journal entries, and I was always pulling out my pocket notebook to write something down, but I very rarely wrote stories. Since that was my benchmark of being a writer, I didn't think I was doing anything worthwhile. Now I look back at how frequently I wrote in my late teens and early twenties and I wonder what the hell happened.

When I started this blog, I saw it as my responsibility to publish things in it, almost like I had been hired to write a daily column for a newspaper. My deadline was midnight every night. I could take vacations without getting prior approval, but it was on the understanding that I might lose my two or three readers.

I later learned that (a few) other people read my blog at various points but never left comments, so I didn't know it at the time. If anybody I don't know personally has read my blog, I still don't know it. Over time, though, I must have lost all of my readers, mostly to my own neglect.

I meet very few new people these days, and I've fallen out of touch with most of the old ones. I became friends with library students the first two years I was a supervisor, but in the third year, I really haven't. I don't feel a desire to hang out with people in my German class, and even if I did, they live in Albuquerque. And I get tired and misanthropic in most social settings involving more than one other person.

Writing is a famously solitary action, but that clearly isn't the whole story. Without a sense of audience, I often have no urge to write. The more time I spend alone, the less time I spend thinking and, of course, the less I have to describe anyway.

Also, I guess, as I get older I'm continuously losing my engagement with the world. My curiosity is mostly intact, but I primarily focus it on things that other people have written. I get little sense of wonder from encountering new things in the world, and indeed very little seems genuinely new. I often seemed to have an unlimited desire (but very limited ability) to observe and probe people, the way they think and speak and dress and move, the bizarre shapes their relationships with each other take, the mystery of personality. I thought about it often, but to little effect. I've been thinking about it less and less, and I don't know why it is that I no longer become fascinated with people any more.

I can still get plenty annoyed with people, though. As I type this, someone in the preceptorial that meets in the study room attached to the library is polluting my ears with his overwrought, high-pitched, percussive laughter. The sound is like an evil clown in a Saturday morning cartoon, only it has a genuine lunatic quality that cartoons can't match. I wonder if it isn't the student Anne dubbed "hyena boy".

So there, I've met my digital quota for the month. Here's hoping I keep it up tomorrow.

Last night I dreamt that M. Night Shyamalan had died in a plane crash, or perhaps it was from a horrible disease. What a tragedy it would be if we lost the worst Hollywood filmmaker of the present era (if not ever), and thus all the terrible movies he'll produce in the future. It is a great relief to check google news and find that the top Shyamalan hits are still about this historically important director being invited to the White House as a guest at the state dinner for Manmohan Singh.

fumbling toward ecstacy

Epicenters of hamhock faces:

Sports Center
Boston, MA
ex-members of Saturday Night Live
high school sports coaches
reporters for Men's Fitness
County Kerry
John Kerry
Kerry O'Malley's brother Mike O'Malley
Martine Kerry O'Michael O'Malley
McDonalds in Ohio
Ted Mc'O'Hamhock Shyamalan Kennedy
within twenty minutes of any cornfield
and, I'm sure, also in Heaven

Anybody still reading? Read these two paragraphs from the Daily Howler about how poorly people understand the way the media and the government work in the U.S.:

Like Henneberger, Simon described a strange dual system. One side gets to yell objections—the more absurd the better. The other side is somehow required to make an impossibly complex presentation. One side is required to yell two words. The other side has to tick off long list of complex points.

To our ear, Simon and Henneberger were each describing a political system they can’t quite explain. One side gets to yell crazy things—and the other side is required to make intensely detailed presentations! And yet, the side which yells the crazy things is the side which constantly wins! It’s almost like a dream from Kafka—a dream our side can’t quite explain. Then too, we thought of a passage from Wittgenstein: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”

From: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082609.shtml

The following sentence appeared in an email from Conference Services about carpet being installed in the library:

Please do not “get in the way” of the crew when you stop by as we need them to get done with this project.

Can anyone tell me what she thought she was doing with the quotation marks? I really want to know. I'm strongly tempted to reply to the email and ask.

The world contracted again.