I want to get past said mood before I post so the post isn't just a venting session.
17 December 2010
In the Meantime...
I'll post something worth reading in a few days (maybe). In the meantime, this applies to my general mood:
I want to get past said mood before I post so the post isn't just a venting session.
I want to get past said mood before I post so the post isn't just a venting session.
10 November 2010
"Home" by Martin de Thurah
Ikea commercial though it may be, Danish director Martin de Thurah accomplishes a great amount of story by simply pairing shots of different homes from all over the world with audio of domestic sounds that occur inside them. This is economy:
HOME from martin de thurah on Vimeo.
HOME from martin de thurah on Vimeo.
04 November 2010
"You're a pig, crow..."
These days, my brain is like mud. I have a tedious task before me with a looming deadline and it feels like the apocalypse is coming. When I read my work, the words and sentences on the page appear out of order no matter how I configure them. So it feels good to read fiction that intentionally plays with the very anxieties that plague me. Daniil Kharms is one such writer and in the state my mind’s in his stories make perfect sense to me.
The Four-Legged Crow
by Daniil Kharms
Once upon a time there lived a four-legged crow. Strictly speaking, it had five legs, but that’s not worth talking about.
One time the four-legged crow bought itself some coffee beans and thought, “So, I’ve bought coffee – now what do I do with it?”
Then, to make matter worse, a fox ran by. It spotted the crow and hollered to it. “Hey!” it yelled. “You, crow!”
And the crow yelled back at the fox:
“Crow yourself!”
And the fox yelled at the crow:
“You’re a pig, crow, that’s what you are!”
The crow was so insulted that it spilled the coffee. And the fox ran off. And the crow climbed down to the ground and went home on its four, or to be precise, on its five legs to its lousy house.
- February 13th, 1938. [Trans. with Eugene Ostashevsky and Simona Schneider]
Kharms, Daniil. Today I Wrote Nothing: the Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Trans. Matvei Yankelevich. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2009.
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| Doctor Impostor's Resident Badass: Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) |
The Four-Legged Crow
by Daniil Kharms
Once upon a time there lived a four-legged crow. Strictly speaking, it had five legs, but that’s not worth talking about.
One time the four-legged crow bought itself some coffee beans and thought, “So, I’ve bought coffee – now what do I do with it?”
Then, to make matter worse, a fox ran by. It spotted the crow and hollered to it. “Hey!” it yelled. “You, crow!”
And the crow yelled back at the fox:
“Crow yourself!”
And the fox yelled at the crow:
“You’re a pig, crow, that’s what you are!”
The crow was so insulted that it spilled the coffee. And the fox ran off. And the crow climbed down to the ground and went home on its four, or to be precise, on its five legs to its lousy house.
- February 13th, 1938. [Trans. with Eugene Ostashevsky and Simona Schneider]
Kharms, Daniil. Today I Wrote Nothing: the Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Trans. Matvei Yankelevich. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2009.
03 November 2010
Story Endings and Me (aka: It's a long post because I'm still learning how to blog)
Outstanding Conclusions from Great Short Stories
Ernest Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story” from In Our Time, 1939.
The protagonist, a wounded soldier, falls madly in love with his nurse, Luz, but they can’t get married right away. During a period of separation, she leaves him for an Italian major, an ostensibly bigger and better man. The story ends:
“The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”
Denis Johnson’s “Work” from Jesus’ Son, 1992
The narrator, a man known only as Fuckhead, abandons his girlfriend at a motel after a drug binge only join up with a friend named Wayne on an excursion to steal wire and copper from an abandoned housing development. The narrator later discovers the house they robbed from was purchased by Wayne and his ex-wife. Broke, aimless, and heartbroken, the men end the day at their usual watering hole:
“The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. ‘Nurse,’ I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. ‘You have a lovely pitching arm.’ You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”
Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” (2002)
Johnson’s “Train Dreams” could be categorized as a long story, depending on one’s method of categorization. Nevertheless, it features a man named Robert Grainier whose life falls to ruin and monotony after his wife (Gladys) and infant daughter (Kate) are killed in a forest fire in the Idaho panhandle around 1920. Years pass and rumours of a wolf-girl spread through the few people with whom he associates. She appears to him one night, wounded, allowing him to apply a bandage, and then she vanishes. The story concludes with Grainier attending a freak show with the intention to ogle Theodore the Wonder Horse, but the evening ends when a wolf-boy takes the stage:
“But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood utterly still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, a a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.”
Leonard Michaels’ “Murderers” (1975) from A Girl with a Monkey (2000)
A group of adolescent boys climb the rooftops of their Lower East Side neighbourhood in order to perch on a water tower and masturbate while watching their rabbi and his wife have sex. The youngest boy falls to his death, which the naked rabbi witnesses. In the instant, he shouts “Murderers!” though no murder’s been committed. The story concludes:
“Nothing was discussed.
The rabbi used his connections, arrangements were made. We were sent to a camp in New Jersey. We hiked and played volleyball. One day, apropos of nothing, Melvin came up to me and said little Arnold had been made of gold and he, Melvin, of shit. I appreciated the sentiment, but to my mind they were both made of shit. Harold Cohen never again spoke to either of us. The counselors in the camp were World War II veterans, introspective men. Some carried shrapnel in their bodies. One had a metal plate in his head. Whatever you said to them they seemed to be thinking of something else, even when they answered. But step out of line and a plastic lanyard whistled burning notice across your ass.
At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I’d never before heard that sound, the sounds of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth.”
Me
With all that out of the way, I’ll quickly say something of myself, in an effort to follow my first (confessional) post and adhere to the philosophy of this blog thing. The Barth lecture went well. I tripped up once, maybe twice, but on the whole it was, I feel, a success. It was also an exercise in learning to love a kind of story I otherwise overlook. Crazy, though, how long it takes to prepare a 50 minute lecture. I spent over a week putting it and the PowerPoint presentation together, wanting to be accessible yet comprehensive and exciting, to include pictures (because they’re fun when done well), all the while knowing that a good portion of the students would simply sit in the auditorium, tune me out like some annoying mosquito and cruise their Facebook accounts. I loathe the day wireless internet made its way into the classroom (I don’t even get it in my office). So much for the Socratic Method being alive and well in the classroom – Mark Zuckerberg (et al) have raped and murdered that time-tested system of learning. Nonetheless, the lecture, as I say, was a success and fun to lead.
In other news, my department’s Graduate Studies Committee decided my face is like filthy rag your babushka must take to the riverbank and grind against a metal washboard to get clean. In other words, my already delayed PhD research is being further delayed by revisions to my proposal so that I can attend to issues of interest to profs with entirely other scholarly agendas than my own. God forbid someone study literature as literature and rhetoric as rhetoric anymore, but I’m trying. Of course, I recognize the presence of power discourses in the Foucauldian sense, but one must resist Foucault’s reading of power discourses from implementing a power structure its own. I think. My frustration comes from trying to understand and navigate the touchy (boiling, explosive) interdepartmental relationship of English and (trendy) Cultural Studies, the latter of which, in my experience, often amounts to little more than an uppity adaptation of the kind of “fix the world’s problems” conversations I have with friends after a few beers. There are, of course, many admirable Cultural Studies scholars and theories; I loves me my Giorgio Agamben, but Lord am I happy Jacques Derrida will never write another word for the rest of eternity.
If you’re still reading, thanks, I’ll end now. I apologize for rambling. And here I want, so badly, to think of myself like an introspective veteran described by Michaels’ in the “Murderers” conclusion printed above. But I guess I’m a rambler. Lady Churl can attest to that. In conclusion (this time) take a minute to read one of the stories I mentioned above. I’ll be back with more such entries in the future. If someone other than the one person I know is reading this blog is reading this blog, let me know, somehow, so this exercise can feel less self-serving.
Ernest Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story” from In Our Time, 1939.
The protagonist, a wounded soldier, falls madly in love with his nurse, Luz, but they can’t get married right away. During a period of separation, she leaves him for an Italian major, an ostensibly bigger and better man. The story ends:
“The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”
Denis Johnson’s “Work” from Jesus’ Son, 1992
The narrator, a man known only as Fuckhead, abandons his girlfriend at a motel after a drug binge only join up with a friend named Wayne on an excursion to steal wire and copper from an abandoned housing development. The narrator later discovers the house they robbed from was purchased by Wayne and his ex-wife. Broke, aimless, and heartbroken, the men end the day at their usual watering hole:
“The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. ‘Nurse,’ I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. ‘You have a lovely pitching arm.’ You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”
Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” (2002)
Johnson’s “Train Dreams” could be categorized as a long story, depending on one’s method of categorization. Nevertheless, it features a man named Robert Grainier whose life falls to ruin and monotony after his wife (Gladys) and infant daughter (Kate) are killed in a forest fire in the Idaho panhandle around 1920. Years pass and rumours of a wolf-girl spread through the few people with whom he associates. She appears to him one night, wounded, allowing him to apply a bandage, and then she vanishes. The story concludes with Grainier attending a freak show with the intention to ogle Theodore the Wonder Horse, but the evening ends when a wolf-boy takes the stage:
“But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood utterly still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, a a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.”
Leonard Michaels’ “Murderers” (1975) from A Girl with a Monkey (2000)
A group of adolescent boys climb the rooftops of their Lower East Side neighbourhood in order to perch on a water tower and masturbate while watching their rabbi and his wife have sex. The youngest boy falls to his death, which the naked rabbi witnesses. In the instant, he shouts “Murderers!” though no murder’s been committed. The story concludes:
“Nothing was discussed.
The rabbi used his connections, arrangements were made. We were sent to a camp in New Jersey. We hiked and played volleyball. One day, apropos of nothing, Melvin came up to me and said little Arnold had been made of gold and he, Melvin, of shit. I appreciated the sentiment, but to my mind they were both made of shit. Harold Cohen never again spoke to either of us. The counselors in the camp were World War II veterans, introspective men. Some carried shrapnel in their bodies. One had a metal plate in his head. Whatever you said to them they seemed to be thinking of something else, even when they answered. But step out of line and a plastic lanyard whistled burning notice across your ass.
At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I’d never before heard that sound, the sounds of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth.”
Me
With all that out of the way, I’ll quickly say something of myself, in an effort to follow my first (confessional) post and adhere to the philosophy of this blog thing. The Barth lecture went well. I tripped up once, maybe twice, but on the whole it was, I feel, a success. It was also an exercise in learning to love a kind of story I otherwise overlook. Crazy, though, how long it takes to prepare a 50 minute lecture. I spent over a week putting it and the PowerPoint presentation together, wanting to be accessible yet comprehensive and exciting, to include pictures (because they’re fun when done well), all the while knowing that a good portion of the students would simply sit in the auditorium, tune me out like some annoying mosquito and cruise their Facebook accounts. I loathe the day wireless internet made its way into the classroom (I don’t even get it in my office). So much for the Socratic Method being alive and well in the classroom – Mark Zuckerberg (et al) have raped and murdered that time-tested system of learning. Nonetheless, the lecture, as I say, was a success and fun to lead.
In other news, my department’s Graduate Studies Committee decided my face is like filthy rag your babushka must take to the riverbank and grind against a metal washboard to get clean. In other words, my already delayed PhD research is being further delayed by revisions to my proposal so that I can attend to issues of interest to profs with entirely other scholarly agendas than my own. God forbid someone study literature as literature and rhetoric as rhetoric anymore, but I’m trying. Of course, I recognize the presence of power discourses in the Foucauldian sense, but one must resist Foucault’s reading of power discourses from implementing a power structure its own. I think. My frustration comes from trying to understand and navigate the touchy (boiling, explosive) interdepartmental relationship of English and (trendy) Cultural Studies, the latter of which, in my experience, often amounts to little more than an uppity adaptation of the kind of “fix the world’s problems” conversations I have with friends after a few beers. There are, of course, many admirable Cultural Studies scholars and theories; I loves me my Giorgio Agamben, but Lord am I happy Jacques Derrida will never write another word for the rest of eternity.
If you’re still reading, thanks, I’ll end now. I apologize for rambling. And here I want, so badly, to think of myself like an introspective veteran described by Michaels’ in the “Murderers” conclusion printed above. But I guess I’m a rambler. Lady Churl can attest to that. In conclusion (this time) take a minute to read one of the stories I mentioned above. I’ll be back with more such entries in the future. If someone other than the one person I know is reading this blog is reading this blog, let me know, somehow, so this exercise can feel less self-serving.
20 October 2010
Raise your hand if you wish you didn't drop French after high school...(My hand is raised)
I should be putting the final touches on my "Lost in the Funhouse" lecture, and I am, but a break from the slog has reminded me that I wish I had never dropped French in high school as soon as I was able.
17 October 2010
In the Beginning...
Maybe today’s the day to start this thing. Yesterday was amazing on all accounts – spent the morning at a pumpkin patch and apple orchard with my wife and our son, a great afternoon walk to the park, followed by an evening filled with homemade spicy shrimp pizzas, beer (Steam Whistle: nothing better), and a funny movie (Tina Fey knows funny). Today stands no chance in living up to the fun I had yesterday, but it’s another kind of good. This Friday I’m lecturing before 100+ undergrads on John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968). And this is my thing. The short story. Short stories, that is. Specifically, the American short story. It’s what I study. Now, should anyone other than myself ever stumble across this blog and take the time to read it, I should point out a few things about myself.
I’m a PhD student in English Literature at a pretty okay university in Canada. The “Doctor” in my blog’s title refers to the position toward which I’m currently striving, however clumsily. Okay, very clumsily. The “Impostor” gestures toward the anxiety felt by a lot of grad students (“Impostor’s Syndrome”), felt by me as a result of my ongoing academic clumsiness (Every day presents itself as the one when I might receive that email telling me a mistake was made in accepting me to the program). Thus, my pseudonym. Also, it sounds, to me anyway, like the name of some bygone comic book super villain (for example: Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange (not a villain), Dr. Fate, Dr. Impossible, et cetera). And I like comic books, so that suits me just fine.
As I prepare my lecture on Barth’s story, I’m quickly realizing how complex a narrative it is, and I’m a little worried I may have jumped at too complex a story too quickly; perhaps it would have been better to start with something a little more user-friendly. But I’m clumsy (see above). And I’m an impostor (again, see above). So I’m proceeding on the hope that within the next week I can pull together something sounding enough like knowledge to get me through 50 minutes before 100+ people. Wish me luck.
If I ever post again, I’ll let “you” know how it goes (whoever you are – this exercise feels so self-serving. I’m probably the only person who will ever read these posts). In the meantime, read more short stories. Here are a few good collections:
Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son
Leonard Michaels’ The Collected Stories (especially “Murderers,” “The Girl with a Monkey,” and anything from the brilliantly titled cluster, “I Would have Saved Them if I Could”)
Tobias Wolff’s story “Firelight” from The Night in Question: Stories
Daniil Karms’ Today I Wrote Nothing
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Collected Stories
Isaac Babel’s The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Listen to George Saunders read “You Must Know Everything” on the New Yorker podcasts)
And read the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.
Enough procrastinating (as if such a thing exists). I gotta go. Be well.
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