Printculture : March 2007

by RM | March 30, 2007

After the fine posts by E Hayot, C Bush, and S Shirazi on Mallon's unfortunate list, I feel a little like the last guy on line at the Kiwanis dunk-tank booth at the local fair--the clown inside is already pretty soaked. Still, I've paid my dollar, so to speak, and it's fun to send Mallon down into the cold water again. And it's for a good cause. So to speak.

A note on “Islamofascism”

by S Shirazi | March 29, 2007

Recently in the American Scholar, Thomas Mallon challenged readers with 10 questions about American intellectual life today. As our regular readers know, the gang at Printculture thought we should rally the troops and try to actually answer them. The one that interested me in particular was #7.

Forms of Resentment

by C Bush | March 28, 2007

Once on a vacation I was sitting in a Seattle diner and overheard two strangers fall into an animated conversation at the lunch counter. It was the fall of 2004, shortly before the Bush-Kerry election. Neither could believe that the country had fallen into the hands of radicals. Neither could believe what a dramatic transformation had taken place in such a short time, how the level of discourse had plummeted, how a bunch of crazies were ruling the country to the benefit of their special interests. Misery was loving company until it suddenly dawned on them that she was an ardent Bush supporter angry at the communists (did I mention it was 2004?) and he was angry at Bush.

Responding to Mallon, Day 1

by E Hayot | March 27, 2007

I'll just say it: questions 1, 3, 10 and especially 7 are the questions of either an idiot or an asshole. Which one Thomas Mallon is is a question we will leave in abeyance till the end of this week and maybe even beyond, humbly remembering all the while that any postulation of the great chain of being defined by assholes and idiots ought to be revised towards other, more geometric possibilities. That said, I'll be taking on question 6, which I reproduce after the break.

Tupper Saussy, 1936-2007

by H Saussy | March 23, 2007

The e-mail from my Aunt Lynda said just “Call me” under the subject line: “Your father.” What has he got himself into now, I wondered. Was he about to get married, the romantic 70-year-old? Had he invented a new form of currency? Had a small island nation finally invited him to be their king? As I went downstairs imagining these pleasant and not unlikely scenarios, the phone rang.

My father died last Friday, abruptly, as if punched by a gigantic cartoon kangaroo, while sitting in front of two computers and a piano, working on eight or nine different projects. It’s a strange thing to say. The word that rings false in that sentence is “died.” Everyone who knew him knows what words would fit more aptly and characteristically in its place. My father laughed last Friday, abruptly. My father had a new idea last Friday, abruptly. My father made a new friend, last Friday, abruptly. My father called me, full of enthusiasm, last Friday, abruptly. Would that it were so. But this time the kangaroo won. Abruptly.

On Humans and Humanists

by E Hayot | March 22, 2007

Next week we'll be devoting the site to answering a series of questions posed to humanists by Thomas Mallon, author of a number of novels and former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanites, in a recent issue of The American Scholar (the official publication of Phi Beta Kappa, for those of you hooked up to the secret handshake). We'd like to invite you all to participate in this series of responses, either via the comments or by writing a complete entry (just send an email to letters at printculture dot com). Mallon's questions appear after the break...

WORST. LIST. EVER.

by S Shirazi | March 21, 2007

Can one possibly greet news of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the Definitive 200 albums with anything but weary disdain? A disdain which quickly turns to despair and strained confusion on seeing the actual list?

The Bunco Party

by J Lee | March 20, 2007

Cathy said she would buy the bread herself. Leaving the children with Rosa she escaped into the corridor, which felt cold, dark, and sterile after the noise, heat, and familiar banana-and-soap smell of her apartment. Her feet padding on the carpet as she walked towards the elevator, pulling her coat around her, she thought again that stepping out was like the prequel to swimming: standing alone and without the protection of clothes, shivering, willing oneself to jump in, knowing that the pleasurable feeling of lightness and movement would come after the shock of that first difficult lap. Shedding the tangle of four kids’ arms and legs and demands left her at once relieved and disoriented, questioning herself. Am I wrong to use a nanny? I have four kids, for goodness sake! I need help! I can’t do this on my own. And if it wasn’t for me Rosa’s life would be much harder.

Mistakes Were Made

by E Wesp | March 19, 2007

Almost as if by design, the pattern of outrage that has surrounded the Bush administration has taken on a pattern so regular as to become numbing. Bad Thing X happens, and at the time it happens we hear either nothing about it or an explanation that will eventually be revealed to be false.

Bad Thing X is revealed, too late to prevent its ill effects and late enough that interest in the original event can now be characterized as that most un-American of all things: looking to the past, backwards not forward, toward earth not heaven.

Yes, We Have No Modest Proposals

by H Saussy | March 15, 2007

Here are excerpts from a talk I gave to the language faculty at Harvard yesterday.
---------
Good old Laozi, or whoever wrote the Daode jing, said in a few words just about everything there is to say about professional specialization. “A house is made of walls,” he said, “but it’s the gap in the wall, the door, that makes it usable.” A house without doors would, indeed, be an uncomfortable place to spend one’s career. But the condition of having a career, of having a place in the university or the economy, is to have a nice solid set of walls to shelter in. Periodically we find it necessary to cut new openings, to facilitate traffic or take advantage of the view.

Cream of the Crop

by S L Kim | March 14, 2007

I'm up to my eyeballs in conferences with students (for which I must read and comment on their essays), interviews with job candidates, teaching, etc. etc. In the free moments when I'm eating lunch at my desk, I read stuff online, and this NYTimes article about professional coaches for online daters in the “Your Money” section of the Business section was briefly on the most e-mailed list. (Judging by my reading habits, I'd have to agree with S Shirazi that the NYT is essentially a lifestyle rag posing as hard-hitting journalism).

Three Documentaries

by C Bush | March 13, 2007

Three times in the last week or so I’ve tuned in to a documentary because of an interest in its subject matter and each time discovered that although the subjects were not French the documentaries were. For today’s post: three brief reviews and a closing reflection on the Frenchness of it all.

Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles

by E Hayot | March 12, 2007

A 2002 feature on the French author Michel Houllebecq in The Guardian describes him as “a particularly unstunning, monosyllabic, frequently drunk fortysomething-year-old who has been known to make passes at interviewers” (enough to make me a bit sad I'm not interviewing him). In The New Yorker, John Updike calls his recent novel The Possibility of an Island “90% hateful”; eight days before September 11, 2001, the Moroccan newspaper Libération published his picture under the headline “This Man Hates You.”

The Armory Show

by D Kuan | March 09, 2007

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My feelings approaching last weekend's Armory Show were mostly those of dread and trepidation. So much art, so many hipsters. Were the inevitable sensory overload and physical exhaustion going to be worth the chance to see the biggest art fair of the year? Plus, there was a 20 dollar admission fee, which is usually enough reason to give me pause before going to any MoMA show. I hemmed and hawed for a long time, then finally bit the bullet. I grabbed my digital camera, a notebook, and carefully mismatched some vintage clothes. I was armed for the art world.

The Shins / Deerhoof / Lily Allen

by S Shirazi | March 07, 2007

I'm trying to cover more ground in fewer steps this year, so here are three quick capsule reviews of albums that might be worth checking out.

In medias res

by J Lee | March 06, 2007

I’m on draft 6 of my post for today, on bunco. (Yes, bunco. Come back in two weeks.) I have reached the bad place, the place where I start to pull on my hair and the self-hate begins. I have to make a decision about the point of this essay, the reason, the stunning conclusion. If I could decide that I could finish it. I read C Bush’s post on Finishing, which makes me think I should scrap bunco and write about Starting, ‘cause, hey, that would be cool. I look through the archives and realize that starting has already been covered here and here. And besides, my problem isn’t really starting, my problem is the middle.

A brief visit to Lord Baltimore's old granary

by E Wesp | March 05, 2007

A conference right in the middle of a semester’s teaching is a nice change of pace, but there’s plenty of work waiting for you when you get back. So, today’s post is, depending on how you look at it, a Do-it-yourself Printculture Post Kit (pieces included, you put them together) or an homage to Larry King’s old USA Today column (or at least Nor.m Macdonald’s parody of it.)

Old School

by H Saussy | March 02, 2007

Blogs and open-mike comments—self-evidently good, right? But what happens when the virtual soapboxes are set up on the virtual grass is less so. Of blogs with more than, say, a dozen regular comment-leaving readers, how many manage to keep up a real discussion for more than three or four exchanges? Every news link I’ve followed sooner or later collapses into dogmatic posturing, name-calling, ignorance, and an assortment of offers for miracle pharmaceuticals.

But it's not just blogs. Let me switch to a hallowed forerunner of the blog genre, the Letter to the Editor of the Alumni Magazine.

Against Purity

by S L Kim | March 01, 2007

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock is the lightly edited book version of the six Andrew Mellon lectures Kirk Varnedoe gave in 2003 at the National Gallery, just a few months before he died of cancer at the age of 57. After 12 or 13 years as the director of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Varnedoe left the post in 2001 for a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ to devote his time to writing.