A few years ago I wrote that Comparative Literature has, in a sense, won its battles…. The controversy is over…. Our conclusions have become other people’s assumptions. But this victory brings little in the way of tangible rewards to the discipline.... The omnipresence of Comparative Literature ideas does not by any means betoken a large and powerful university department in that discipline; in fact, it might be used as an argument against the...

My favorite two Baudelaire stories. 1. One day, Baudelaire, hatless, was sunbathing on the quai d'Anjou [outside his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, so the date is the middle 1840s], and enjoying fried potato slivers that he extracted one by one from their newspaper wrapping. Along came, riding in a carriage, some very grand ladies who were friends of his mother, the ambassador's wife. It amused them to see him pecking at such a democratic f...

Several major life events have conspired to keep me away from printculture for so long and I've found it exceedingly difficult to get back into the writing game, despite telling myself that I should really just sit down and get started. So here I am. How to start? The biggest game changer was the birth of our child last summer TWO summers ago. In fact, the printculture cohort has been having something of a baby boomlet, with two recent arriva...

The Appalachian clan is notorious for criminal activity and reckless, larger-than-life characters. They tap-dance, shoot and stab people (including each other), and sell (and do) a lot of drugs. Think “Sopranos” meets “Coal Miner's Daughter.” Family patriarch D. Ray White, murdered in 1985, is a dancing legend and folk hero in these parts. He was profiled in the PBS documentary “Talking Feet,” and was a mast...

An article in the New York Times Magazine claims experimental verification for the idea that very small children are able to tell right from wrong. This, if true, would be wonderful posthumous news for Mencius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other believers in the basic goodness of human nature. It would also, I imagine, help to reduce the anxiety of new parents who fear they are not doing an adequate job of turning their little blobs of cuteness i...

I was just wandering around the “land of poets and thinkers,” as some observers used to call it circa 1800, before the outer world's primary impression of Germany became one of bristling moustaches and weaponry, not to mention extermination camps. This mythical land of feeling and imagination, readily evoked by a string of names-- Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul, Fichte, Schelling-- had its physical centers in Weimar and Jena:...

We used to talk about the death of the author. That was overdoing it. A suggestion of Oedipal drama (if he died, did we readers kill him?) gave the phrase a cheap spice. Or if you were sure that the author's extinction was the result of a natural evolution, maybe you were committed to a “grand narrative” of historical inevitability that would chase out one ill with a greater one, like the tiger brought in to eliminate field mice.

In one interview Kurosawa was asked about the theme of his 1975 film Dersu Uzala, and since the director’s reaction was rather staggering, the interviewer answered his question himself, articulating the theme of the film around the character of Dersu and his wisdom and knowledge of the ways of the forest. [Cardullo:] So one of the film’s themes is man’s harmony with nature – when he achieves it – and how such harmony can only help his relati...

I would never forget that frigid winter afternoon in January 2009, when I spent an hour walking in the entirely deserted Central Park, digesting and devouring my memory of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 that I had just heard at Avery Fisher Hall that morning—in fact, for once, not only because of Mahler, but also because it was a performance conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

It seems that stupidity became a hot topic in the last decade. Several tomes were published on the subject: James F. Wells, The Story of Stupidity (1996) and Understanding Stupidity (1997), Giancarlo Livraghi, The Power of Stupidity (1996-97), an edited volume by Robert Sternberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid (2002), and Avital Ronell, Stupidity (2002), which inspired a 2003 eponymous documentary by Albert Nerenberg - Stupidity. The film...

The humanities are under attack! Quick, find me a justification for their continued existence! I forgot to mention that it's not 2009, but 1883, and the spectre of epistemological reductionism stalks the land. * * Late at night, I sometimes have a visit from David Hume—pleasant, fun-loving, ironic, gentle David Hume. But he is not gentle with me. He shakes his finger and says:

I live on the top floor of an old New York tenement. It is a well-maintained building (well-reflected in the rent, of course), but the boiler-room system and the airshaft design (considered to be an improvement in the swinging 20s) hosted some unwanted visitors. As the end of the building’s pipelines and tunnels, my apartment is often the preferred destination for newborns, which blindly wander as far as they can.

Like everybody, I went to college at a time of transition. It was a pretty good time, it was a pretty weird time, we lived the heyday of laxity, we lived the constraints of puritanism, ours were the last of the good years, ours was the beginning of the glorious future, and so on. Languages and literature were what drew me on. I was good enough at them to get into advanced courses and be encouraged to major in one of those fields. My fellow st...

I sat down the other evening to read some old articles by Gregory Bateson with some friends: a couple of psychiatrists, a philosopher, an anthropologist, and a large Newfoundland dog. (The science journalist was the person we really needed, but she was doing something else.) We get together periodically to eat pizza and kick around a book that isn't precisely in any of our fields, to find out what we all think about it. This reading, from Step...

There is a memorable scene in the film Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), in which Logan 5 (Michael York), in his jovial state of idleness, teleports a series of potential female partners from the community-run circuit (meat market). When a woman of his fancy is finally beamed into his apartment (whose name is revealed later on in the film as Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter)), Logan welcomes her with open arms, “Let’s have sex!”

After its publication in 1857, Tom Brown’s School Days (Thomas Hughes, 1822-96) was immediately criticised for romanticising the pedagogical practices of the English public schools, including those reformed by Thomas Arnold (1795-1842; headmaster of Rugby School between 1828 and 1841). Many boys, like myself, left the public schools with ourselves mentally or even physically traumatised; but why do we still have such fond memories of them as w...

Someone from Rome I met a few years ago told me that the government has cleaned up the wasteland on which Pasolini fell and took his last breath.

For obvious reasons, films about academics catch my attention. The latest, “Examined Life,” by Astra Taylor, who also made “Zizek!”, opens in New York and I read two reviews and an interview with Taylor. I'm always curious about how academics are perceived, understood (or misunderstood), and talked about by those outside the profession, reading with a kind of wariness to see which of the usual tropes will get trotted ou...

A week ago, I promised my friend O Solovieva to write a sequel to her article “Whose Funny Valentine?” As usual, I admire immensely her astute analysis of Slumdog Millionaire, and was flattered that she was able to open up the mise en abîme of the little comment I made in my email and deconstruct the underlying assumption I had in my criticism.

I remember that in mid-February 1999 the New Yorker published a note from Salman Rushdie entitled “Uncanny Valentine.” It was about the death sentence he received from the Muslim fundamentalists one February 14 for his alleged assault on Islam in his Satanic Verses. When I recently watched Slumdog Millionaire and overheard some of the to-do about the question of the representation of India in this film (orientalist or not? offensive or not? et...

When I read literature about Kurosawa’s ambiguous position between the East and the West, I see a tendency to construe the relationship between Western and Japanese sensibility as a chasm and to discuss Kurosawa’s work in terms of his attempts to bridge it. But this bridge always appears to me as rather a forced construction, which in the end only re-enforces the sense of a fundamental gap between the East and the West.

Normally, I take my position very seriously. That is, my position as Armchair Ethnographer. To describe it more fully, it is: one leg on the arm of the chair, the other stuck out straight ahead, arms down at 45% angle, hands possibly engaged with keyboard, head tilted up and gaze directed off into space. And brows circled with the smoke of a nonexistent Gauloise, if you please. But to better handle some stress and annoyance in my life, I start...

I wrote about half this post earlier this morning, then deleted it, but this item from Feministing sent me over the edge. So here's the question: to what degree domost non-obviously racially oriented insults contain racial content?

I don’t know any more what exactly motivated my friend and me several years ago to visit the American Museum of Natural History at Central Park West and 79th Street, a place favored primarily by dating lovers and families with children. It was one of our several forays into NYC’s tourist zones of attraction, quite inappropriate for us, as we were permanent inhabitants of the metropolis and its region. Most likely, we were procrastinating vis-ŕ...

In a thoughtful, somewhat agonized article in The American Scholar (Summer 2008), Charles Johnson offered the view that the classic African-American experience narrative—slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, civil rights, Dr. King, unrest, Black Panthers, painful rises and frustrated struggles—doesn’t correspond in its totality with the histories that many self-designated black people living in America today carry with them. Black immigrants from v...