Andrew Statum

People used to rent phones?

Ms. Alterescu, in her blog entry, talks about the relationship between musical and emotional memory which got me thinking...

The only thing I remember from my first encounter with this book, which was back in my sophomore year of college, I think, is the quote from Cymbeline. My English professor harped on this for quite a while. I don't remember why. And I haven't read Cymbeline so I have absolutely nothing to contribute on that front. Other than that, like most of college, it's all kind of a blur. I remember more about the wood-paneling of the seminar room than I do about Mrs. Dalloway.

This is gonna be a real bona fide consciousness report because i'm not going to revise what i write and im not going to censor though i don't think i'll plop down everything that comes to mind, for the sake of decency. think of the children!

It had been five years since he’d seen the old man, five years to the day tomorrow. In that time, Marcus had changed. He had thickened through the arms and his hands, from the moving and shaping of rocks, were calloused and worn. His neck was corded and his legs, like tree trunks, had become hard and dense. A far cry from the doughy, irregular boy who went off to “build trails out West,” as he put it to the old man back then. A certain hardness now ran along the ridges of his lean face, and his brow, like the lines of a canyon, seemed carved by the elements into an attitude of rigorous contemplation, as if the land itself had adopted him, molding him, body and mind, over the years, into an image befitting its own natural offspring. The other men of the crew, happy, jocular men mostly, tended to curb the wild energy of their banter when he was around, believing him possessed of a severity of mind in a proportion more intense than theirs and therefore, disapproving of their lighthearted fraternity. This was not the case – he rather enjoyed a good bull session over a few cold rounds – but he wouldn’t have it otherwise. He preferred to maintain a slight air of mystery about his rule rather than risk the all-out fraternal insubordination he had seen infect the other crews. There was work to be done. And that was the way it had to be.

Criticism anymore is hard for me to swallow. Not that it ever was "easy" to read or understand. But there's something much more accessible and honest in the pre-theoretical criticism of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling, or even Samuel Johnson for that matter, than there is in, say, the Freudians or the post-structuralists who all seem to write criticism for the sake of criticism as opposed to writing criticism for the sake of the reader. So much of what passes for "literary criticism" embraces that technical jargonistic gobbledy-gook of the theoretical sciences that it's entirely unreadable by anyone outside of the handful of academicians who have read each other's papers. The entire enterprise smacks of career advancement chicanery.

Here's a link to a comment on an article (is that four levels of intentionality? three?) in a blog called Cognitive Daily discussing change over time in language:

I used to think Wordsworth was full of shit. "Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind." Strength? In what remains behind? In nostalgia? You gotta be kidding me!

Speaking of nostalgia, I went to a wedding this weekend.