So my defense is today. Wish me luck!

I’m pretty confident about my work, having studied it for over a year and a half, but I guess you never know what can happen in an oral defense…

I’ll be back later on in the summer, after my defense (July 18).

I’m currently writing about Percy Shelley’s heart. Mary Shelley kept the heart of her husband, dried to dust, in her writing cabinet. The heart was wrapped with a copy of Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy the poet wrote soon to mark the death of Keats. Susan Wolfson has a great article where she points out that Mary decides the poem is more about Percy than Keats. Mary writes in an introduction to her husband’s work:

“There is much in the Adonais which seems now more applicable to Shelley, than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny, when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before the fame he inherits” (qtd on 37)

Wolfson then says that the fact Mary wrapped Adonais around Percy’s heart was a “ghoulishly literal application” of this idea (37).

After Mary’s death, Sir Percy Florence Shelley and his wife decided to take the ashes out of the desk and place them in Boscombe: a kind of 19th century museum/amusement park for fans of the Shelleys. The ashes were placed next to manuscripts of Mary’s novels, trinkets they owned during their lives, and painted portraits of their features.

What begins as a ghoulish, personal, literalization of Mary’s identification of Percy as the Keatsian poet becomes a short-cut to literary authenticity as a death wish. Encased (or buried) as it was in Mary’s desk, then at Boscome, and finally in Shelley’s son Lord Percy’s coffin, the heart represents a piece of Percy’s body that does not deteriorate–and thus becomes a testament to his literary immortality. For Shelley to become immortal, the heart tells us, first he had to die.

I’m turning 30 today.  Am I reaching a milestone?  I found a few paragraphs from Derrida on Nietzsche turning 45 that might illuminate.  Derrida discusses a dated page from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo:

This page is in a certain way dated because it says “today” and today “my birthday,” the anniversary of my birth.  The anniversary is the moment when the year turns back on itself, forms a ring or annulus with itself, annuls itself and begins anew.  It is here: my forty-fifth year, the day of the year when I am forty-five years old, something like the midday of life.  The noon of life, even midlife crisis, is commonly situated at about this age, at the shadowless midpoint of a great day.

[...]It is a shadowless moment consonant with all the “mid-days” of Zarathustra.  It comes as a moment of affirmation, returning like the anniversary from which one can look forward and backward at one and the same time.  The shadow of all negativity has disappeared: “I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once.”

Yet this midday tolls the hour of a burial.  Playing on everyday language, he (Nietzsche), buries his past forty-four years.  But what he actually buries is death, and in burying death he has saved life–and immortality. “It was not for nothing that I buried [begrub] my forty-forth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal.  The first book of the Revaluation of all Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer–all presents [Geshenke] of this year, indeed of its last quarter.  How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?–and so I tell my life to myself.” (Ear of the Other 11)

So, with Nietzsche and Derrida, I tell my life to myself and receive my life as a gift to myself.  Some of the past may be buried but, I tell myself, I have so much to be.

(Cross-posted at Long Sunday)

Our administration at the University of Florida has decided that, to offset mounting budget cuts, they should eliminate the doctoral program in Philosophy. I see this as a dark day for my University and for the state of Philosophy in American Higher Education. Our president, Bernie Machen, remains one of the highest paid officials in public education.

Read the story here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/budget-cuts-res.html

Sign a petition protesting this measure here:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/145/petition-to-president-machen-to-keep-philosophys-phd-program

I read Iron Man comics as a child. He wasn’t my favorite superhero (obviously). He wasn’t even my favorite Marvel superhero. But I always thought that it was cool he kept a suit of power armor in his briefcase. Some thoughts:

1. The movie has a strange “America is the savior of the world” feel to it. Some of the film is set in Afghanistan, and Iron Man the American hero is shown saving the lives of Afghan refugees and killing terrorists. The themes of the American weapons manufacturer coming to save the Afghans from terrorists is pretty indulgent and kinda imperialistic. Considering that the comic book was set in Vietnam, and Tony Stark basically did the same thing there, I don’t see how the filmmakers could have gotten over this aspect of the story. But it did leave me feeling uncomfortable, especially the scene where Tony starts torching an entire group of these terrorists before destroying their munitions.

2. I LOVED Gweneth Paltrow in the film. I usually can’t stand her, but she had a certain charm that was difficult to resist. Robert Downey Jr. was amazing, but I would have been shocked had he not been. Terrence Howard was a bit of a let down as Rhodey. I expected there to be a big blowup between him and Tony in the film. It happens all of the time in the comics, but it didn’t happen. Howard seemed to be Tony’s buddy who was mainly in the background.

3. The villain, the Iron Monger, sucked. His character in the comics was always an overblown dark reflection of Iron Man–but I couldn’t really see Jeff Bridges as all that devious.

4. Loved the suit. Loved the tech. My girlfriend whined about going to the film but was dancing to the soundtrack after we left, and decided that she loved it. te he…  Inasmuch as I am a sucker for cool armor suits, Robert Downey Jr., and ummm cool armor suits, I loved it as well.

Wow, almost a month since I last posted a blog! Can you tell I’m in the middle of a dissertation? I don’t have much time, so I decided to update you with bullet points. BAM!

• I finished my chapter on William Blake and Alan Moore and am moving to a chapter on Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. This chapter argues that Jackson’s text figures hypertext (and New Media more generally) as disciplines of literary and institutional melancholy. Jackson’s text uses Mary Shelley as a character to show a lineage from literature to hypertext. Yet, it also can’t decide whether it is alive or dead. The whole text takes place in a graveyard where the reader has to “put” the Patchwork Girl together. On the other hand, the Patchwork Girl is also arguing that she is faster than the reader, that the reader can’t pin her down, that she can (in some respects) escape the reader. And Jackson, curiously enough, uses metaphors of life to describe this escape.
• I saw Smart People (2007), Oh Lucky Man! (1971), and Le Corbeau (1943). The first continues the great indie-film tradition of treating intellectuals as oedipal figures to be ridiculed. I liked most of the performances, but hated the script and can’t help but wonder why films today want to “school” the intellectual. The second is a pretty good follow-up to If…, but I didn’t enjoy it because I’ve grown tired of postmodern “everyman” tales. It did have a pretty good piece of graffiti about mid-way through the film, which read “revolution is the opiate of the intellectual.” The final one was a great bit of noir, with complicated characters. All of the characters were more than their noir cliches: the lead was a morally compromised physician who doesn’t catch the killer, the two femme fatales were too clingy and didn’t follow the classic mold, and the city itself seemed to grow less interested in catching the killer.
• I’m SICK of the primary season and of one candidate in particular, whom I won’t mention. The funny thing is that I’m having less political arguments with my conservative father than my Hillary-supporting mother. But Maureen Dowd has a great little bit on her in today’s New York Times. Here’s a little snippet. After relating Hillary to the “50 foot woman,” Dowd turns to Obama, who has been subjected to one pancake dinner after another.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

After supporters of the Hillary campaign used an embarrassing translation of the Jackson 5’s ABC to showcase her commitment to multiculturalism, I thought it couldn’t get worse.

Boy was I wrong. I got this from Daily Kos. They suggested that it was planted by Democrats who wanted to show how “unhip” Republicans were.  But, given the ‘quality’ of campaign songs this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be real.

I recently rewatched the Hughes Brothers’ production of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. I have a greater understanding of why Alan Moore doesn’t trust movie directors. The movie completely eviscerates the central obsessions of the comic: Gull’s psychogeographic lecture about the hidden histories of London, the encounters with William Blake, the game the comic plays with literary and political history, the intricate way it enters into the occult world of the Freemasons. Each of these elements are either completely deleted in the movie, or so degraded that they mock the care Moore takes in placing them in his graphic novel. The literary elements are almost erased entirely, and replaced with halfhearted references to Shakespeare. When Aberdine (played not by a frumpy old 40 year old as he was portrayed in the comics but by sexy Johnny Depp) overdoses on laudanum and absinthe at the end of the film (!!), his partner plays says sweetly “Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels see thee to thy rest.”

So, why replace Blake with Shakespeare? I argue that Shakespeare’s appearance in the Hughes film and Blake’s disappearance stages a battle between academic literary culture and the mass culture of the spectacle that is definitely part of Moore’s comic but that becomes–perhaps unintentionally–the defining feature of the film. In the comic, Moore depicts Blake as a radical druidic iconoclast literally weighed down by the masculine rationality (and ready literary respectability) of Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s grave is depicted in the book with an obelisk which casts a shadow over Blake’s grave everyday at dusk. Sir William Gull, who in both the movie and the film is the alter ego of Jack the Ripper, laughs with glee “The obelisk is phallic, for the Sun’s a symbol of the male principle; of man’s ascendancy. It also symbolizes man’s left brain, our rational Apollonian side and yet, each sunset casts its unforgiving shadow ‘cross the grave of England’s greatest Holy Fool” (4;12). The fool, in this case is Blake. During Gull’s life, Blake was only beginning to be recognized by the literary community. The Pre-Raphaelites, Algernon Swinburne, and W.B. Yeats all expressed interest in Blake, but each of them had to fight hard against an establishment that thought him mad. Blake’s literary place in the comic is to act as a foil to Gull’s aristocratic evil, to suggest that there are forms of poetry which–while not completely accepted by the literary community–still maintained a certain form of literary value.

Shakespeare, in the Hughes film, provides a literary counterpoint to the depictions of the mass media. Each death is a media spectacle. In one scene, police officers impotently attempt to mask one of the bodies from a crowd of onlookers by holding up a linen sheet. In another scene, Aberdine and his partner appear disgusted as newspaper cameras take shots of the dead bodies. The attitude of the newspapers toward the Ripper murders foreshadow the media culture of the twentieth century with its obsession over serial killers, dead celebrities and murder.

Shakespeare is better known to American audiences than William Blake as a signifier of the literary. When Aberdine’s partner mouths off lines of Shakespeare and allusions to his plays, he is enacting a popular repudiation of mass culture using a popular conception of what signifies literature. Literature is no longer a secret struggle between mystical and occultic forces as it is in Moore’s graphic novel, but rather a way for the film’s popular audience to reject the media culture that many of them, nevertheless, might indulge in every night.