The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

mordy at the very least on the scent of some money imo

prescient

lol, again.

i'd have to read some of this stuff, but from the outside it seems like it would make a mockery of feminist and postcolonial critical projects. the marginalization of objects -- even animals -- is not the same thing as the marginalization of women and minorities.

i think you'd find quite a bit of argument to the contrary--the discourses of race and gender are not that distinct from discourses of species.

The way I look at it Fear of Music-era David Byrne presaged the analysis of objects by a generation.

objects, man. like OBJECTS.

this is what happens when you bring kids up on java

there's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore. the question is more pragmatic: why question that particular distinction at this particular juncture and to what end?

here's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore.

I think my tricks do this to me all the time.

Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella

a Soto Machine

key text:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.hitfix.com/assets/8749/hqdefault-2.jpg

no joke but "toasters" comes up a LOT from these guys.

as i posted that i thought "what are the odds this isn't literally the oldest joke in this field" but i did it anyway because of the picture

there's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore. the question is more pragmatic: why question that particular distinction at this particular juncture and to what end?

― ryan, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 4:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the end would be radical asceticism of the type practiced by jainist monks i guess

today's post grad students you mean

a good deal of the objects stuff is down to the notion that philosophy (or theory or whatever) has lost any claim to realist positions and instead is just about the circulation of discourses and identities. there probably is or at some point was a kernel of something useful in this observation, but i've never been quite clear why naive scientism and metaphysics is supposed to be the solution

i'm still waiting for my golden era...

When Is Someone Gonna Make A Sci-Fi Show Or Movie Without Any People In Them?

skott you really missed out on the chance to capitalise.

also xp to myself it's worth noting that one of the driving forces behind this is the idea that no one in the humanities had been talking about science or taking it seriously, a claim that only makes sense when you decide to ignore all of the people in the humanities talking about science and taking it seriously

I totally had to check the thread title here I'm so lost

What is a key text for this stuff?

I remember a few years ago Latour got spooked by the right wing's embrace of relativism especially as it related to their skepticism about climate change. His solution had something to do with a renewed commitment to "the thing" but he was interested in the social dimensions of the thing, not the part that exists apart from human relationships. This seems different than the deep ecology folks, also it didn't make sense as a solution to the particular problem he outlined.

Speaking of objects, thread became itself

thread is coddling someone? not sure that zinger works under fierce interrogation.

Youse couldnt fiercely interrogate a soft boiled egg youse degree-snorting navelgazers

ps enjoying thread fwiw

nobody knows how to read anymore anyway. canon fite in 2016 about as exciting as a 6 hour matthew barney film about rich people and shit. science/ecology/earth the only subjects worth studying at this late hell date right before we all explode.

yale firebrands should be starting some eco-anarcho-commune in the woods instead of going to yale anyway. fuck all books.

shout-out to my sister-in-law for finishing her first year of yale divinity school this year though! way to go, robin!

yay robin

when you read this novel don't just think about who's in love with who, think about who needs money from who and who has power of who" and that opened my mind a lot and I thought it was good advice about reading novels and I still think so (eephus)

Yeah in the distant nineties I remember hearing about how you need to read imperial Russian novels with a sense of the invisible serf / invisible peasant who enabled the lifestyles depicted in the text; I was like Whoa.

Then when you look at e.g. Woolf you might occasionally see the attempted seeing of the servants (however hazily sketched) but you still have to extrapolate the underlying economic structure that enabled all the introspection that the people were doing yeah blah blah zzzz. The politics of Glengarry Glen Ross yadda yadda, these schmucks are forced into their schmuckdom etc.

If you go down this road ad absurdum with objects, one can't really read Gone With the Wind without thinking of the oppression of the cotton plants. In Hamlet, the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Won't someone please think of the meat?

I'm not sure it helps anyone get smarter or the world get better, but I confess to feeling the pull of these lines of thought.

Trollope is a tonic.

the greatest trick derrida ever pulled was convincing the world deconstruction didn't exist

i need more trollope in my life.

People are not objects. Considering the oppression of cotton plants is not a natural extension of considering the oppression of slaves. There is no hidden story of the cotton plants because they are plants. This is my prospectus.

i need more trollope in my life.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 1, 2016

just read The Prime Minister. Never have I read 702 pages in five days.

i hate to admit this, but having kids made me SUPER critical of old movies and t.v. in a way that i never was previously because i was a nihilist and a drunken rotter. they also took my love of horror movies away from me because they made me value human life! damn kids.

also being married to a gender-fluid post-feminist wesleyan grad who was raised by radical feminist lesbians and whose doorstop-sized thesis was on east german women writers doesn't help. she doesn't miss a trick! having human reality checks around is a good thing though.

reading books and seeing movies through the eyes - even intermittently - of people who are not me is a late in life skill that i never even thought i would learn. and now i can't turn it off. it's not like i never noticed racism/sexism/etc in art before. i saw that everywhere. what i don't think i noticed before was how unaware and self-absorbed and incurious so many (mostly american) artists/filmmakers/writers are/were a lot of the time. nothing outside the bubble of whiteness matters/mattered much to them. if it did it was often a distraction or a threat. obviously there are exceptions, and i look for more curious art now. and art that challenges my perspectives. though i am finishing season two of The Last Ship right now...so, you know...

in the end, there are LOTS of ways to read a book! any book. and you can bring your own creativity to the process. and Yale lit and poetry professors can get more creative too. creativity in learning is key.

I looked at a discarded part of a stranger's meal today and thought, man, if that was part of my sister's leg, I would prefer it be treated better.

of course nobody in my family would ever get caught dead in a etc. etc.

yeah i always feel like i should have like all the Palliser books in order to dig in, but i should just dig in anywhere.

wait, does Tombot watch The Last Ship? post-plague Bay-fare. nothing like it on God's green earth.

the last episode i watched was directed by Peter Weller.

"There is no hidden story of the cotton plants because they are plants."

this is why i'm so grateful to science fiction. another late in life thing for me. that cotton plant could have a helluva story.

I watched a lot of Last Ship. Wasn't as fucking insane as that one-season submarine show with Andre Braugher, but pretty crazy. I forget why I stopped!

I should totally go back, binge The Last Resort and compose an essay in the voice of the submarine

i feel bad that andre can't seem to find the right fit. Homicide was a once in a lifetime thing. i guess Brooklyn nine-nine is as good as he's gonna get. Hack sucked. nobody remembers Gideon's Crossing. i didn't even see Last Resort. i don't even remember if i saw Men of a Certain Age...

actually Brooklyn Nine-Nine is fine for him. he's funny in it. it's a good steady gig for a guy in his 50's.

I wish FX would release that miniseries he did, Thief, on DVD. Or at least put it up streaming somewhere (Hulu?). I'd watch it again.

reading books and seeing movies through the eyes - even intermittently - of people who are not me is a late in life skill that i never even thought i would learn. and now i can't turn it off. it's not like i never noticed racism/sexism/etc in art before. i saw that everywhere. what i don't think i noticed before was how unaware and self-absorbed and incurious so many (mostly american) artists/filmmakers/writers are/were a lot of the time. nothing outside the bubble of whiteness matters/mattered much to them. if it did it was often a distraction or a threat. obviously there are exceptions, and i look for more curious art now. and art that challenges my perspectives. though i am finishing season two of The Last Ship right now...so, you know...

in the end, there are LOTS of ways to read a book! any book. and you can bring your own creativity to the process. and Yale lit and poetry professors can get more creative too. creativity in learning is key.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 8:29 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is super otm.

i think if the yale dept is really as stuck-in-a-rut as it sounds, then there's a perfectly legit case to be made for opening the canon, changing the curriculum etc and there have been running wars on this since the late 50s really. the language used by the students today might open itself up for more mockery or whatever but the debate doesn't change. otoh i appreciate the point about the reasons central figures stay central, tho i wonder how disputed that is at all.

it does make the argument though that wanting to appreciate say The Tempest as such is very different than wanting to appreciate The Tempest as it develops as a text which was struggled with / reinterpreted / borrowed from / paid tribute to by the Caribbean writers trying to figure out their voices as at once in the colonizer's tongue but apart from it. And its totally legit to want to make your starting point the latter set of questions.

You see them on the low hills of Barbados
bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,
trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;
when I was green like them, I used to think
those cypresses, leaning against the sea,
that take the sea noise up into their branches,
are not real cypresses but casuarinas.
Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.
But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,
whoever called them so had a good cause,
watching their bending bodies wail like women
after a storm, when some schooner came home
with news of one more sailor drowned again.
Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense
than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind
whatever grief bent them was all the same,
since they were trees with nothing else in mind
but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;
but we live like our names and you would have
to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain,
to love those trees with an inferior love,
and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend
like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain
like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we,
if we live like the names our masters please,
by careful mimicry might become men.”

^^ like, teach a course on the canon via _that_.

I wrote this a few years ago:

For years I read fiction and poetry with the expectation that “connections” with the material were besides the point. I’d empathize with characters and scenarios and study the prose rhythms and mimic them in my own work but that’s it. When I told a friend I was reading George Eliot and h/she would say “Ugh, no, I can’t relate,” I’d recoil. I’d think “What does that have to do with anything? Can’t you use your imagination and enter this complicated mid 19th century rural world?”

When I accepted my sexuality I realized these responses were in part stunted. For some novels and poems my neutrality stemmed from my inability to point at a heterosexual romance and “relate” to it. To some extent I still do it and as some of you know I’m still loath to consider intentions as a valid way to judge work. For a gay Hispanic man with a quarter century lived the act of reading demands a constant negotiation with contrary impulses, animal curiosity about the way literature is assembled, and awareness of privilege. I still have much to learn.

there's reasonable historical cover for it, of course (hard for lots more contestants to take the field in the time since), but positioning eliot at the end of their major-poets anchor seems like an admission that for the time being, the whole idea/function of a 'major poet' is outmoded. like, he got to be because he and his peers and the academy made him one, in that historical succession of majors. but after, just historically speaking, there aren't those. you might be able to find some that can be identified as sufficiently innovative, influential, working with the appropriate scope, and so on, but not while maintaining at least the fiction that gets play with the earlier figures that their elite pasttimes could be representative of englishness or anglo-saxon literary humanity or whatever. really the chain stops circa the victorian era, when all those novelists and the post-romantic english poets had their day, but also when the u.s. was making its biggest early claims to literary independence, so having to pick a loser american expatriate like eliot to be an honorary English poet is just a way of acknowledging that the Tradition was so specific a function of geopolitics (often in a very tight neighborhood of literary/political/religious activity) that it couldn't muster the forces to maintain itself in historical continuity across the division in power/influence of the anglophone world in the nineteenth century.

i read / am told that the last slot in that course is often at the instructor's discretion, it'd be interesting to see a list of their choices.

I am generally for opening up/questioning the canon and generally against "cleansing" the canon by removing all works that can be seen as in any way tinged by racism/genderism/colonialism/homophobia etc., or not so but written by authors with attitudes not acceptable today. Of course it's hard to say how far to go -- there's some value in continuing to read the books that people have been reading through the generations but there's also a tyranny of precedent that can result in perpetuating an ideology you don't want to perpetuate. Also the canon has always been in flux.

We can certainly throw names aroundof canonical authors: Morrison, Heaney, Bellow, De Lillo.

Eliot tried to make himself a canonical figure from the start, hence those hilarious and rong essays about James, Milton, the Romantics, etc.