August 7, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: Moi tells me that the trumpet-like flowers are morning glories. I believe her, even though I don’t find exactly what I see in Audubon; the photos the book shows of flowers in the morning glory family are close enough, and I’m content enough to call it a morning glory, although, except for the pinkish flowers, the entry for hedge bindweed better fits the bill: “leaves arrow-shaped or triangular” rather than “heart-shaped,” “a pest, twining among and engulfing desirable ornamentals,” so I suppose I should be equally content to call it bindweed. The other flower Moi says is comfrey, which she planted herself there quite a few years ago. Moi and I both work tonight; I have to go into town this morning; not quite sure when I’ll fit in a walk with Mway. Back from my errand; I decide I might as well take Mway out now, at 11:27. Moi is out painting the house; she feels compelled to distract me with every little detail: “I’ve just painted the trim on the two bottom windows. If I wasn’t afraid to go up on the ladder….” I bring along the clippers; it’s a cool, nonhumid day.
State of the Path: I decide not to do any reclipping on the main path, just finish up on the side paths what I didn’t do the other week. I snip an obtruding briar or goldenrod stem or two along the old orchard, but I don’t hunker down until I pass the maple tree and set to work on clipping the 20-foot swatch of goldenrod I hadn’t gotten to before. End up clipping some dogbane and a little of the jewelweed too, though I try to keep most of the latter standing. One thing I have to be mindful of is where I set my stick; walking back along the path, and clipping here and there whatever I might have missed, I think for a moment I lost the stick. Fortunately, the “pro-quality” stick is big and conspicuous, and the weeds not as thick this year as they usually are, so I do find it where I left it. Down at bug land, I stare again for a moment at the big “chokeberry” bush; then I spy two ripe blackberries, which I pick and eat to quench my thirst. The path along the creek isn’t in dire need of clipping, so I head quickly to the side path along the skating pond. Mind where I set my stick. After the second honeysuckle bush, I find that the goldenrod is not too thick, so I just round the bend and gather up my stick. Up beyond the ridge, I find another ripe blackberry to quench my thirst with.
State of the Creek: The water at the tree stand is just a puddle beneath the big maple tree. The pools at the black walnut tree and the big locusts have completely dried up. See a frog leap into fresh mud. The vinyl siding is nearly 4 feet away from what is now a pathetic puddle along the narrows. The creek bed at the car tire is completely dry.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, Mway starts rolling in something, and I have to yell at her, “Don’t roll in that.” To my surprise again, Mway starts fetching the stick more times than I care to count, and even forces me to play “Put it down” four or five times. I stand in the middle of the clearing and toss the stick very lackadaisically, like I’m tossing sticks aside. Looking around, I see that what Mway had been rolling in is a dead baby starling or something. Back at the porch, Mway stands at the door without the stick in front of her. “Where’d you put the stick?” I have to ask her. While I’m looking for it around the porch, she runs past the swimming pool, as if she knows definitely that she dropped it way back there, but she comes running back empty mouthed. I walk down the stoop, resigned to having to look for it all around the yard, Mway heading out again in front of me, but before she does I soon see the stick athwart her little wading pool. As I bend down to pick it up, she suddenly spies it, snatches it up before I can reach it, and carries it back to the door.
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The absurd. The term sounds so old fashioned, like muttonchop sideburns and teardrop wire-rims, or, actually, more like flattops and browline glasses, or, really, Dizzy Gillespie’s or Monk’s goatee, beret, and hornrims. (Le Mythe de Sisyphe was first published in 1942). The course taught by Mr. Bernstein, who had a wispy goatee and wore gold-framed glasses, was called “The Modern Novel” and included such diverse works as, if I remember correctly, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Heller’s Catch-22. Camus was represented by The Stranger. Mr. Bernstein did a great job of tying all these works together, talking about Hemingway’s post-WWI ethics and so on and linking that with Camus’ notion of the absurd, but I imagine that as time went on his job got harder and that by the early 80’s say, if he was still teaching, he had become encumbered with a lot more stuff to teach. For one, he may have had to split his course into two, one called “The Modern Novel” and the other “The Post-Modern Novel (he would have put Joyce into the first course with Beckett either at the end of the first or at the beginning of the second). He would have had to distinguish “high Modernism” from “postmodernism,” and in the latter course, he would’ve had to discuss not only the “literature of the absurd” but also the “literature of exhaustion,” the “nouveau roman,” “metafiction,” “magic realism,” “maximalism,” “minimalism,” and probably would have thrown in “Beat fiction” and the “new Journalism” (one of Jazz’s favorite writers is Hunter Thompson), and if he wanted to go out on a ledge could have even touched upon “OULIPO.” He probably would have had to reduce the number of times he said the word “absurd” and would be using a new term instead, “deconstruction,” and maybe even “difference,” along with phrases like “absence of a transcendent signified” and the “death of the author” and maybe even “no work of art that’s not also an act of barbarism,” and bringing up such things as “irony,” “intertexuality,” “pastiche,” “fabulation,” and “poioumena,” and despite being a Don Juan and an aging white man (and not much into his Jewish heritage), he probably would also have discussed “feminism” and “identity politics” and rather than Ellison might have had his students read The Color Purple instead, and at some point in the middle of all this would have had to mention the “call in the mid ‘80’s for a new realism.” And as time went on he could have expanded his overview of “Beat fiction” into a look at “punk fiction,” “splatterpunk,” “steampunk,” and brought in a “graphic novel” to read, and have looked at some “transgressive fiction” (Chuck Palahniuk is another of Jazz’s favorite writers, whom Moi, when not reading her usual stuff, also likes to read) and as computers came into the classroom also “cyberpunk” and “cybertext” or “hypertext” more generally or just “ergodic literature” in general (when he was still in college the Boy once brought Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves home for me to read) and finally after so many years because he was rethinking his own “ethnicity” maybe even include a Jewish writer in the course, Philip Roth say. And after that, the 80’s already having gone into the 90’s and the 90’s into the 00’s, after all that – well, Mr. Bernstein, as I suppose as I was told, Mr. Bernstein because of his seeking to “deplete all the possibilities of experiences in love” long ago had been fired or quit teaching, or let’s say he just retired and is sitting around now reading Portnoy’s Complaint and worrying about his pension or 401(K) plan,
and a new young teacher has taken his place, a bright new educator of a generation whose “defining moment” was not World War II, or the Vietnam War and the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, or the fall of the Berlin wall and the “end of history,” but 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama, this young new spirit in his early 20’s has to teach all the same things that Mr. Bernstein did, but unlike Mr. Bernstein he has his students read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a “postmodern novel” which nevertheless raises the question whether or not there is something beyond “postmodernism,” and as the young whippersnapper, who wears a range of different “retro” styles of eyeglasses, gets closer to the age of 30 he keeps raising this question whether like “modernism” before it “postmodernism” is now going out of style, bringing up the point that “post-structuralism” is starting to be eclipsed by an emerging “Darwinian criticism” and that there is talk by experts that the times are now entering into a “post-postmodernism,” which could be called “trans-something-or-other,” with the idea that “faith, trust, dialogue, performance, and sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony,” which could variously be characterized as “post-millennialism,” the “rejection of victimary thinking for non-victimary dialogue, “performatism,” calling for a “unified, aesthetically mediated experience of transcendence,” the “New Sincerity,” “irony and sincerity combined like Evel Knievel,” “pseudo-modernism,” a “triteness and shallowness resulting from the instantaneous, direct, and superficial participation in culture made possible by” electronic media, “metamodernism,” a “sensibility that oscillates between, and must be situated beyond, modern positions and postmodern strategies,” or “elementalism,” an “aesthetic, in the face of the strictures and ruptures of imperial capitalism, based solely upon getting something, anything, down on (if we can still use the term) paper,” the “critical” counterpart of which would be “simply trying to get through a book with a basic understanding of most of the words.” The citations here are from the excellent wikipedia articles on postmodernism and post-postmodernism, which you can look at for yourself.
What’s this with you, M? Usually you’re very good when you’re alone at the house. But last night when I came home from my gig (Moi’s out of town working a festival), I went up to my bedroom and you had gotten up on my bed and had peed all over it – maybe drooled or sweated, but probably peed. Little hairs all over the sheets and pillow too.
Most novels raise the question “Why is there this thing rather than some other thing?” My bloggersroman, if such it be, simply asks that more fundamental question I mention elsewhere.
I feel compelled to say this at this late date: Yesterday, Tanya (you’ll meet her more properly later on) began talking to me about “critical racial theory,” which she became steeped in while earning one of her PhD’s in the early 00’s. Although we didn’t have the opportunity to talk long, I got the impression that this was another way of approaching literature – anyway, add this to what Mr. Bernstein’s replacement needs to address in his class on the novel.
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