10/18/2019 0 Comments apaceIf I haven't written anything here in awhile, it's because I've finally returned to a practice of writing, one that is personal and professional, and so marries the two impulses in a less self-segregating way than the blog facilitates.
But I am at work on projects-- --an essay on Yvonne Vera's unpublished novel Obedience, rememory, lynching, and the trauma of/and/in the archives --an essay on Doris Lessing's theatrical work, all those 'dead ducks' that she was somewhat embarrassed to have written --an essay on Doris Lessing's mescaline trip in 1962, which is wonderfully preserved in the journal she wrote during the experience, with a UK scholar of psychedelia --an essay on immigrant care labour in Doris Lessing, Brian Chikwava, and Zadie Smith --an essay on Zadie Smith's reading of George Eliot's reading of Spinoza, for a collected edition on Smith's more recent works, and for which I'm excitedly reading her new collection, Union Street --and, more, a book (or two?) collecting and organizing my Doris Lessing research And I've worked toward, and embraced, the rhythm of regular writing. Finally. Again.
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Not very long before Eve Sedgwick died, I went to her apartment. She needed me to bring her some materials from her office to her home; she'd be teaching her class from home; she was having a hard time leaving home. Not very long after Eve Sedgwick died, I was diagnosed with cancer. It seemed somehow kismet, fit, and although not fun, the damnable irony made it feel better. Very long before I knew Eve Sedgwick, I felt compelled and fingered by her writing. I applied to the Graduate Center to work with her, in a year she chaired the admissions committee; when I was accepted, and accepted to work with her, I was so paranoid, I probably thought this essay was about me. Very long after I knew Eve Sedgwick, I read an article about a man who wanted to be a student of hers, and how that was a kind of virtual kinship with a text-as-corpus that sustained and inspired him, and I thought, whatever other ambivalences grief, and its long long half-life and its sheer cliffs of fall, continue to convey across quantum timespace, I have a right and a need to mourn my relationship with her. Long before I knew Eve Sedgwick, I read her piece on gay uncles; on triangulated desire; on reading relations; on paranoid reading; on axiom one: people are different from one another; on therapy and therapeutic relation; on mutual care; on theories of love; on love; on love; on love; love. Not long after I missed Eve Sedgwick, I learned to love and then had to learn to miss another tremendous woman who taught me as much with fewer words about love and its sundry obligations. Not long after I met Eve Sedgwick, I read her article on teaching/depression. It left a profound impression on me, in part because I thought it was about me; sheer narcissism but the times/lines up. Not long after I lost Eve Sedgwick, my therapist pointed out that my single greatest motivator seemed a compulsion-to-honesty, a kind of compulsive parrhesia. It was a flattering and anxiogenic reading of me, and in some circular way it comes back to what I loved, and wanted to be loved by in, Eve: that Buddhistic sense that if we have the luxury of living a life of thought, that it came with certain responsibilities to self, self-care, to principle, to presence, and to present. o the mind, mind has mountains cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathom'd. A while after Eve Sedgwick died, I read another mentor, Wayne Koestenbaum's, impression of the impression of Eve: To say it plainly: in Eve’s presence, I felt stoned on the cannabis of her smartness. A while after Eve Sedgwick died, I thought of affect, and being affected by. I cannot remember what we talked about that last time we met in her apartment. We talked about rubber stamps. And her cat. And feeling tired. And I want to say, but it would be apocryphal, that she told me about death, her death, mourning, what it means to mourn, what it means to have mourned, and what that means when you're melancholic.
But I honestly can't remember everything about the last time I saw Eve Sedgwick. 8/27/2018 0 Comments Delany, LeGuin, Lessing and moreA number of weeks ago, Samuel Delany posted a picture of Ursula K. LeGuin's Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places as a neglected text in LeGuin's ouevre, as yet uncollected and unanthologized, in print but unstocked. I ordered it on impulse; I'm always down for expanding my encounters with LeGuin; her words live on my flesh, tattooed about my clavicle. So it was with real pleasure that I stumbled into LeGuin's review of Doris Lessing's Shikasta - a novel I am currently struggling with, critically. Her review is crystalline and precise in its violent ambivalence. It totters between scathing excoriations of Lessing's shortcomings and snarky marveling at her achievements, and its final paragraph is the kind of paragraph you'd sell your soul to write: Intellectual fiction, the novel of ideas, all too often slides down into the novel of opinions. Science fiction gone self-indulgent rants and preaches, with no more right to, despite its vast subject matter, than any other kind of art. Lessing's opinions, her diatribes against 'science' and 'politics' and so forth, are very nearly the ruin of the novel. But beneath and beyond the opinions, not fully under her control, perhaps even disobeying her conscious intent, is the creative spirit that can describe a terrorist's childhood with the authority of a Dostoevsky, or imagine the crowded souls crying at the gates of life -- and the lurching, lumbering, struggling book is redeemed, is worth reading, is immortal diamond. (252) The most sterling endorsement of a book I've ever read is the one that demonstrates its ambivalence, the violence of the encounter with the work of art, the fact that it refuses our passivity, requires our participation, yanks us toward it and repels us simultaneously.
I suppose this is why Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is one of the most profoundly important texts I've read. It is a paean to failing to understand the object of one's keenest elective affinity even when there is nothing that one wants more. It is a book about not being able to write a book about a writer you love. I have, at this moment, composed five different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing -- including the fourth (which began: "I have, at this moment, composed four different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing) -- and which keep faltering. Each paragraph teetered and fell: into an abyss of the personal; into the psychoanalytic; into transference and counteridentification; into dispassion. Doris Lessing is the good mother and the bad mother, in all senses of the word. To rehearse her biography here seems relevant and a violence: she left her first two children behind in Zimbabwe with her first husband when she left for London with her third child. She kept the third child close, and he grew into something of a monstrously humored manchild, living with and on Lessing until his death, not long before hers. She took in a stray child from her son's class - an unruly, rebellious young Jenny Diski, whose end-of-life memoir In Gratitude marvels at the maddening incoherence of Lessing's surrogate maternity. She is the writer who tantalizes me and dances out of my way: no sooner do I commit some argument about her to print than I shy back and reconsider, uncovering some new object in her work that challenges any consistency to her thought at all. I fear my own writing is afflicted by the same inconsistency, -- and once more, I want to incept back to the beginning and begin again I have, at this moment, composed six different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing. I try again: my love for Lessing is wrapped into my love affair with academia. I read The Grass is Singing in a warm independent study on midcentury British literature with a gently lisping, Athenaesque professor who spoke with authority and generosity, and who was at home enthusing about prosody as insisting on intellectual rigor. I read The Golden Notebook the way so many women did - in a group of women, fellow students; the copy I have to this day was borrowed from a classmate and bears both archeological strate of errata. I finally took a class on Lessing with someone who I felt over and over again missed the point of Lessing; but I felt so thwarted by her myself that articulating why escaped me over and over again, too. But I couldn't stop reading Lessing; more and more Lessing, at that time. Shortly after, I submitted my first accepted publication to Doris Lessing Studies - on the trope of rejecting children in her fiction. Like all first publications, and children?, I feel ambivalent about that article: whence did I find the confidence to articulate moral judgment of any kind? -- I have, at this moment, composed seven different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing. Lessing was on the outside of the outside in Rhodesia; a white immigrant to rural parts distant from other white Europeans, distant in all but proximity to the Africans amongst whom she lived. She was a Communist in a country full of capitalists, a socialist amongst colonial democratic monarchs. She was, and I am, and was, and am, and cannot. I have, at this moment, composed eight different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing. 7/21/2017 0 Comments on trees and inspirationI've now seen Lawrence Durrell's Tree of Idleness in Northern Cyprus,
and DH Lawrence's epic Tree in Taos, NM. Modernist trees I have known. Bitter lemons and creosote. Blasted landscapes. 11/15/2016 0 Comments The Fire Next TimeThe fires in the surrounding hills creep closer, curling over the lip of the bowl and flooding the valley with smoke. Something has changed -- it's not just dead trees burning, but trash, detritus, and, soon, our homes. There was an unmanned fire engine parked down the street, couchant.
I woke up this morning and stepped outside and it smelled like winter in Afghanistan, when all the poor furiously burn anything at hand to stave off dry, freezing, winter winds that rip through and kill people where they huddle. This feels like a metaphor; it doesn't have to be. This feel likes a portent; it doesn't have to be. 9/9/2016 0 Comments Venti FeelingsOn NPR's Marketplace this morning, there was an interview with Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. He was explaining how the megacorporation was moving laterally into media and content production. What was missing, out of the gate of this interview, was the fact that Schultz pushed hard (way back when I worked for Starbucks myself) to create Joe Magazine, dedicated to coffee and talking point. And he seems to forget that he once pushed baristas to have uncomfortable conversations with customers about race. So Schultz doesn't have a great track record of "starting conversations," as he claims his new media outlet will do.
Nobody remembers Joe magazine. For good reason. It was glossy and relatively contentless. It was linked to the brand, even as the company insisted it was quasi-autonomous. But what does it mean, that Starbucks is pushing (back) into content production? Schultz stresses that the new magazine will be largely digital (because Web whatever-point-whatever) and not linked to the brand in any explicit ways. It is to be full of "inspirational" stories of "ordinary Americans." (So it isn't any different from hosts of similar media making similar claims.) So why would Starbucks do it? |
AuthorJames Arnett is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Archives
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