SCA Open Day

Me and Norma Jean

Finished it.  At last!

Was it worth it?  Yes, truly amazing.  Did I get it all? Less than I think I did, much less.  I'll pay closer attention next time round.

Imagining America

My university study proper resumed today with the first classes of my literature unit (Imagining America, led by Dr David Kelly with whom I’ve studied previously – his Literature and Cinema course on book to film adaptations).  Typically (for me) I mossed the first class, a one hour lecture, thanks to a meeting running over at work.  I suppose I can’t complain too much.  NDS is allowing me the flexibility I need to study at all.  But I’ll try hard in the future not to miss classes.  I did make it to the first of our weekly two-hour seminars; this week an introduction to the course as a whole.  I volunteered to take the first week’s seminar topic (next Tuesday) on Walt Whitman with a particular focus on The Song of Myself.  I was the only person to put my hand up for Whitman, which I was rather pleased about.  I’m not keen on undergraduate group work.  To be honest, it’s because every time it’s foisted upon me my mark drops a notch or two. 

This afternoon we discussed the idea of America, considered within the context of American Exceptionalism and ‘the American experiment’ in nationhood and nation-building.  There were divergent views on the extent to which the exceptionalism notion still features in contemporary political philosophy (as distinct from current political discourse).  I tended towards that remains live within both philosophy and discourse (thinking of Bush and the Neo-Cons not so long ago or the Tea Party today).  A couple of my fellow students argued a similar perspective (with a sounder base in fact than I offered).  Dr Kelly saw it as less real in the current political philosophies at play in modern America although still a strong driver in the public discourse of candidates competing for office.  He argued (I think) that we’re in a different phase, beyond the triumphant and imperialist march of the great 20^th Century powerhouse, although the USA remains a great power but the hegemony of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that emerged from the ‘founding fathers’ is waning (Dr Kelly suggests) as the nation fragments, diversifies and re-considers internally its foundation myths while, economically and culturally, the idea of American hegemony in a globalised economy as reached its limits. 

Rip Van Winkle by John Howe

We started our literary examination of an imagined America with Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.  I read the story as a child.  The only part that stuck with me was the part about the man who falls asleep for 20 years.  I remember it as a modern fairy tale – Dr Kelly used the term ‘tall tale’ which has more meaning in the American context; that’s the tradition Faulkner was invoking with As I Lay Dying. Although I read the story before the class and was able to offer some analysis and interpretation of it – particularly around the portrayal of women, the soft spot it exhibits for the laconic, ne’er do well male hero, the reassurance of continuity and progress around or across the bifurcating disruption of the long sleep, among others - I was struck by the differences between Dr K’s much closer, more analytical reading of the text than I could manage.  I realise, of course, that he’s a full time academic at a major institution and that American literature is one of his areas of interest.  Nevertheless, I should have been able to see more than I did.  My reading must become more analytical.  I need to become more rigorous in asking myself what’s going on and seeing the answers present in the text.  So I didn’t adequately describe the contrast in women’s roles before and after the big sleep (Dame Van Winkle may be a shrew but she has agency; Rip Van Winkle’s daughter is domesticated and nurtures the next male generation).  I didn’t see the satire on the monarchy or on the transfer of power from King George to George Washington (asking the question, to what extent has circumstances truly changed / improved for ordinary people?).

The point is this: I must sharpen my powers of observation.  I need to see better what it is that’s going on inside a text, not simply what’s happening with or to the story or its characters.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester.  I may even learn something.

Depressing, isn't it?

An article by Aryn Baker, Middle East Bureau Chief for TIME:

Three shots ring out in close succession, and the woman’s shawl-shrouded body slumps to the ground. Whoops, cheers and praise to Allah follow another four shots into her inert form. The latest video footage to come out of Afghanistan purports to show the execution of an allegedly adulterous woman at the hands of the Taliban. The video, filmed last month on a mobile phone and obtained by Reuters, is shocking. But even more atrocious is the fact that such incidents are on the rise in Afghanistan, from Taliban executions to gruesome punishments like cutting off noses and ears, whippings and the forced amputations of hands for accusations of theft. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission notes that cases of extreme violence against women are on the rise — some are Taliban-inflicted, but many are simply eruptions of ancient forms of tribal justice unchecked by Afghan society and the government. The Taliban, after all, based their extreme edicts not just on a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law but also on tribal traditions that predate Islam. This latest video, as many have pointed out, supposedly presages the fate of Afghanistan’s women when foreign troops pull out over the next 2½ years. But the fact that such punishments continue to be meted out even with some 100,000 foreign troops still on the ground in Afghanistan is an indication that when it comes to women’s rights at least, the 11-year experiment in nation building has come to very little. And that has less to do with the commitment to women than with the weak support for education across the board.

Read the full article here

The Murders of the Rue Morgue

Charles Gemora plays the ape in the 1932 film

What a weird little tale, so entirely dependent upon the exotic, orientalism of an Orang Utan from Borneo; an animal that could not have been well-known in 1841 from a place that most readers would have known almost nothing about (if they knew anything at all).  I was about half way through reading the tale when I remembered that I read it once before, years and years ago, probably when I was a teenager.

It seems so quaintly old-fashioned despite its graphic, Gothic imagery of violence.  When it was published though, it must have been read as shockingly modern.  Did Poe invent the private detective with his character Dupin?  He pre-dates Sherlock Holmes by nearly fifty years and must surely have been part of Conan Doyle's thinking as he constructed the acutely perceptive, supremely analytical Holmes.

Reading Walt Whitman

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

(Song of Myself, the opening lines of Section 48)

Must be a Presbyterian cartoonist ...

New Yorker Magazine, July 2012