An old palimpsest

Here is what a robot thinks of us:

partpalimpsest.wordpress.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time.

partpalimpsest.wordpress.com is the 538th most manly blog of 3005 ranked.

partpalimpsest.wordpress.com is the 1745th most happy blog of 3005 ranked.

Barth’s Chimera (more grouchiness, alas)

This is a stupid book.

Acquired tastes

I think people should start using the concept of “acquired tastes” outside of food and drink. A lot of styles of music, writing, etc. are initially abrasive, but really good when you get used to them. When people fail to acknowledge that, they fall into either elitism/hipsterism (“I always liked X, because I have refined taste”) or conspiracy-theory populism (“no one really likes X, they just pretend to”). Either way, people are missing out on stuff they might enjoy.

Everyone finds their first taste of coffee or beer or whiskey to be kind of rough, but everyone knows that you can get used to these tastes and grow to enjoy them. No one goes around after that first sip declaring “no one really likes this! They’re just pretending to, to impress people!” Yet people say analogous things about books and music all the time.

‎(Clarification: When I say that elitism/hipsterism makes people miss out on stuff, I mean it makes *other* people miss out on stuff. Like, say the hipsters are going on about their new favorite band. “Dude, Mutilated Gnostic Rabbit is the shit!” So you try listening to a Mutilated Gnostic Rabbit song, and it sounds all distorted and screechy and terrible. And so you may think, “well, I guess these people and I just have really different taste.” But what the hipsters won’t tell you is that they, too, found MGR’s style abrasive at first, and they had to listen to it for a while before they started to notice its subtle artistry, etc. etc.)

Closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience

But are these old habits essential? Mightn’t they actually be distracting us from the written word itself? Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

. . .

Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. Memorized, a poem is as surely a piece of literature in our minds as it is on the page. If we say the words in sequence, even silently without opening our mouths, then we have had a literary experience—perhaps even a more intense one than a reading from the page.

. . .

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience.

-Tim Parks, “E-books Can’t Burn”

My two minutes hate: hyperobjects

As a given semester progresses and I become more caffeinated and more sleep-deprived, I inevitably drift further and further toward being a ranting, flanderized caricature of myself. (My most recent post already displays considerable development in this direction.) Given the inevitability just mentioned, the only thing I can do about this process is try to enjoy it.

In that spirit, I give you this post, which is one long sneer at the concept of “hyperobjects” as expressed by lit professor Timothy Morton in this interview I came upon when surfing the internet this morning. I don’t know why I even care about this. I guess it’s because 1) Morton’s ideas are dumb, 2) Morton’s ideas are dumb in a way that encroaches on my academic turf in a few ways, 3) Morton is a tenured professor who has published nine books and seventy-six papers, so we should expect better of him, dammit.

a populist russky poem

Written 1876 by Nikolai Nekrasov (his last name means “not pretty”). Translated last week by me. I have no idea what to do with the problematic phonetic resemblance between sower and sewer (and suddenly, listening to Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby and having just typed “sewer,” it occurs to me that it looks an awful lot like “sewer”), or if it’s even problematic at all. My favorite thing about the poem that came through in translation is the weird repetition of “shy.” My favorite thing about the poem that may not have come through in translation, despite the help of irregular English past participles, is how many different forms of the word “sow” there are (in Russian it looks like seed, sperm, family, and the number seven). Original under the cut.

TO THE SOWERS
Sower of knowledge in the people’s field!
Do you find the soil fruitless, or is it that
Your seeds are lean?
Are you shy of heart? Are you weak in spirit?
Your work is rewarded with stunted shoots,
Your grains of little good!
Wherever are you, able ones, with your spry faces,
Wherever are you, with your baskets full of wheat?
The work has been sown shyly, seed by seed—
Strike forward!
Sow the reasonable, the good, the eternal,
Sow! You will be thanked from the heart
Of the Russian people…

“Everything and More” and related things

(Disclaimer: This turned into one of my . . . things where I rant on and on. Over 3000 words. Read at your own risk.)

I’ve been reading Everything and More, David Foster Wallace’s history of the concept of infinity. It received poor reviews from mathematically educated critics (including from some who liked Wallace’s fiction — see e.g. here), and I’m mainly reading it out of general interest in Wallace, rather than to learn about the material he presents.

Aesthetic associations

1. The concept of shore leave during World War II, a warm breeze at night, doing math for a long time in a small metallic room, solitude, longing, simplicity.
2. Harlequins, chessboards, butterflies, music theory, madness, the word “piercing.”
3. Pop music with too much reverb, a bar or nightclub lit with gaudy colored lights, the end of the world, the revelation of the unity of things, otherworldly calm, melancholy.

Viktor Shklovsky and the 5 paragraph essay

Darling Viktor Shklovsky, founder of Russian formalism, has a tome on Tolstoy’s War and Peace that I’ve been using in writing my thesis. The damn thing has never, as far as I can tell, been translated into English, which means that it takes me hours to read a few pages. Here I provide my translation of a few particularly salient (!) paragraphs, which, astonishingly, take the form of a sixth-grader’s attempt at a five-paragraph essay: all huge block quotes, no analysis. The thesis of the essay is: “Tolstoy corrupts historical details (on purpose?!)” Amusingly, the text called “Perovsky’s notes” is almost certainly misattributed, and my research has left me with the growing sense that Shklovsky entirely invented the enigmatic “Doctor Roos.”

Symposium, II

FELLOW:

You’re always the same, Apollodous. You’re always maligning yourself and others, and it seems to me that you think that everyone but Socrates is schizophrenic [althios], starting with yourself! And I certainly don’t know where you picked up that nickname, “Softy” [malakos/manikos]! You’re always like this in your speeches, baiting yourself and others—everyone but Socrates