Summer Reading (ENGL 105: English & American Fiction)

A list of what we'll be reading in my English and American Fiction course this summer: Books for ENGL 105, Summer 2007

Connected Composers: Making Music and Money Online

Clive Tompson's "Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog" describes how blogs are changing the dynamic between musicians and their listeners. Blogs provide musicians a way to find an audience for their tunes, but fans are coming to expect more from them. Fans don't simply want music to be readily available for downloading; they want the musicians to be available for chit chat; they want the musicians to be their "friends."

Audience-artist interactivity is an interesting phenomenon, but I wonder whether the model is sustainable. Artists are often reclusive for a good reason: creation takes time and requires a level of attention that isn't possible when one must constantly check her e-mail or update her blog.

I've learned this lesson the hard way, through experience.

Questions this article raised for me: Are the Internet and e-networks making audience interaction necessary for artists and musicians who want to support themselves financially through their art? Will artists have the time both to communicate with the audience and to create quality compositions? To what extent will economic considerations - both financial and libidinal - shape the form of these compositions?

I know that my professional commitments - reading, writing, teaching, etc. - prevent me from blogging as much as I would like. Right now academia, at least the institution and the department in which I work, does not really provide the infrastructural resources to integrate blogging into the curriculum. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

While I love the convenience of networked discourse, electronic communication technologies can lead to hurried thoughts. Too often the aim is simply to hit send and make a connection. More time and thought must be given to the act of composition, to the creation of a message worth communicating.

As a teacher of literature, I devote much energy to making students more mindful readers: they need to be trained to slow down and pay attention to the workings of language, both their own and others's. I've found that electronic communications can distract students, who are no accustomed to being pereceptive observers of texts, or, for that matter, the world in which they live.

La Mort de Jean Baudrillard

Aside from a short, superficial interview in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago, I hadn't read anything by Jean Baudrillard for several years. His post-911 pamphlet published on Verso, I suppose, which was dwarfed, for me, by Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Last night, though, something compelled me to pull Cool Memories IV: 1995-2000 off the shelf. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his Zarathurstrian obervations on postmodernity, and found myself laughing aloud, quite loudly.

I need to return to Baudrillard, I thought. My favorite writers, mostly novelists and philosophers, are those who provoke this mad laughter, and I'd forgotten how deadpan hillarious Baudrillard can be. When I first read him in my early 20s, I took him too seriously, despite knowing that I shouldn't. Over the years I sort of lost track of Baudrillard. Perhaps unconsciously, I'd paid too much heed to those who decare Baudrillard's writing to be passe (and in making thinking into a fashion contribute to the implosion of meaning about which Baudrillard wrote so brilliantly...). Anyone who can't appreciate Baudrillard's aphorhisms from the abyss must be tone deaf.

Today, I recevied an e-mail informing me of "Le Mort de Jean Baudrillard." Dead at age 77.

Foucault, Lacan, Guattari, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, now Baudrillard...

I'm still holding onto a small hope that Baudrillard's death will be revealed to be a simulation, the ultimate hoax by this brilliant sophist...

But, until that time, in Baudrillard's memory, a toast, and a few choice words. The first quote is exactly the right reply to the sense and thoughts of the uncanny news of Baudrillard's death provoked:

Thought is nothing but happy coincidence.

In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.

Exess of information kills information; excess of meaning kills meaning, etc. But it seems that too much stupidity does not kill stupidity. Stupidity may be said, t hen, to be the only exponential phenomenon - one which even escapes the laws of physics. This is a miracle to rival perpetual motion.

The social order teaches you to keep quiet, it does not teach you silence.

Freedom is not as free as is generally thought: it produces antibodies which rebel against it. Truth, too, is threatened from within, like a state battling with its own police force. If values enjoyed total immunity, they would be as lethal as a scientific truth.

Current events are an incurable illness.

Oregon Orangutan Picks Bears

And don't dismiss her pick as animal instinct either. The analytic apes I've consulted have crunched the numbers and screened hours of game film. They're all picking da Bearz as well, in a nail-biter.

Auster-cized

James Gibbons's survey of Paul Auster's career is respectful, but doesn't shy away from making severge critical judgements. It concludes with this devastating dismissal of Auster's latest novel: "Travels in the Scriptorium sucks out whatever life there is in Auster's invented universe, leaving a sterile vacuum of self-regard."

Other reviews of Travels , if I recall correctly, have been largely negative as well, though they haven't been so forceful in their assessments. Nor have Auster's critics been as clear about their reasons for finding this novel to be a metafictional failure when compared with Auster's acclaimed New York Trilogy. For Gibbons, Travels is too gimmicky. Its protagonist, a Mr. Blank, "has no real resonance" and remains a "stillborn creation," an intert thing to fill "the echo chamber that Auster has made of his career." Unlike Auster's best work, this book doesn't convey adequately "the self's vulnerability, the revelation that... we are little more than sentient ghosts."

Gibbons's gloss on Auster's Beckettian project in that last sentence is spot on. At his best Auster is adept at demonstrating the extent to which we are fragile subjects, "spectral ciphers" whose existence is precarious, supported by our fantasies about the Other, whom, it turns out, is virtual, the product of a consensual hallucination and thus as vulnerable as we are.

On a personal aside, I'm curious about what Gibbons thought of Leviathan. Presumably not much, since it's passed over in his survey. Leviathan is my personal favorite and the book of his that I know best. I've taught it a couple times and am doing so again this semester. I'm also writing about it in Senseless Resistance. What attracts me to Leviathan is the way it adapts self-reflexive elements from The Locked Room but opens itself to a world bigger than New York City. Auster dedicated Leviathan to Don DeLillo, and the book is in dialogue with Mao II. In order to adequately respond to Mao II's anxieties about authorship and violence in an era of media spectacle the book must beginning look at the State - America - and its role in the world at large.