"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind..."

Funny, I never considered this site to be a blog, yet in spite of myself that is what it has become. What is a blog? Going by the blogs I've seen and not necessarily the accepted definition of "blog," it is a personal chronicle that may or may not emphasize a particular theme. It is also commentary on aspects of shared experience or hobbies, e.g., being a parent, politics, academia, photography, travel. And often, particularly in academic blogs, it is a place to vent frustrations that might not be acceptable to air to one's real-life colleagues.

It is in this last way that this site fulfills the criteria for a blog. I write as one who is frustrated with aspects of academia, while simultaneously loving academic work and discourse. Because, as a mere grad student, I am not in a position to change academia's approach to humanistic study but rather must adapt to its dictates if I expect to succeed in my studies, I invented Academy of Readers in order to articulate how I wish humanistic study could be in hopes that clarifying what I want will help me adapt to what is. Thus on these pages I am both wistful (idealistic) and pragmatic, and correspondingly the concept of an Academy of Readers is both a eulogy to a cherished way of thinking even while it gives voice to certain aspects of this way of thinking that refuse to die.

In one sense, therefore, this site is a crutch upon which I lean while I undergo a difficult process of intellectual development and the personal adaptations that must be made in its wake. When I move beyond my present challenges, I will no longer need Academy of Readers. It is a transitional object that will become de-cathected of its meaning, the husk of an idea out of which a new idea with more highly adapted configurations will develop. Yet there is an element of the notion of an Academy of Readers that rather than a crutch constitutes a vision of what kind of scholar/artist ("scholartist") I aspire to become.

As a vision, then, Academy of Readers is the following (I'm working on articulating in my own language what I conceptualize Academy of Readers to be, playing around with statements until I settle upon one that feels 'cinched'):

Academy of Readers is a utopia of scholarship and artistry in which a humanist approach to literature celebrates nuptials with a postmodern approach, producing a discourse florid with the passion and sensuality of readerly pleasure, yet unburdened by solipcism. It works text as though text were clay, dirtying arms, lodging under fingernails, splattering surfaces, baking in kilns of hearts aroused. It also reaches through text as though text were mist; it dons special goggles to see into the ineffable, naming what appears, interrogating what stubbornly hides until its concealment evaporates. All this is circumscribed by a single discourse....

A Dialogue About Theory, Art, and the Praxis of Humanistic Thinking

How to account for my silence these past two months? Well, first of all, I have been busy, in the real-world, practical sense; busy, in the lofty-thoughts, intellectual connundrums, and writing throes sense; and busy, in the subterranean cognitive and emotional work carried on through all other activities and all day sense. This latter busy is most accountable for my silence, as it bears on what I want to do with and through this blog. I started Academy of Readers as a place to validate and explore the nature of the pleasure of reading, as a response to the shock of my first year of graduate school in the humanities, where I discovered that the majority of academics--those who are taken seriously and seen as most cutting-edge and rigorous--no longer actively talk about literary texts themselves but about the intricate cultural system that surrounds and that 'produces' these texts. I was shocked not because I distrusted this approach or disagreed with it--in fact, I was and am rather intrigued by it, believe in its value, even accept it wholeheartedly (or almost so), having continued to study it on my own in preparation for further graduate work--but because this approach has seemingly so utterly crowded out the intricate, equally (if not moreso) rigorous art of close reading of the literary text. It sounds naive, perhaps, and so some it may even sound childish, but the intellectual transition, or really, expansion, from the delight, challenge, and rigor of close reading to the equal delight, challenge and rigor of theoretical and historical contextualization has caused me no small amount of emotional pain. Laugh if you must, but there it is. I try not to write about it explicitly in here, because I never intended for this blog to serve as a personal diary--rather, my intent is and always has been for this blog to be an exploration of issues in literature and humanistic study--and also because I am too much engrossed in working out these intellectual and emotional complications in real time to be able to look at it objectively. That will have to wait for when the dust begins to settle.

In the "comments" section of my previous post a dialogue arose about art versus scholarship, theory versus experience, that in my opinion is too rich and interesting to languish as a mere aftereffect of a post. It deserves to be a post all its own. My hope is that this dialogue can be continued in the comments section of this post. The dialogue follows:

Anonymous: How can academics belittle artists, when they need them, live upon them like fleas on a dog? Their constant attention to art, it seems to me, amounts to a kind of praise. Who would read Shakespeare today if Shakespeare were not taught in schools? A few people, yes, if it didn't go out of print.

Anyway, I'm not so sure about the separation, whether it exists. One certainly can write academically artistically. See Stanley Fish. Is it not that first demand, to write academically, that frustrates you? For in order to write academically artistically, one first has to be able to write academically.

One might think an artistic ability privileges one to leapfrog the first and least glamorous requirement. But before Cubism, Picasso mastered the tradition.

Me: Ah, Anonymous, I'm not so sure about the separation, either. But I think academics do belittle artists, at times, even while they praise them; they do so every time they wield a theoretical tool without first baptizing it in the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience that have burbled within them since birth. As soon as the academic turns to theoretical discourse with the expectation that it possesses something a scrupulous attention to her own experience cannot teach her, she demeans art and it doesn't matter what she says about it; her words are empty, deadened and deadening. Artists can only create from experience. It's all they have, no matter how great their erudition. They must have great faith in the power of their experience, their barefoot, naked, wide-eyed wild streaking across the rugged terrain of human experience. Real praise of art requires that the academic, too, possess a tremendous faith in the power of her experience. She must join the artist in the language of his enterprise, or her words become strangling hands, choking her own vitality before it stills and cools the hot pulse of art. And then who cares whether Shakespeare is taught in schools? He will be taught within a dead discourse, a heart beating faintly beneath layers of corpses.

Yes, it is indeed the demand to write academically that frustrates me. But certainly I do not claim the privilege of "leapfroging" this requirement, or else I'd be ensconced in majestic fully funded pre-doctoral resplendence in my at present most favorite Large Private Research University--or in blissful intellectually stray poverty in a cramped and musty hovel, writing the Great Scholartistic Novel. No. Technical excellence is always, always the prerequisite. Woe be to she who thinks she can skirt it. But woe be to she, also, who thinks technical excellence really can ever serve as an end in itself.

Anonymous: where do theoretical tools come from if not from the raw generative and digestive juices of human experience?

Don't theoretical tools, like art, just reorder experience?

Do filmmakers belittle vision?

Me: Exactly. I'd even go so far as to observe that Theory and Art are Siamese twins: narrative streams through their shared network of veins; each feels what the other feels and knows what the other knows (though their kind of knowing may differ); each carries the burden of the other and never shall the two be separated. But just as individuals in capitalist society are alienated from their essential humanity (their living-by-nature)in their function as workers, Theory and Art can experience an agonizing rift when they are put to task by the interpretive system in which they are employed.What I mean is that often one is emphasized at the expense of the other, or one or both are hailed as an Authority, when really both are, as you say so aptly, narrative forms that "just reorder experience." When Art is interpreted as a symptom of some aspect of culture without simultaneously being appreciated for its own intrinsic value and analyzed within aesthetic confines, then Art is alienated from itself and from its twin, who falls mute from its loss. Likewise, when Theory is hailed, blindly, as The Answer, or The Way into a text or a problem, it grows brittle; it ceases to be able to nourish or be nourished by its twin, and so it, too, becomes alienated from itself.

Theory and Art are creative endeavors of the highest order and are best approached creatively, and by that I mean hungrily, or passionately--and by that, I mean apprehended via every sensual faculty one possesses. There are six commonly spoken of, but I include here a seventh: desire, which here is directly synonymous with incorporation. One must make frenzied love to these Siamese twins, must dominate them, engulf them, but not destroy them; rather, one allows oneself to become so filled with them that they begin to speak them, but with something of themselves blended in. It is a process of being created so as to become a creator. One does not then interact with Theory and Art (only at the beginning of the process, the love-making, incorporating act), one is Theory and Art. And there one's work begins.

How this creativity ought ideally (in my mind) to be carried out is the subject for a separate post. Suffice it to say, for now, that the building in which such work could take place would be like this: A tremendous library, multiple floors of the usual carrels and musty stacks. But then, in their midst: a painting studio. A performance hall. Practice rooms with pianos. A dance studio. Potter's wheels and kilns. Gallerys. Right in the midst of where academic study happens--not in a separate building.

It seems that right now too much work is done via one way of thinking, one that somehow suppresses the 'intelligence' of the senses as though they somehow are antithetical to critical thinking. It's this suppression in which I observe an artificial and by all accounts unwanted bifurcation of art and scholarship. There are numerous pieces to this, and it's complicated, so I am loving having this dialogue about it.

What, really, IS the difference between art and scholarship?

This blog arises out of an as-yet-unspoken protest, the pained cry of battered but determined idealism in partnership with a gentle but unrelenting faculty that presents itself as 'realism.' "If you want to change the conversation that goes on around the table," a co-director of my master's program advised me, "you have to get a seat at the table." In other, grander words, she was reminding me that idealism's potential to beget positive change is contingent upon a secure sense of reality. I seem to have imbibed an attitude in which "art" correlates with "idealism" and "scholarship" with "realism"--and from this attitude the protest that has formed in my mind is that art and scholarship should meld better than they do, in all our social institutions. These thoughts occurred to me in the context of clarifying for myself my purposes for this blog and re-reading Beauvoir's The Second Sex, whose "Introduction to the Vintage Edition" by Deirdre Bair quotes an early reviewer as lauding the work thus:

...more than a work of scholarship; it is a work of art, with the salt of
recklessness that makes art sting.[1]

Presumably the reader, along with Bair and the author of this observation, grasps the observation’s inherent meaning. I, for one, was immediately reminded of the assessment in A Room of One’s Own by Woolf’s narrator of Charles Lamb’s essays:

For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their
perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of
genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred
with poetry.[2]

These observations conjoin in my mind because they evoke a similar idea: of something almost mystical, of a logic so robust, probing and thorough that it breaks its own constraints, becoming, more than an argument, a site of possibility, a narratological Babel in which multiple implications converge and clash, converge and clash. Certainly these observations are quite provocative, like the sumptuous prose of some food critics that achieves on the intellect with words the same titillation the critics claim the repast in question achieves on gustation. They make me ‘hungry’ for Beauvoir and Lamb—meaning, I desire passionately to read them, as well as intellectually. But what does this mean? Look at the assumptions regarding “scholarship” and “art” implicit in these observations: scholarship is more polished, complete in itself, than art, yet art—“reckless” and “flawed and imperfect” though it is—is “more than” a work of scholarship. Each possesses desirable qualities that the other lacks. You’d think, then, that a partnership between the two would yield the most interesting and far-reaching thought. But the tendency is for scholars and artists to belittle one another: Spivak, for example, opined that to discuss fiction on its own terms is nothing more than “gossip about imaginary people”; one academic blogger mobilizes a common denigration of academics in her blog title, Another Boring Academic has a Blog? Artists are 'undisciplined and irrelevant'; academics are 'boring and irrelevant.' This mutual denigration, in turn, cleaves scholarship and art apart, when in fact they really might not be so different--or, if different, then at least not as seemingly hostile towards one another.

You may have noticed that on my profile I blend the words “scholar” and “artist” into “scholartist,” pronounced “SCHOL` artist” or “scholAR`tist” depending upon which emphasis best describes the work of the person to whom the name is applied. I thought, briefly, that I had coined this word, but upon looking it up on Google, I discovered that others, too, feel that “scholartist” might best describe the intellectual orientation and practice of some people. Yet it’s not enough to just stick a new name to an interdisciplinary practice; there has to be a theory of how scholarship and art have been and ought to be combined, as well as an effort to demonstrate what such a combination would ‘look like,’ i.e., what kind of experience it would invoke and what new kinds of conversations it would enable. Thanks to the assessment of The Second Sex quoted above, I realized that this is what I have been aiming to achieve in, or by means of, this blog. I went back to my first posting and revised part of it to reflect this newfound piece of clarity. The following is what it now says:

…literature is an outlet to me not only for rigorous analytical exercise, but also (and not separately) for every inarticulate yearning, sorrow, joy, and passion I have ever felt and will feel. I feel like I can thunder like a giant around books, be a bull and make impossible demands (love them to decrepitude like so many velveteen rabbits, elicit life in them, vivify my life), and the books are meant to, and must, withstand everything. And all that intensity elicited by and brought to books…I do not know how best to articulate it. I do not know how best to share it with others, and engage them in conversation about it. It often seems to me that the richest, most interesting way to discuss literature is through formal and rigorous study of it in an academic setting. But in that setting, literary discourse too easily becomes brittle and impotent, bold words full of promise that is never realized; it all degenerates into hubris the way a drowned body bloats like a hungry sponge but is dead. I am not someone who feels hostility towards theory; theory excites me as an aggregate of sophisticated discourses serving as 'lenses' that enhance the naked eye of shared human experience. But without an acknowledgement of and conscious working within an experience of sensual reading, theory, along with its subject, crumbles into meaninglessness. I do not think the sensual reading experience—what elsewhere in this blog I call “passionate reading,” among other things—receives its due in the academic discourse surrounding literature. Disdain curls the lips of colleagues into scorpions’ tails if anyone dares ask, “But what does this passage in the text make you feel?” I dream of a literary discourse that holds “intellect” to be an exquisite marriage between analytical rigor and emotional receptivity, linear reasoning and intuitive logic, and thoughtful and scrupulous discipline and lightning-flash imagination. Such a discourse would never conceive of dispensing with close reading; reading would be elevated to an Art, an act of creation, not a laying of train tracks for the latest theoretical trend. Such a discourse would be its own institution, aptly named the Academy of Readers--as opposed to being dubbed the "English Department" or "Department of Comparative Literature." So I dream it, and this blog aims to initiate the invention of this discursive institution, one word at a time.

No doubt I will return to this post and revise it, as well. It has not answered the question posed in its title, not that that was my goal for it. But even this post cannot comfortably stand as it is because its definitions of "art" and "scholarship" are unclear. Funny, how the differences between art and scholarship seem so obvious, and yet...

[1] Brendan Gill, “No More Eve,” The New Yorker 29, 2 (February 28, 1953): 97-99.
[2] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1989), p. 7.

Good Thinking; Whither Rigor?

(What follows is a posting-in-progress to which I will add as time permits over the next several days....)

An Academy of Readers, when such a thing becomes a reality, is an Academy of Thinkers. Such a conceptual and institutional space will differ from the university, as the university's intellectual practices are carried out today, at least in the United States. Before imagining the procedural differences from the university of an Academy of Readers a.k.a. Academy of Thinkers, imagine this:

• A graduate student in English Literature at a prestigious American university is asked, in his orals, "In your own words, with allusions to a particular theorist or theoretical paradigm only as a last recourse, what is power and how does power work?"
• At world-reknowned ____ University, first-year graduate students in the humanities form groups based on similar research interests in order to generate a bi-annual publication, until they formally begin work on their dissertations, of their individual selected papers-in-progress that includes their comments on each other's work, and their questions and expositions of their research and/or writing struggles. The publications are available in the library and online for the university community to read, use in other research, and comment upon.

By asking that you imagine those two scenarios, I'm asking you to imagine what it might feel like to inhabit each of them. Imagine how you would respond if asked what power is and how it works. Imagine how you would thumb through the variegated lexicon and catalogue of imagery in your mind, searching for ways to gather into a fresh vocabulary all your knowledge--not the named and structured knowledge-nuggets fed you in the course of your graduate education (no regurgitation of Foucault allowed!), but the knowledge extracted from those nuggets, the juice that, one hopes, dribbled deep into the pitcher of your mind when the oranges were squeezed and twisted against the juicer of your frontal lobes--into your own unique expression, your very own idea, word-winged. Then imagine yourself as a first-year graduate humanities student at world-reknowned ____ University, shackled by the impotence of first-year naivete (so you feel) yet already your flawed and time-cramped writings are treated publicly as part of the scholarly discourse, to be debated, critiqued, even pulped as knowledge by the juicers of your colleagues' frontal lobes. How would you feel? Perchance would you feel...liberated?

Now imagine how you would feel if you were privy to, or participating in, these scenarios at the university:

• Agnes, a first-year doctoral student in Comparative Literature, tells Martha, also a first-year doctoral student in Comparative Literature, about a course in Russian suspense narrative she is taking. Martha smiles condescendingly and says, "Oh, I was going to take that course. But then my advisor said it wouldn't be rigorous enough for me." Agnes replies, "Really? You know, we're reading Barthes' S/Z right now." Martha is impressed. "Barthes' S/Z?" she says, incredulous. "Really? Well, but...are you reading allllll of it?" "Yes, all of it," Agnus affirms. "Hmmmm, interesting..." Martha muses.
• Two masters students in English reveal informally over dinner how thorough a reading of primary works each accomplished in preparation for formulating and writing their theses. One, writing on Willa Cather's My Antonia, claims to have read the novel multiple times--more than ten, at least--and select passages hundreds of times. The other, whose thesis is on George Eliot's Middlemarch, replies, "I only ever read Middlemarch once before composing my thesis."

These interchanges occurred in reality (except that here I have altered names and thesis subjects); I was a third-party witness to both. I imagine you might feel similarly to how I felt: disgust, contempt and irritation with the first interchange, incredulity with the second, regarding how such variance of emphasis on close reading could be condoned, even possible in the same degree program. If you felt differently, do please post a comment and let me know. Now, at first these two scenarios appear to be rather banal examples of the misguided arrogance of pseudo-intellectualism, on the one hand, and of one student's scholarly integrity and another student's lackadaisicality, or (depending on your point of view) one student's misuse of time and another student's efficiency, or one student's sophistication and the other's lack thereof, on the other. But if one attempts to discern the assumptions operant in these scenarios, the scenarios grow luminous, for no longer are they banal examples of behaviors most people take for granted in academia, they are symptoms of something profound that affects every intellectual enterprise. I say "something profound," because it involves such a tangle of assumptions, points of view, palimpsests of intellectual and cultural history and contradictory educational goals that it surely cannot be identified by a single, specific name. Part of this "something," I believe, is the emphasis of university humanities programs on teaching its protégés not mastery of crucial texts or ideas, nor fluidity in launching original and envelope-pushing ideas, but versedness in the most current and most widely embraced critical discourse. This emphasis may be yet another symptom of the "something profound," and not a cause--nevertheless it serves as a worthy site for examination.

The assumptions operant in the two scenarios above appear to suggest this emphasis of university humanities programs. In the first scenario, the two comparative literature students (and seemingly also Martha's advisor, if Martha is to be believed) correlate intellectual rigor with theoretical emphasis. Martha subtly denigrated Agnes’s intellectual competence and Agnes redeemed it by pointing out that Barthes’ S/Z is on the course syllabus. She pinned Barthes to her hood-in-the-making for the same reason the girl scout sews badges onto her uniform. She knew precisely what would restore her intellectual status in relation to Martha; not for a moment did she flinch, nor pause to consider what response would be most effective. It was automatic for her and for Martha: Barthes connotes intellectual rigor. Several works by Dostoevsky were on the syllabus; if Agnes had replied, “You know, we’re reading Dostoevsky right now,” she merely would have fallen into Martha’s trap. But why? Why doesn’t Dostoevsky connote intellectual rigor? That’s not entirely true, I know. Dostoevsky is one of the most universally-respected authors; no one would ever turn his or her nose up at Dostoevsky. So it is not Dostoevsky’s name itself that would have failed to impress Martha; it is the possibility that a course in Russian suspense narrative could be taught without inclusion of applicable theoretical texts. Neither Martha nor Agnes could conceive of a graduate literature course being rigorous when no theoretical texts are on its syllabus. They most likely would agree that Dostoevsky's work is challenging--but they also would agree that analysis and discussion of his work are not intellectually rigorous without proper contextualization and due invocation of applicable theory.

~To Be Continued~

Yes, but I can PLAY Mozart

(I began composing this posting back in March, and am going ahead and publishing it with the intention to complete it gradually as time permits. The crux of this posting (which really wants to be an essay, as most of the postings on Academy of Readers do) is the parallel I draw between this passage from The Republic and the question of who has and who ought to have the authority to determine what art should be. In the absence of the explication of that parallel, the passage from The Republic stands side-by-side with the beginnings of my posting, inviting you to draw your own parallels. In turn, as always, I invite you to share your thoughts on this subject—both when this posting is complete, and now, in its unfinished state.)

From Plato’s Republic, Cornford transl., Part V, Chapter XXXV (Book X, 595 A – 608 B), pp. 329-333:

...Have the good poets a real mastery of the matters on which the public thinks they discourse so well?

It is a question we ought to look into.

Well then, if a man were able actually to do the things he represents as well as to produce images of them, do you believe he would seriously give himself up to making these images and take that as a completely satisfying object in life? I should imagine that, if he had a real understanding of the actions he represents, he would far sooner devote himself to performing them in fact....

Quite so.

Here is a further point, then. The artist, we say, this maker of images, knows nothing of the reality, but only the appearance. But that is only half the story. An artist can paint a bit and bridle, while the smith and the leather-worker can make them. Does the painter understand the proper form which bit and bridle ought to have? Is it not rather true that not even the craftsmen who make them know that, but only the horseman who understands their use?

Quite true.

May we not say generally that there are three arts concerned with any object--the art of using it, the art of making it, and the art of representing it?

Yes.

And that the excellence or beauty or rightness of any implement or living creature or action has reference to the use for which it is made or designed by nature?

Yes.

It follows, then, that...the man who uses any implement will speak of its merits and defects with knowledge, whereas the maker will take his word and posess no more than a correct belief, which he is obliged to obtain by listening to the man who knows.... But what of the artist?

...he has neither.

If the artist, then, has neither knowledge nor even a correct belief about the soundness of his work, what becomes of the poet's wisdom in respect of the subjects of his poetry?

It will not amount to much.

In my teens when I pursued a career as a violinist, I never doubted that the richest use of a passion for music is to learn to make music--by mastering an instrument, composing, or becoming a pedagogue. I was certain that anyone set aflame by music would yearn to become a musician, that naturally a passion for music would urge one to do music, not to be content with gaping and swooning in the audience like (so it seemed to me) a lover cowering beneath his beloved's balcony, never to offer a serenade. So the day my stepfather, a locally respected music critic, interrupted my practice of Mozart's Violin Concerto in A to inform me, "That's not how to play Mozart," with chilly confidence I retorted, "Yes, but I can play Mozart."

Never mind that he was right. He advised me to be lighter, less lush, and I did tend to play Mozart as though it were Brahms--an infraction akin to wearing dark, heavy make-up on a summer morning. What infuriated me was that my stepfather had never trained as a musician, had never once tried his hand at an instrument, and in a house with an accomplished violinist and pianist (my mother), he issued decrees: "Mozart must sound light, crystal-clear." "This part of the Wieniawski Concerto, Carroll, needs to sound more gypsy-like." "Dolores [my mother], your Chopin was a little lackluster today, a little too labored." Granted, he had studied musicology, could identify a piece of music on the radio after hearing only a few bars, and hum--unmusically--the prominent themes of almost any symphony upon request. Snot of a stepdaughter that I was, I even tested his ear once and was shocked to discover that he had very good relative pitch, better, even, than some of the students with whom I had ear-training class at Juilliard. He wrote reviews of all the important performances for one of our state's most widely circulated papers. But what, I wondered, gave him the authority to give not merely his personal opinion of a performance, but to declare a standard of how compositions should be performed?

In my teens, the answer to this question was obvious: nothing. I granted that my stepfather was a born listener who had honed his skill attending concerts religiously since adolescence, but I was convinced that I knew more about music than he did. After all, not only did I too attend concerts and listen to recordings, I performed, as well--and on Saturdays at a conservatory pre-college program studied music history and theory, both elements of knowledge that influenced the nature of my performances as much as the violin practice, lessons, and rehearsals did. Furthermore, his being a born listener could not trump my formal music studies, since apart from those I, too, had an excellent ear--perfect pitch, in fact--demonstrated at an early age, which was one reason why my mother enrolled me in music lessons.

~To Be Continued~

The Simultaneity of Reading and Writing

A brief entry, for a change.

Whether the page you face is already saturated with someone else's speech, or whether it is stark white and ever-yielding to the deluge of your own speech, your reaction is the same: excitation. A stripping away of boundaries to reveal a terrifying ecstasy of possibility. Falling, like Alice into the rabbithole, suspended in the fall of being-in-experience, endless stimulation.

It's like being tickled by hand you can stop at any time, but which you cannot bring yourself to stop, because you keep thinking you are going to reach orgasm, "jouissance," but it never arrives. The most intense pleasure, the most horrific torture: Being, stripped.

There will be more on this subject.

Academy of Readers, In Utero

I cannot bear to have eked out this lovely site on the 'net only to neglect it for over two months. I had intended this blog to be a forum for objective commentary on the nature of reading, literature, language, and academia. Lately I have found it difficult to be "objective" as I currently am experiencing what I can only think to call a Linguistic Revolution/Evolution. In what may well be an act of writerly prostitution--except even more abject as I am offering my intimate verbal moments without being guaranteed payment--I have collated excerpts from my writing notebook that I feel best illustrate the issues about which I've been attempting "objectively" to discuss in here. Many people use their blogs as personal diaries; I think keeping a diary that is available for all to read is an entirely different organism with an entirely different effect on the mind than keeping a secret notebook, and I strongly advocate the latter over the former. But when you are struggling to express something, as I am begrudgingly discovering sometimes it is better to go with whatever you are capable of, to throw it all out there and trust that you'll get closer next time.

I would like to draw your attention to the mention, in these notebook excerpts, of what I have dubbed the "Jekyll-Hyde mind": a mind that employs equally two disparate faculties, one that operates as "a humming machine of analytical rigor" and "revels in questions, in lineages, in facts and order and repetition until understanding is gained," and another faculty that represents "wild, crashing, rapacious creativity" and "revels in the moment of NOW, to express what is shy, transient, fleeting...to speak the understanding beyond conscious deductive or reductive knowledge." By likening the opposition between these ways of thinking to that between a "Jekyll" and a "Hyde," I do not mean to imply that one kind of thinking is "good" and the other "bad." Rather, I mean that often these different ways of thinking, that in my opinion complement one another splendidly, often are set up by culture as hostile to one another--for example the Enlightenment thinkers who viewed 'poetical' knowledge as an important stage in human progress but as representative of a less advanced stage of thought than 'rational' knowledge. And what I really mean, of course, that I, Carroll, feel pressure to relinguish the language of my experience in order to advance in the halls of the language of academia. I cannot tell from whence the pressure comes, only that I know it is not from me--is it from discourse itself? I do not know the answer.

March 17, 2005
A room of one’s own. This journal is my room, where thoughts are disentangled, a voice is born via strands of language and self-trust is restored. My theory, born last night, is that to be able to speak your thoughts on the page, you have to cultivate a relationship with yourself through the medium of the page. You have to learn to speak to yourself effortlessly in a voice you could never use directly with others but that is addressed, indirectly, to others, or to “eternity,” i.e., to the promise of being read by virtue of existing as a material thing. I somehow lost my ability to converse with the page, so that the pages I write can converse with others. That’s what it is: you converse with the page, so that your pages become living manifestations of mind, that recreate, or enact, the play of the mind in such a way as to engage others, who dart in and out of your flow like children in a fountain. The words must rise, leavened, from the page, individually and in strands, syntactical bonds, the way you rise out of bed in the mornings, a living being, and assume a role in the world. Thus a journal is not merely a repository of thought, but the site of a kind of exorcism, a playing Dr. Frankenstein, a breathing life into something that is heavy, dead, because objectified. A page becomes a living thing, a stingray, waving its sinewy flaps of treeflesh in a sea of signs. A fascinating, remarkable process, the way a piece of paper can become a communication of timeless, manifold importance.

See how my language becomes more assured, more ‘poetical,’ more closely and immediately issuing from that impulse to speak. There is a sense, I feel it now, of belonging, of existing in a family of minds, pages, possibilities. This is the joy I seek, the nirvana that makes me want to put myself through the strain of finding a voice by which to speak. The violin* is being played; it’s not drying out and coming unglued in the coffincase lined with plush velvet, velvet to soften the degradation of being so alive and yet neglected as though dead. There is a relation between writing and playing the violin—there are many relations—and one of them is that a tree was cut, wood was pared, planed, and bound together into a cohesive object, and when the bow is drawn across the strings or the pen is drawn across the paper, music (or the promise of such) issues forth. To be a violinist in language, the VioLinguist—this is what I want. A complete amalgamation of visual, aural, kinesthetic and linguistic, a rendering of time, space and sound, all through language.

Writing in here I feel I am digging. Words, like sediment, lie on the ocean floor and I go downdowndown to it through transparent fluid and grab fistfuls, reveling in their texture, the way the loose strands swirl and dance in the current. Tension, like a swarm of air bubbles, flees to the surface. Each word that concretizes a real feeling simultaneously envelops me in and releases me into ecstasy—the ecstasy of clarity, the clarity that ensues from acceptance of the fact that clarity, in language, is impossible. Only approximations, only evocations are possible. As Toni Morrison observed in her Nobel speech, “Language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”

*Until seven years ago I seriously pursued a career as a violinist and so I tend to think about language in terms of music. The idea of a "coffincase" refers to the fact that whereas I once spent at minimum 4 hours a day playing my instrument, I now only take it out of the case once a month, if that. Nevertheless, music was so much a part of my life for so long that I cannot separate myself from that mode of thinking and hearing. Music greatly influences my thinking about language, reading, and narrative; hence my sense that at my writerly/artistic/intellectual/academic best I will know myself as a VioLinguist.

June 1994
Having given up entirely on getting home at a decent hour from this “Journal-a-thon,” I’ve read my entire journal from beginning to end. And I am depressed, because though I have asked myself hundreds of questions, and though I have belabored many in a quest to answer them, absolutely no answers have been reached. Nothing is even close. And if I view this journal as a prophet of the future, then it tells me that I will never find answers to most of the questions I or others pose. So what is the use of always searching? It’s a test: what’s the use of a teacher giving a student a multiple-choice question with ten pages of possible answer choices, if there IS no answer, and the student will get the question wrong no matter WHAT answer he or she circles?
But that’s like questioning the point of doing ANYTHING because nowhere in this world, in this life, is there a true answer. The object is to come as close to an “answer” as you can. As close as you possibly can.
And though right now I am about as far from answers as our sun is from another sun, I AM getting closer—I AM moving somewhere, though I don’t know where yet. The second and third times I confronted a question in here, I had just a bit more to add. And if I keep sparring with the question again and again, then bit by bit I will get closer and closer, though I will never hold an answer in my palms. But I suppose I can accept that. As I’ve learned in English this year: there is no one answer, ever. Ever. But it’s worth it to take part in The Quest….

April 1, 2005
My my my what a morning hormones thrashing mood crashing angry bashing shoulders tense mind dense menstrual fence emotional dents. Dark thoughts heavy and thick and boiling in the cauldron of this muggy spring day. Play: splash with the words on the page thrash with the thoughts in the mind cut and pull and stab and pound the rubber soles on the asphalt in desperate furious steps. Seize, punch, grip with your fist and hurl into the nearest trashbasket. Tie the cord around its neck and twist more and more tightly, choke him with your bare hands, feel the giving way of the larynx, the mad, desperate look in his eyes, set in a face blotchy, almost purple, the skin tight and on alert. Feel the spray of the sputters of his last breath, crush crush his neck as he claws and pounds at your determined hands, that have suddenly acquired the strength of a giant, the sleek power of an anaconda, a boa. Boa beau—they’re all the same. Squeeze and squeeze until the breath dries up in you like you’re old, dried-out violin wood; you die in their hands, or you hand over, as they crush down on your windpipe, your breath, your will, your soul. And then you are just a rag doll. Boa. Beau. Well beau, I am stronger than you, and six feet longer, and six inches thicker, and I will live on and on and tell everyone this story, of our tug-of-war with a rope of breath between us, consuming it at either end and drawing ever closer together as fierce opponents, not as friends, not as lovers. Our embrace was one of war, like two praying mantises locked in a post-coital struggle until the female in a final enraged seizure bites off the male’s head and swallows it as though it were a chewysilly Sunmaid™ raisin. Skull crushed like a cracker, the brain pulped and juiced like an orange at the Tropicana factory. Teeth pulverized into a white powder like evaporated milk, the sultry red flesh of cheek and gums dried out on wooden boards like salt fish. Anonymous parts: only breath amalgamates them into something whole and with a name.

Wow. That all just came out of nowhere and now my commencement of orderly commentary feels like a ridiculous pretense. Pale and grey, thinned out, watered down, a putrid gruel. Jekyll-Hyde mind, one part wild, crashing, rapacious creativity in a colorful helter-skelter tangle, the other part a humming machine of analytical rigor: clean, determined, hungry to KNOW, to break elements down and expose the nothingly everything-ness upon which they are built. Hybrid I am. One part revels in the moment of NOW, to express what is shy, transient, fleeting, to convey visions no matter what vague, random and disparate notions comprise them, not to gain understanding but to speak the understanding beyond conscious deductive or reductive knowledge. The other part revels in questions, in lineages, in facts and order and repetition until understanding is gained. Which part is Jekyll, and which is Hyde—or are they both Jekyll-Hyde amalgams?

March 18, 2005
…I’ve built up a strong, confident “public” self, and am much more comfortable with my “private” self—much more comfortable in my own skin—but I’ve temporarily lost a “writerly self.” What is a “writerly self” comprised of? An amalgamation of public and private, I believe—but with a twist. The chemistry is different; the writerly self is not merely a compound of public and private. How you communicate on the page is entirely different from how you communicate within your own thoughts and to others. Perhaps because in writing—good writing—one doesn’t speak through or by means of words; there is not (overtly) a distinct consciousness from which ideas, encapsulated in words, issue forth; the words themselves speak. The words must speak for themselves. Perhaps these were Derrida’s thoughts when he claimed the author does not exist. More than a play of mind, writing that truly can be called such is a play of words. Gradually, even in a journal, there is a removal of the author from the page. Now, you could say this is always the case: as soon as anything is written, the author fades into the background or fades altogether and what is written is considered in that light. But with a true play of words even the author of the journal has the sense of being removed; she ceases to think of herself (she loses self-consciousness) and thinks of and in words. There is immediacy: an idea arises, and it appears in words—so quickly that the idea arises in words before it arises in the mind. So that the author is simultaneously reader of her own mind. The mind exists on the page; the page is alive because the writing gives the sense that the page secreted these words; the page appears to be the site of some omniscient consciousness. I say, for example, that “I am reading Woolf,” but I don’t care about Virginia Woolf, because I don’t have to; her writing does not draw attention to her. It seems as though I am saying that Woolf’s writing is “incandescent,” as she calls in Room writing that reveals nothing about the state of mind of the author. But I don’t think Woolf achieves incandescence; rather, she knows how to wield language so well that I don’t have to refer to her life to find coherence in her writing; I need only refer to her writing….

…Is all this self-observation grotesquely narcissistic? “Should” I be talking about weighty, universal topics? Would this journal be more “sophisticated” if I wrote about Iraq, say, or North Korea, Medicare or stem-cell research? Why this continual concern that I appear sophisticated, intellectual, impressive? One reason children produce such powerful artwork (written or drawn) is that they are not trying. They just express what they know. A reviewer of Alice Munro observed that Munro has been criticized in the past for her failure to write about the “big” subjects, that because she writes about the interior lives of ordinary women her work has been viewed to be less “important.” But would we read Munro if she tried to be anything else? Clearly she is an “expert” in her subject. (How I loathe, LOATHE the word “expert”!) Would she call herself an intellectual? Who knows what that word really means; it could mean almost anything. I suppose I’m getting at the nagging question, What does it mean to be “educated”? Plenty of people graduate college, even obtain Ph.D.’s and are unable to think critically or imaginatively; plenty of people without college-level educations demonstrate high levels of critical activity and imaginativeness. These latter people, unfortunately, are limited, socially, as to where they are able to apply their mental abilities. Prestige eludes them. That’s the difference. Fiction-writing is a field that favors equally the well-educated and the minimally educated, since what is important to fiction-writing is not what the writer knows but how he or she thinks, i.e., what he or she imagines. Or, to say it better: how the writer applies imagination to gain insight into a situation. Who’s to say what topic is more intellectual than another when both are considered intelligently—and by that I mean both analytically and imaginatively?

March 21, 2005
…personal growth (intellectual and emotional) does not automatically translate into writerly growth. Your imaginative, your writerly (to what degree are these two the same?) self has to be honed and developed within the medium of its expression. That’s probably why so few older adults succeed in becoming writers if they’ve never really written before: they’ve spent so many years enjoying the competence and eloquence of adulthood that it is a shock to find themselves in childhood again, and a pale, gray childhood at that, where judgment and disappointment override (at first) the joy of discovery, the triumph of each increment of progress towards mastery. The adult wants to be an adult in writing, and most adults abandon the literary dream once they realize they’re going to have to dredge a writer’s voice from the fragmented void of infancy through the awkward bursts of toddlerhood, the triteness of adolescence, the imitativeness of young adulthood, and only then: a mature voice of their own—a feat even the most tenacious rarely attain. My point here is that I have to allow for awkwardnesses of all kinds if I am going to get my idea out, and that is the most important thing: getting the idea out there, in whatever state of mess, to JUST GO, as [a friend] said in her e-mail, to SPEND IT ALL, SPEND IT NOW, as Annie Dillard said. Meaning, courage always looks better, reads better, than complacent fear. No one wants to read a narrative that sounds cramped and intimidated. So maybe, since I am so comfortable and eloquent here, and lately my computer screen is a scary, finger- and mind-numbing presence, I can practice being courageous here, and write out my idea longhand, never mind the mess. I need not be a perfectionist this first go-round. I can spew everywhere; as soon as uncertainty hits I can yell—in gibberish if it must come to that—until I settle into what I intend to say. Then in pencil I can excise the hoverings around a thought, type what I have, and lo! A draft. I have two hours ahead of me. How far can I go?

March 22, 2005
…I am drawn to the emotive and poetic and the intellectual is only a vehicle to that end, never the end in itself. I hate how there’s this differentiation between “artist” and “intellectual.” Artists are the most intelligent people I know; they possess a deep intuition regarding how elements in life are related, and oftentimes so-called “intellectuals” don’t pick up on these relationships. I think part of the cause for the differentiation is that if you are a mediocre artist, unless you appeal to some strain of popular culture you are relegated to a life on the margins, respected by no one, ridiculed for being so impractical, so selfish as to continue to pursue a craft for which you clearly lack the requisite gifts. But mediocre intellectuals procure university positions; universities teem with them. True intellectuals—true thinkers—are very rare: those who master discourse so as to work freely within its confines and yet still manage to push a completely original idea through. True intellectuals are people like Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Erikson, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes, Genette, Said, Chomsky—to name only a few. At this level, as far as I’m concerned, the intellectual is an artist, a creator. Artists—real artists—and intellectuals—real intellectuals—overlap in that both are ORIGINAL THINKERS. It’s only the differential social treatment of the quacks—the quack artist is dubbed a loser while universities create, fund and nurture quack intellectuals**—that makes it seem as though “artist” and “intellectual” exist at opposite ends of the thinking spectrum.

But why am I so bitter? Why do I continue in daily irritation at the preferential treatment given intellectuals? Because, outside the university, I feel I am not allowed to call myself one. [One of my graduate-school professors] wrote that “anyone who knows me does not doubt” that I am a “serious, first-rate intellectual,” but I feel I cannot own that identity until a university hands me a doctoral degree, or until I publish something that puts me in conversation with other intellectuals.

Well, since you clearly are suffering a lapse in confidence, let me ask you this: to you, is Alice Munro an intellectual? Here is a woman who never finished college, who at your age was a housewife with few prospects, who besides writing when she finally published a book at age 37 never had any occupation, once married, than as a book shop co-owner. Her writing—much of it—focuses on the “lives of girls and women” in Canada. So let’s call her an “expert” on women and the social difficulties they face. Does she know less than a scholar of feminism? The scholar of feminism studies Munro’s writing, and puts it in context with other women-centered writing, with cultural movements, and with the scholarly discourse on feminism. Munro studied, to produce her fiction, the craft of writing in the context of the literary tradition, the immediate world around her, her own attitudes, yearnings, life and psyche. And who knows: maybe she also is interested in feminist theory and read that over the years. How does her work require any less “intellect” than that of the scholar of feminism? How does her work require any less “knowledge”? Perhaps the scholar of feminism does not know how, or it does not occur to her, to view her own life through the lens of the feminist discourse she consumes and speaks. Often that is what happens—that the scholar lacks the imagination to reconfigure the theoretical/historical/cultural discourse into something personal, or original. To the scholar, these discourses are tools merely, tropes to be quoted, not challenged. Of course, not every scholar thinks in such a limited way. The best scholar may herself have the requisite imagination to be a fiction-writer and chose an academic route instead, and thus the difference between her work and that of Munro is one of focus rather than intellectual strengths.

But these differences—see how they crumble under scrutiny? Of course Alice Munro is an intellectual. And who cares what you call her? Her work is exquisite, original, thought-provoking. At that level, categorizations are irrelevant. They nearly always are irrelevant. It is so petty even to consider them, as though they have any real power. But they DO have power, when you’re young and seeking a place in the world. You present ideas, and people say, “You are this; you belong *here*.” Or, “You are that; you belong *there*.” And you look at each of the circumscribed groups and protest, “Well, I see myself in both of them. And why are these groups separate, anyway?”

**This claim is not intended as a dig at academics, nor is it meant to suggest that university systems as a rule produce quack intellectuals--only that there is a lot more job security for academics than for artists. The reason for this, as I see it, as that despite the demand for "original scholarship" embedded in every phase of one's academic training and career, the criteria for what counts as "original" is far less stringent than the criteria for artists. Artists are perpetually put on the line to prove their originality; academics--not so much. As an academic, you can build a whole career--and receive tenure--out of a scrupulous obeisance to the rules; as an artist, you must learn the rules but only in order to break them, otherwise you are nothing more than a devotee of a certain tradition, a copycat. Also, writers, as artists, must invent their own unique discourse; academics are handed a discourse with which to speak. This difference is owing to the fact, it seems, that art cannot be institutionalized, whereas the academic disciplines can and must be. This is a complex subject and no way could a blog address all the nuances of difference between the arts and academia and artists and academics. My wish is that the two could be better amalgamated; I do not know why they always appear to be antithetical, even hostile, to one another; from where does that hostility come? Admittedly I feel a degree of hostility towards academia, but only because there is in its discourse, from what source I cannot discern, a brazen arrogance that deadens the faculty of thought, or seems to. That arrogance seems so unnecessary, so counterproductive; I cannot imagine academia actually wants it in its discourse; it seems most likely that the discourse, as it became more sophisticated, more wary of dogma--its own and that of other discourses and institutions--inadvertantly produced its own arrogance as a noxious byproduct, than that some conscious intelligence placed it there. But all this speculation is me hovering on the lip of a volcanic debate, an endless discussion. Important, but it cannot be figured out all at once.

March 30, 2005
Maybe critics have trouble writing fiction because their theory gets in the way of their ability to embrace their experiencing of things without having to name them, or decode them. I was thinking just now about the terrifying power of mothers, and immediately I went into a “psychologist” frame of mind. I began thinking psychoanalytically about mothers, how her body, her beliefs, her nurturance or the lack thereof leave hoofmarks all over the psychic body of her child, deep half-moon-shaped clefts, scars that are reopened and reopened, that bleed, that swell and seep pus…. Or worse: they clot. The blood and pus congeal and become a kind of enamel covering the psychic body, encasing the once supple psyche in a prison of its origins, determining how it shall live out its life. But what if I could only write from my own experience of mothers? I’d have to invent my own language. D.H. Lawrence in Sons & Lovers did that; no aura of psychoanalytic jargon invaded his narrative; he simply committed himself to the story of a young man coming of age, his tight bond with his mother thumping, throbbing, like a mournful, percussive motif beneath the fresh song of his love affairs, weighing them down with nostalgia and melancholy until they modulated and slowed into eulogies of unrequited desire, aimless, nameless yearning, and heartache….

…Sometimes I have this feeling of wanting to reclaim language by going back to babyhood and learning to speak all over again, but with the awareness of my adult self, and the abandon of a young child who has discovered something that gives her joy. I feel…congealed in certain tropes, as though I am mindlessly echoing what I hear around me. I feel…hardened, as though a steel shield obstructs my soul. There is anxiety in my language. Hardened, congealed, anxious: how to break open my syntax to allow more air, more moisture, movement, and color in?

March 23, 2005
SNEEZE. Languagespittle sprays like seawater from a dolphin’s blowhole, disrupting the rolling blue surface. An accumulation of unsaidfelts, germs of years of repression clogging my mind with mucus, finding release only through discordant bursts, everything-all-at-once, language violated, sprays of signifiers with an order of signifieds congealed in the back of the mind like a cancer. Poke. Prod. Tear it down in sheets, melt it with the heat of a will for rebirth, desperation, a sense of living in a language that has hardened around me. Lies I have told and have lived…. Language, malleable, spandex, loose molecules stirred to activity by the heat of thought, broken apart, reconfigured in the cool of a new certainty. Owning language, beating it into a shape—the imprint of all you imagine, unique associative twists, turnings of corners, from one image to the next. What is it to wield a word? To own it, to say this word means *this* because I have built grammatical scaffolding around it such that it appears congealed to another mind; it can’t mean just anything. If I could choose words like yarn at a knitting store, if I had money for only one skein, what word would I choose? Beauty? Love? Book? Purse? Teacup? Mother? I own them insofar as I unearth what these words mean to me, so that when I use it I appreciate its power.

…Sleepiness has made me weak and moldy; my body outline is growing blurry; I am melting into my mattress, evaporating into dream, condensing on the underside of a tender green leaf, a new day. “The close withdrew; the hard softened.” The hard—the tight sphere of mental activity—softened—dissipated into a devout mass fluttering of butterflies’ wings, wings the color of lemon meringue and brushed in the most subtle velvety down, wings of meringue flannel, beating softly at their posts, like hundreds of mouths opening and closing, singing heavenward in perfect silence. Butterfly milk. Sated and fluttery, pollinating the crimson flowers of night. Good night.