Currently reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach; Love in the Time of Cholera

Finally the semester is winding down and I am finding some time to read for pleasure and semi-pleasure (ie. long-neglected and apparently useless reading and the equally coveted reading with an eye toward various critical and creative projects. GEB falls into the latter category, Love the former). GEB is exciting so far, though Hofstadter is, in my case, mostly preaching to the converted. I'm not sure how important GEB will be for my next manuscript, but no matter... the pomp and circumstance of philosophies of emergent patterns, selves, writing is plenty entertaining for me. Hofstadter generally makes a great case for poetry (exciting for me since poets are so often asked, implicitly and explicitly, "Why bother?"): "As I see it, the only way of overcoming this magical view of what 'I' and consciousness are is to keep on reminding oneself, unpleasant though it may seem, that the 'teetering bulb of dread and dream' that nestles safely inside one's own cranium is a purely physical object made up of completely sterile and inanimate components, all of which obey exactly the same laws as those that govern all the rest of the universe, such a pieces of text, or CD-ROM's, or computers" (P-4). Pieces of text. This, coupled with Hofstadter's general suggestion that apparently meaningless patterns can become causative (for selves or other events in the empirical world), would excite a poet. Words aren't useless after all, and all those of us who thought they had a distinct weight and savor on the tongue are onto something.

Even if it's only a consequence of what I'll call a constellation of coincidence, GEB has for me some resonance with the text I am teaching this week, Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. I chose to end my class on this book in the hopes of drawing together for my students a number of (at least for me) really important issues: philosophies of self; relations between private and public, mundane and exceptional, local and global, to name a few. We began class by performing the first poem in the book, "Poem Written after September 11," each of the students voicing one of the poem's short paragraphs. For each student to hear the other students speaking, weaving their voices in and out of our collective voicing, was an important way of demonstrating the connectivity Spahr's text calls for. One of the interesting issues that came up in discussion (aside from some good observations about the form and function of this opening poem) was in response to the tone and role of the speaker. One student suggested, and justifiably so, that the speaker in the poems sometimes comes across as an irksome pedantic/didactic/condescending cocktail. Justifiable because the book clearly banks on the tradition of poet as prophet, and that's a tall order for the poetics and politics of someone like Spahr. Still, even if the text requires that the reader surrender, allow herself to be absorbed ("absorbed," I say because we are reading this book in connection with Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"), one could argue that any such surrender is a willed surrender. Cf. "decreation."

As I walked away from class and wandered amidst the unseasonably warm air of November in Ithaca, I wondered if there was any way to resist Spahr's call to relation without looking like an isolationist jerk. Probably not. And what's so bad about relation, anyway? Just being curmudgeonly, I guess. And in spite of my reservations, I have to say that Spahr’s speaker does earn my trust.

The other primary topic of interest we touched on in class was Spahr’s poem on 9/11 and whether or not 9/11 was an exceptional event (cf. “American exceptionalism,”). Many of my students seemed to think so; that is, they seem to have succumbed to the narratives that have since proliferated about that particular event and were especially resistant to understanding 9/11 within any given historical context or continuum. 9/11 as absolute rupture, go figure. I’m hoping that next semester’s syllabus will take up this problem and others with a view toward digital and pop culture’s construction of historico-political relations. I think I ought to do a unit on memorials and try to trace a dialogue between the Vietnam War Memorial and the proposed Freedom Tower.

I wanted to write about Benjamin’s Arcades project and its relation to blogging and presentness, and also something about this fabulous menu I concocted for myself Sunday night, but let this serve as a sufficient footnote.