Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Before I was watching the movie I was reading Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why.  Mr. Bloom in his inevitable, and snobbish fashion hits upon some of the most important reasons for why we read.  To start with he makes the point that we read for ourselves, and ourselves alone.  With a single rhetorical flourish all of the cultural apologists are swept aside as we turn toward literature and look for our authentic selves. Bloom may be easy to parody or dismiss because of his elitism but there is no denying he is an astute critic of literature.  I once took a class with him on twentieth century poets and will always remember the telling phrase that summed up a whole discussion on Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.  Ashbery, he said, "lacked the same ontological weight" as Stevens.  How true. He offers these principles of reading. Clear your mind of cant. Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. (Emerson) One must be an inventor to read well. Recovery of the ironic. And this elegant quotation: Going on seventy, one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent.  I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent. Thus the elitism of reading. 10:39:29 PM     I watched a video of the Richard Linklater movie, Tape, this evening.  Linklater is one of my favorite directors ever since I first saw the poster for Slacker.  I remember walking by the theater in New Haven my freshman year and seeing that crazy poster.  Generation X was a term on the upswing and the critics jumped on the bandwagon to call it a movie that defined a generation.  Of course I didn't actually see it until a couple of years later.  Then I was blown away by its lack of any pretensions of a plot and the wildly, wacky characters of Austin.  Since then I've watched Linklater through Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Suburbia (the one low point) and 2001's tour de force Waking Life (brilliant animation and more mind-bending philosophy) Tape stars Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman and takes place in a hotel room one evening as the three friends reunite to find out what happend senior year of high school.  Of course everything ends up being more complicated than it initally seems: the pothead is really preparing a revelation, the nerdy filmmaker confesses to rape, and the young asst DA confuses them both by saying nothing happened.  I encourage people to watch it as it was a lot less painful than any similarly themed David Mamet production.  (Does anyone really like Oleanna? Or think it has a point?)  The actors are all top-notch and Linklater directs his best non-original source material.  Linklater really soars when he writes his own movies but expecting someone to write two Waking Life's in a single year is too much for any one person. 10:24:53 PM     I mentioned Loren Eiseley in the post on the death of Gould and wanted to add some links for those who might want to pursue the writings of a master of the natural essay. The Man from Sunflower Street - a short biography and excerpts. Searching for Loren Eiseley: An Attempt at Reconstruction from a Few Fragments - a paper with the following opening: Literati often view scientists with mixed feelings of awe, envy and perhaps pained disappointment. Loren Corey Eiseley might have won the admiration of poets sooner had he not first appeared in scientist's clothing. To regard him as a scientist who wrote well (a Bronowski, a Snow) or a tinkerer with the left hand, however, would be a misapprehension, and worse, a condescension. What amazed me while reading Eiseley was the immense amount of time he was able to put into his writing.  The sense of immense depths he trailed into his prose. I too am aware of the trunk that stretches loathsomely back of me along the floor. I too am a many-visaged thing that has climbed upward out of the dark of endless leaf falls, and has slunk, furred, through the glitter of blue glacial nights. I, the professor trembling absurdly on the platform with my book and spectacles, am the single philosophical animal. I am the unfolding worm, and mud fish, the weird tree of Igdrasil shaping itself endlessly out of darkness toward the light. — The Firmament of Time This is evolution with tragedy and heft. And for me this is what makes evolution such a powerful idea.  We humans are here because of the confluence of an almost infinite number of chances.  The power of chance might not make you feel safe in the universe but it puts an immense burden upon our shoulders to carry forward lest we squander our feeble chances. To conclude with Gould and Darwin - "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." 1:35:42 AM     There are two authors who stunned me with their brilliance in junior high, one was Loren Eiseley, the other was Stephen Jay Gould.  The two of them combined brilliant writing and science into forms I had never encountered and I blame both for of my persistent attempts to become a polymath as well versed in science as I am in philosophy or English. RIP, Stephen Jay Gould. "Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist at Harvard University whose research, lectures and prolific output of essays helped to reinvigorate the field of paleontology, died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. The cause was adenocarcinoma of the lung, according to his wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer. One of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and perhaps the best known since Charles Darwin, Dr. Gould touched off numerous debates, forcing scientists to rethink sometimes entrenched ideas about evolutionary patterns and processes. He is credited with bringing a forsaken paleontological perspective to the evolutionary mainstream." [NY Times] [The Shifted Librarian] 1:21:58 AM

© Copyright 2002 Todd Suomela. Last update: 6/5/2002; 1:55:57 AM.