Messing about with Neruda

So I love this Neruda sonnet (XVII):

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

 I was sitting with a patient at work who was sleeping, so I had a pen and paper nearby--this little piece of foolery came out:

Neruda told me he did not love me.

But then said he did love me but like a plant in the dark. And also that it was a secret, and we weren’t going to talk about it. 

But I think he also said I smelt good, all of which felt weird. 

But everybody shivered unconsciously and with obvious pleasure, so there are worse things, I guess, than being loved like a ficus in an ill-lit room.

(12/8/17)

Reading in 2017

Reading- and Writing-wise I slowed down in 2017 because it was a year of shifting foci.

1/1 In Chancery, John Galsworthy (1920)
1/10 American Philosophy: A Love Story, John Kaag (2016)
1/30 A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz (2011)
3/29 To Let, John Galsworthy (1921)
4/1 Bartleby the Scrivner, Herman Melville (1853)
4/15 Rustication, Charles Palliser (2004)
5/18 Harry Potter and Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling [reread] (1997)
5/20 Alpha Docs: The Making of a Cardiologist, Daniel Munoz (2015)
5/21 HP and the Chamber of Secrets, Rowling [reread] (1998)
5/29 Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev (1862)
6/1 HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Rowline [reread] (1999)
8/17 HP and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling [reread] (2000)
8/28 The Children Act, Ian McEwan (2014)
9/3 Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton (1934)
10/2 The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (2013)
10/22 The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard (1997)
10/24 Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley (2004)
12/20 Last Bus to Woodstock, Colin Dexter (1975)


My EMT course had began in January; I was certified in June. I took a cardiology course that summer (thus the surprisingly enjoyable Munoz memoir). I also had ridealongs July-August before taking a fantastic vacation to Colorado with my pops and sister. I was employed as an Emergency Department Tech in October on night shift--still adjusting to the sleep patterns. A good year, but hoping for even better productivity and career insight for 2018. I also had a pretty good workout routine in 2017 which needs to be reestablished. Entering a serious relationship has given me new priorities as well. Is this what "adulting" means? Having more fun now than I was at 20 in some ways, even with less alcohol and social life. Things feel richer.

I'll end this update post with a quote from The Forsyte Saga, about a character whose personal philosophy had been "To be kind and keep your end up--there's nothing else in it" (Galsworthy 801). After Young Jolyon's death, his son Jon reflects on Jolyon's legacy: his life, his work as a painter, the loves he left behind:

Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father [Jolyon]. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very high--but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious, and complete. And, remembering his father's utter absence of 'sides or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always spoken of this own efforts, ever calling himself 'an amateur,' Jon could not help feeling he had never really known his father. To take himself seriously, yet never bore others by letting them know that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle. (Galsworthy, Oxford 812-813)

I suppose my only misstep here is to let others know through this blog that I do try to take myself seriously. But--thank goodness--not too many besides myself actually review these entries. Keep it close.

What did I read (and finish and record) in 2016?

Jan 5.  The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood.
Jan 9.  Purity, Jonathan Franzen
Jan 14. A Thousand Naked Strangers, Kevin Hazzard
Jan 25. The Taming of a Shrew, Shakespeare
Feb. 2 Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
Feb. 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Mar. 6  The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
June 3 The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen
June 20 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
June 26 Euphoria, Lily King
June 26 The Flick, Annie Baker
July 8 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
July 10 The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
Sept 3 The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (781 dense pages)
Oct 11 The Man of Property, vol 1 Forsyte Sage, John Galsworthy
Oct 28 Silas Marner, George Eliot
Nov 2 The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin

Tenui musam metitamur avena

Or, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal." Ref. in Richardson's biography of William James, p.59. Coined by Sydney Smith, a founding editor of The Edinburgh Review. 

From Richardson:

"Smith was an ardent believer in the association of ideas, in the notion, first given its full form by David Hartley, that "complex mental phenomena are formed from simple elements derived ultimately from sensation." The belief that everything mental has a physical explanation and origin--one of the rocks on which positivism is built--is put forward by Smith by way of an attack on metaphysics, " word of dire sound and horrible import," says Smith. "A great philosopher," he says, "may sit in his study and deny the existence of matter: but if he takes a walk in the street he must take care to leave his theory behind him."

Notes on Nietzsche

Just re-reading my old notes on Nietzsche.

Tuesday October 7th, 2014

My Presentation on "On Truth hand Lying in a Non Moral Sense"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--Revaluation of all values

--Philosophy with a hammer. A tuning fork. Sounding out what doesn't ring true.

---Use Epigrams from Twilight of the Idols

15: "Posthumous human beings--like me, for example--are understood worse than timely ones, but they are listened to better. More accurately: we are never understood--and that's the source of our authority…

26: I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way. The will to  a system is a lack of integrity.

Did he read Whitman? Or viceversa: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

----"Judgements, value judgments about life, for or against, can in the final analysis never be true they have value only as symptoms….the value of life cannot be assessed.

Idol #1: SOCRATES: Poor Socrates. Nietzsche thinks he's absolute shit! Nietzsche has a taste for the preSocratics as we noticed last reading. Greek philosophy before Socrates didn't infect it with his dialectics ie an investigation of truths in philosophy etc. by systematic reasoning.

"Socrates was the clown who got people to take him seriously: what really happened there?--" aka WTF Socrates?! (Twilight, 14)

Read about Socrates Section 11 and 12

"Reason" in language: oh, what a tricky old woman she is! I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar…  (Twilight 21)

On Truth and Lying in a Non Moral Sense

--a touchstone for 20th century Deconstruction/Poststructuralism. Really for anyone ever who wondered if language and reality don't quite line up. Always a bit of ambiguity.

--Perhaps this is philosophical skepticism (Kant or Descartes. But even earlier pre Socratics like Pyrrho and Eastern philosophy.

--Truth as a comfortable lie.

--We the "clever animals [who] invented cognition"

--Human on earth "the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the 'history of the world;"

-There have been ETERNITIES where the human intellect did not exist! Actually quite a humble philosophy. PULL DOWN THY VANITY via Pound

--The ideological target of this essay: the western commitment to seek fixed and solid truths. We are always under the influence of our own subjectivity, "truth" as such can never be found.

--"…[T]he intellect is human, and only its own possessor and progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which the entire world revolved." (874)

--illusion  as dream influences Freud (875)

--We only like pretty truth, pleasant truth

You want the truth?! You can't HANDle the truth!! We're not ready to let go of illusions. Truth could be painful. "If they will not content themselves with truth in the form of tautology, i.e. with empty husks, they will for ever exhange illusions for truth."

--"Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?"

--Pure truth/"the thing in itself" is both impossible for language to grasp, but also undesirable. You don't even know you don't want it.

--Concepts are made by dropping what is individual and real. Plato's forms one of the earliest concepts in western philosophy.

"Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an 'x' which is inaccesible to us and indefinable by us." (878)

Emerson's influence on Nietzsche: "All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not."

Philosophy as a calling forth to find out who this thing you call yourself really is.

I think I have always found Nietzsche fun to read, as do many intelligent people (I think Kaufmann said this). You get that picture of the 15 year old with bad skin and no friends who reads Nietzsche for the first time and is like: Yes! Everything is stupid, and I have realized it and am now going to be cool and ironic about everything. I see the void now, no one else is authentically living. He’s been labeled a nihilist by people who haven’t read him. The great thing about his author’s not in Birth of Tragedy is that he realizes his own folly, as a kind of juvenile philosopher. It’s early work. He was too broody! That he learned to laugh in his later work is what is fun to read. I was thinking about your question Tim, would you rather be a nihilist or a hypocrite. Now my reading--you can correct all of this in just a sec if I’ve bungled it all--but my sense isn’t nihilism at all, or anyway it must be a qualified nihilism. Why did he hate Christianity. Because Christians are nihilists. Christians have seen this world and given up on it. They see it fallen and evil, and dismiss it for the real world to come. They don’t trust the senses anymore. The senses are all fallen, all subject to the devil in a way. They’ve lost human will. This is what he calls nihilism. He’s a hypocrite, but he revels in being a hypocrite because he can’t not be, and so to admit being a hypocrite is in some convoluted way to get out of it if only for a second or two. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. Nietzsche contradicts himself. I think a great way to understand his affinity for Emerson. Emerson understood that the Self is under constant, neverending revision. That the books you love today will not be the books you love tomorrow. That what you say today will be different tomorrow and this is what it means to philosophize. To try to find out what is the thing you call yourself. Philosophy with a tuning fork--sound out the discord.

Interview #1

I wrote this little piece after graduating college in 2013. Obviously I was frustrated with the idea that I would need "practical skills." I now find myself standing a bit more in line with the interviewer voice, rather than the interviewee. Funny how we change. I still like that idealism though.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




-- Hello. I would like to apply for a position.

-- You have a degree.

-- I have a degree.

-- Give me applicable skills: _________________

-- Certainly. In spades: Exploring the human condition as expressed through language: the written word.

Better: Identifying and articulating underlying philosophical assumptions in a piece of writing. Deconstruction ala Derrida. Ala Nietzsche.

-- No no no. I mean concrete/practical/applicable/useable skills. I mean give me something identifiable.

Useful. Tell me the life skills you have acquired though your education. You have a degree. Where are the internships. Where is the networking. Give me networking. Give me names give me places.

-- I have a thesis.

-- You have a thesis.

-- I read and researched and wrote. And so I have a clever title and a passionately argued central vision.

-- Thesis schmeesis.

-- An original piece of research on the power of imaginative sympathy in modern environmentalism. I pushed these ideas until 3 am even. I worked very hard. There is a brilliant turn on page 14.

-- Who read the thesis? Who will ever read the thesis. Did anyone read the thesis.

-- . . .

-- No one read the thesis. The thesis does not matter. Give me applicable skills:________________

-- . . .

-- Can you work a copy machine?

-- I graduated with Honors. I have an even better than solid GPA.

-- Are you comfortable on a Mac or PC? Are you at home in Microsoft Office more specifically can you format spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel?

-- . . .

-- Wake up. Head out of the clouds. Come on down. What was your education for?

-- To ask questions.

-- Question: Can you give me applicable skills?:_______________

-- What does it mean to be human?

-- Can you come in on weekends? Are you willing to work the occasional Sunday?

-- Is there an objective reality outside of subjective perception, or is reality subjective perception itself?

-- Are you familiar with Prezi or are you more comfortable with Power Point.

-- And so can we live happy, purposeful lives even after dismissing free will? Do we have to dismiss free will?

-- Let us be honest.

-- I can do that.

-- No no no. Who are you kidding. Honestly. What is your plan. Where are you purposefully headed in the next five years. Where do you see yourself. Imaginatively speaking.

-- I will work hard.

-- You have debt. You have little experience and not very little debt. Write a thesis on how you will pay your debt.

-- I will pay my debt.

-- How.

-- I will get a job. I will use my skills.

-- Give me applicable skills:____________

-- . . .

MLA 2017, Hopefully My First Panel in January

Panel Title: Pragmatism and Beyond: William James and the Aesthetics of Realist and Modernist Fiction

Panel Description

In concert with an initiative by the William James Society to broaden scholarly interest in the work of William James, this panel will examine James relationship to fiction. It brings together scholars whose approaches to James extend from, and also redirect, recent threads in literary scholarship concentrating on James' pragmatism within American poetics. 

James has long had an outsized influence beyond the fields of philosophy and psychology. A touchstone for our work is the recently co-edited publication by Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Ramussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (2014). Since only one chapter in the collection discusses James’ relation to literature, we see our panel addressing a similar transatlantic audience but opening new intersections between James and literary studies. 

Within literary studies, our panel will be distinguished by extending and transforming two of the central conversations most often associated with James, modernism and pragmatism. The former site resonates as a traditional location to find James in conversation with questions of aesthetics, as in Ross Posnack’s The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991) and Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007). More recently, scholarly threads tracing pragmatism as an influential discourse of American writing and literature include Joan Richardson’s Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (2014) and her A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006). 

Our panel will push these conversations in new directions, in part by extending them beyond the James-pragmatism-modernism-poetics nexus. We take up a range of James' texts, and consider his relationship to both realism and modernism, including lines of influence between James' philosophy and authors such as William Dean Howells, George Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Furthermore, we examine the novel, not poetry, as our primary textual object. Dr. Blyn’s paper makes important interventions into contemporary conversations on literature, affect, and neurology. Furthermore, by treating literary objects themselves as works of speculative psychology and philosophy coeval with James, the panel inverts assumptions about what’s “literature” and what’s “philosophy.” Given our concerns, we believe the panel will appeal to diverse audiences for the 2017 Convention.

We’ll begin with Laura Bilhimer’s paper, which draws in part upon James’ essay “Blindness in Human Beings” in addition to Pragmatism. In a twist, she takes seriously the idea that, as Rebecca West put it, James wrote philosophy “as though it were fiction.” With James’ admission that Eliot’s Middlemarch was “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written,” she contends that Eliot’s major fictive works were important influences in James’ pragmatist ethics. Drawing on examples from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, she reads Eliot’s major social novels beside James’ post-representational philosophy of pragmatism. In doing so, Bilhimer inverts the norm of reading James in order to explicate or contextualize a literary object. In claiming the protagonists of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are “pragmatic,” she asserts that they, like James, struggle to live meaningfully after the abandonment of grounded knowledge: they struggle in concrete ways to be moral, useful, and empathetic to others.

Following Bilhimer, Dr. Todd Barosky will examine James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience from the perspective of an earlier moment in the nineteenth century. Premised upon how James locates the origins of religion in the ways human consciousness achieves “a sense of reality” that transcends ordinary sensory experience, Dr. Barosky argues that, for James, religion manifests as an aesthetic problem before it becomes an object of study for the psychologist. Working out the notion that aesthetic forms might bear traces of religious experiences, Dr. Barosky tests the idea against a literary form often defined by its repudiation of religion as a source of aesthetic inspiration: the nineteenth-century realist novel. Building on recent work by Gregory Jackson, who in The Word and Its Witness (2009) seeks to recover the spiritual dimensions of American realism, Dr. Barosky turns to William Dean Howells' novels Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, which Howells composed after suffering an acute spiritual crisis. Dr. Barosky contends they’re shaped by, in James’ words, “a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” He argues that this “unseen order” manifests itself in the temporality of Howells’ narratives, which situate the dense materiality of the present within a providential historicity that figures moments of individual purgation as a prophecy of social regeneration. 

Dr. Robin Blyn’s paper inquires into the ways Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha critically adapts James’ neurological redefinition of feeling in Principles of Psychology. James suggests here that feeling does not have a content, but is rather a technology that potentiates new patterns of thought through its apprehension of relations. It’s a process James finds difficult to explain, and Dr. Byln argues that Stein’s Melanctha finds a grammar and language that approximates those Jamesian feelings of relation that allow thought to take place. Reading Stein’s neural aesthetic alongside James’ Principles, she argues that education itself hinges on the process by which feeling opens pathways to the apprehension of the new. Her paper necessarily intervenes in contemporary debates in affect studies, shifting attention away from the James-Lange theory to sites in The Principles of Psychology. There, building on the emergent science of neurology, James offers a description of the work of feeling as a precognitive operation that predisposes the mind to thought. Dr. Blyn argues, however, that when Stein appropriates this view she reveals a more complex feedback loop between feeling and thought. While feeling continues to facilitate a predisposition to new thoughts and ideas, it does so by re-contextualizing what the subject already knows. As Stein appropriates James's view of language, Stein invents a neural aesthetics that, as Ezra Pound enjoined, "takes the language and makes it new."

Our respondent, Dr. Kristen Case, is an established scholar of James with expertise in pragmatism and American poetics. She will act as an interlocutor between poetics and fiction, and spark conversation about James’ overall relation to literary study.

Panel Bios

LAURA BILHIMER is currently a doctoral student in the English department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She earned her Bachelor’s degree with Honors at the University of Kansas. She is particularly interested in the nineteenth century social novel and its reception within the American literary and intellectual scene, with a specific interest in addressing the implications of Eliot and James’ work both within and beyond academic contexts.

TODD BAROSKY is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, where he teaches writing and American literature. His work has appeared in the journal Early American Literature, and he is currently working on a project that reassesses the influence of Christian mysticism on nineteenth-century American realism.

ROBIN BLYN is Professor of English at the University of West Florida. She has published widely on twentieth century and contemporary literature and culture in a variety of journals, including Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Narrative. Her first book, Freak-garde: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), explores the connections between avant-garde art practices in the U.S., the history of American capitalism, and liberal subjectivity. She is working on two book projects, one which investigates the relationship between neoliberalism and network aesthetics and another that explores the theory and art of anarchism in the U.S.

KRISTEN CASE teaches American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. She is the author of the critical study American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House 2011) and Little Arias (New Issues, 2015), a book of poems. She is co-editor of Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has also published work (or has work forthcoming) on Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William James, including a chapter in the forthcoming book Understanding James, Understanding Modernism. 

JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, where also he teaches in the Urban Studies program. His work has appeared in Mediations and International Labor and Working-Class Studies. He has forthcoming pieces in The Canadian Review of American Studies, as well as a forthcoming chapter on the intersections between the late nineteenth century novel and representations of contagion and affect. He is also the liaison for the William James Society in its efforts to expand scholarly conversation around James into new literary fields.

The WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY (WJS) is a multidisciplinary professional society that supports the study of the life and work of William James (1842-1910) and his ongoing influence in the many fields to which he contributed. We are currently interested in expanding the society’s engagement with disciplinary fields beyond philosophy and psychology. It’s hoped that the MLA panel may anchor a special issue of the peer-reviewed, online journal William James Studies.