literature

David Foster Wallace would fail you for rolling your eyes

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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE WOULD FAIL YOU FOR ROLLING YOUR EYES.

Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other students in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

David Foster Wallace sets his expectations for class discussions in the Syllabus for his “English 102—Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction Fall ’94”.. (Comment by Katie Roiphe at Slate). This could be read as swagger, I guess, but I don’t think it is. I think Wallace just wanted to stand up for the ideal represented by a university classroom in the plainest possible terms, uncouched in institutional argot. (via John Gruber).

Seasilt Saltsick

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Streaming 1 (2007), Carl Douglas

And its old and old it’s sad and old and it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

James Joyce, (1992 [1939]) Finnegan’s Wake London, UK: Penguin. p.627-28

This is one of the finest passages of writing I know of. I’ve barely managed to penetrate the surface of Finnegan’s Wake, but the opening (“riverrun, past Adam and Eve’s…”) and the closing (Away a lone a last a loved a long the”) are imprinted in my textual consciousness. The sense of the river’s exhaustion as it returns to the ocean (from whence to cycle back to its beginning) is palpable, mixed with the fear of the ocean as a cold father, and the longing for it as a lover. Drawing to the close of a lecture series that has been exploring the condition of ‘thrownness’ into the world, this passage has a resonance for me. The vastness of a strange, active world opens up in front of us like the expanding grey of the sea. As fluids ourselves running through the countryside and city, we could be forgiven for thinking of ourselves as the animate ones passing through a static world. But at the end of our journey, after a moment of seasilt saltsickness, the banks peel back, and we spill into the ‘moananoaning’ ocean.