i am the man

so, this is a side-note before i begin. i am reading 'eats, shoots and leaves.' as frequent readers of this site should know by now, i get some of the humor and other parts of it are way over my head. not only am i not a fussy punctuator/proof-reader, i am one of those punctuator's that make poor ms truss cuss.

but, that's not what i'm posting about. i am the man...and college profs need to realize this.

i come from an institution that preached family rhetoric. "we are a big happy family and all are equals. the only thing that separates graduate students from profs is that they are colleagues in the making; soon they will drop the in-the-making and be full colleagues, so we should not abuse them. they are our equals." this was the mantra. in practice, of course, this never was the case. in practice, the family rhetoric often was a "because i said so" rational rather than a "the happy family of equals."

still, despite the power difference, which cannot be done away with, they insisted on our refering to them by their first name, on our using the informal pronouns, etc, and in sharing our neurosis with them. frequent were the comments i would here of x or y student having laid bear their souls to w or z prof. who, in turn, would reciprocate the emotional nakedness. also, frequent were the comments, especially about one notoriously unstable prof, who would recount her sexual exploits to her advisees regardless of their gender. i never played these freaky games, and sometimes wonder, though not to my chagrin, if i would've been more of a darling had i engaged in this neurotic, co-dependancy and given my profs that kind of access, power and control over my psyche. but i digress.

it was a very informal place, outwardly. but inwardly, it was still rigid. still, it's hard not to attend a place that for 5 years preaches equality and democracy (despite it being a sham, graduate school is always only a meritocracy...and in too many occassions a "sleep-tocray," to not get too graphic) and not leave feeling weird about being called a professor or a doctor.

my new place is big on the use of professional titles and on the use of the formal register when refering to those in tenure-track positions. which, i must say, has taken some getting used to. but this banal observation isn't the reason of this post.

this past week was our first week of class. a fellow prof, a new guy here at cumberland gap college, has told his students that he doesn't care where they get their books...which i don't have a problem with. i do, however, have a problem with the way he presented the option of buying their books on-line. he told them: "if you tell the bookstore this, i will deny it...but i don't care if you buy from another place, in fact, i encourage your sticking it to the man in anyway you can."

i don't deny that university bookstores seem to have extraordinary mark-ups (though, textbooks aren't cheap). what i wonder about is the attitude of anti-establishment that he is preaching. mainly because it is such a hypocritical stance in fact, i jokingly called him on it. i responded: "oh, so what you're saying is that they can stick it to the man as long as your not the man they're sticking it to."

those 2 of you who wade through my posts will know me to be a rather liberal sort. but i simply fail to understand the academia's, especially the literatis, fascination with being countercultural and anti-establishment. universities are by defenition highly conservative places...they carry on the tradition; they educate the nation's youth to be good citizen's of the nation, to take part of a national culture and diaglogue, etc.; they can only function in and through rigid hierarchies. or, at least, this is what they have been and have done, regardless of the counter-cultural movement, regardless of the decentered class-room, regardless of the open cannon.

more professors need to stand up and say...i am the man. after saying this, they need to decide...can i continue to be the man? and if so, how can i be the man and be so in a way that is responsible and that is consistent with my politics? or they need to put their money where their mouths are and go start un-schools. it's not that a leftist politics is anti-university (and i should say that anti-man politics isn't necessarily leftist, it can just as easily be anarchist, and if so, what's the point of even entering the classroom to teach?)...however, i find that today's academy that pays big-time research profs a lot of money while at the same time freeing them of the burden to teach and shifting this to the underpaid lecturers, adjuncts, instructors and grad students to be antithetical to left-leaning politics.

posted by Jeremy at 9:19 PM

assistant professoring

a very wise friend of mine warned me not to be, or seem too critical of my new school. despite "freedom" of expression etc. schools are very protective of their reputation. the tension now is to document what's going on without sounding too critical, which i am not. i like it here in northern washington state very much. it rains all the time, but i am getting used to it.

when putting together the syllabus of the survey class they they assigned me this fall (a course that is taught every semester, has an anthology and a syllabus pretty much put together), i asked the professor who had had me over to dinner before starting at this new school. little did i know the politics involved the invitation...but, i won't go into that (see above paragraph).

i asked him to see his old syllabus, mainly to see how he put the course together. he willingly obliged. now i learn that this spring i will teach a grad course (MA-level) and an undergraduate course where i decide the topic and readings, etc. i once again asked to see a syllabus of a special topics course he taught. i did this because in the institution i come from it is quite normal to give undergraduates secondary material (namely critical essays to read as part of the course), however, i had been told by another prof that this was not the protocol at the new institution. i was curious to see how much reading was expected. also, i asked about the MA class because they seem to believe that there is a difference between MA and Phid courses. thus, i didn't want to walk into to my MA level class with a Phid level reading load (which where i came from was ridiculously impossible to complete, but, of course, that's part of a Phid program) and scare the melanine out of my students.

however, this apparently was not what i should've done. he kind of looked at me with a weird look and said, "didn't i already give you a syllabus?" as if i had met my quota of syllabi from him by asking for the intro to lit/latin american survey syllabus.

his reaction to me was very odd. i come from an institutional culture where not only is it kosher to ask for syllabi, but for some profs its their past-time.

posted by Jeremy at 1:15 PM

family, can't...can't

so my family surprised me for my 30th and it was nice. i was expecting them on friday but they came in on wednesday, crashed our little renegade bible study and utterly surprised me. i walked around in a daze, sweating up a storm and was slightly confused. mainly because i need a certain amount of emotional gearing up for family visits; i need to fret and worry about their coming so that i can be ready for all eventualities...this did not happen. here are a few excerpts of the weekend so you can see what i mean.

sunday morning i was in the study, which sits caty-corner off the kitchen, frantically trying to get ready for sunday school class. i heard an "ooohhhh!" quickly followed by an "oh, no! i'm sorry." 20 minutes earlier my mother had asked me to fix a waffer for communion since we were going to celebrate it before they left for home. apparently by the time she walked into the kitchen she had competely forgotten that she had asked me to do this and thought that the one wafer sitting on the counter (a wafer that looked exactly like the wafers that she has spent half her life making for church communion) was some new thing i had made for breakfast. not until biting into it did she realize that this was the communion wafer.

thursday i was in meetings all day and got home just in time to go shopping for dinner. (since they had come in early i had not yet gone to the store.) i sat down to make the list and mom kept interrupting me asking what i was doing, what i was going to buy and fix and whether or not she could come with me. needless to say, when i looked over the recipe for the german chocolate cake, i forgot to check to see if i had enough butter nor did i write down the exact amount of bakers chocolate i needed. (thursday is my dad's b-day. apparently, he wasn't at home when i got home, he had spent the day pouting because nobody remembered that it was his birthday.) when we got back to the house and i started on the cake, i, of course, noticed that i did not have enough butter...back to the store...which isn't too bad, it's only a mile away.

it wasn't until i was well into the making the cake that i realized that i hadn't enough chocolate. my 81 year-old grandmother (who we call ita, short for abuelita) came to the rescue to tell me how to make an equivalent amount of choclate using cocoa powder. however, as i was trying to do the simple math to make it work, both she and my mother kept interrupting me (admiring the kitchen aide t. got me for my b-day, asking me if there was anything they could do to help, etc.) needless to say, i put twice as much butter as i needed...which wasn't too bad, it creates a really moist cake...but it was so much butter that the inside cooked much less slowly to the outside and so the cakes (it was a three layer cake) kind of flopped. it was still nice and moist and chewy but not pretty. ita, to help me, chopped up the pecans. however, instead of noticing that the bag was a zip-loc, she cut off one corner of the bag, so now we can't seal it properly. during this whole time, my grandmother with alzheimer's kept yelling into the kitchen is there anything i can do to help?

she really is a great alzheihmer's patient. she still knows who she is and she is a very upbeat kind of person... which is nice, instead of getting snippy or grouchy, she stays upbeat. on friday, we went to the botanical gardens. ita used to grow orchids and was a key member of the orchid society in her hometown. atlanta has a fabulous permanent orchid exhibit. ita cried because it was so beautiful and reminded her of her days in the greenhouse. nonna (the alzheimer's grandma, it's italian for grandma), however, motored through the place with her head down...she can't see very well so always stares at the ground to make sure she is on the path. also, she has a fear of falling into puddles, off curbs, etc. anyway, she motored through the place with her head down, muttering "this is wonderful...this is just great!" however, if she every got 10 paces ahead of somebody, she would stop look around with a puzzled look on her face till she saw someone she recognized and beckon them to join her.

saturday night, we had sparkling mineral water. she tried and it and said "yuck! i don't like that!" dad said it was "aqua minerale" because it was an italian water, and she said "ooh, well give me more, i do like it!" she spent many years in italy, thus if it's italian she likes it.

saturday, oh, too much happened on saturday...too much poorly planned stuff. but the sort of emblematic moment was late saturday night when we had been discussing do we do a devo tonight or wait till sunday morning. no decision had been made. and thn, suddenly in the middle of some olympic race i had gotten interested in. dad announced that we were to have a devo and bam, we started the devo. the thing about it was that there was no warning, just an "okay, devo time...turn the tv off" and we were off to the races.

the devo thought was one on thankfulness for God's care etc. and the whole reason for the visit came out. they wanted to celebrate my new job, my finished phid, and the fact that t. and i are expecting. this was the reason that they came...the frustrating thing about it all, was that this was the first time that this had been mentioned.

that is, we went the whole time here from poorly planned day to poorly planned day without them ever saying we are here for a purpose and a reason and we are going to do what we can to make this an enjoyable visit.

and now, after writing all this i feel like i am a big whiner.

school has started...more on the joys of that later.

posted by Jeremy at 8:03 AM

quarters

more about my boring life as a professor.

it's the small stuff that makes you feel successful. all universities are unique...or at least this is what they believe and what they tell you, over and over and over again.

but the new place is unique. if you talk to admin, or sit through mind-numbing meetings listening to them talk to you, they will tell you about how all 159 counties of GA are represented in the student body, along with all 50 states and 145 foreign countries. they will also tell you that the SAT scores, as if these really meant anything (it seems that really all they mean is that the students that did well on them were smart enough to pay somebody to teach them how to take the test), have steadily increased and that we are becoming a more selective school. but, this is really just admin and profs trying to convince themselves that we are what used to be called a research II and that we should move to research I, because, of course, if you aren't moving towards competing with the ivies, can you really call yourself a university?

but this kind of upward mobility is rather meaningless, except to the extent that it translates into $, because that what it's all about anyway.

no, GSU is unique because it somehow has managed to free itself from outside governance and has a university senate made up of admin, faculty, staff and students that actually decide policy, etc. for the university.

and, it is unique because it is spread across downtown tallamahoochie. this isn't so unique as to not exist among other universities, fordham, CUNY, possibly san fran state, have similar urban campuses. what this means is getting small things done are miracles and make you feel like successful human being.

to get keys to get into your office, you have to go to the campus police, whose offices are located on one side of downtown; but, in order to be given your keys you have to have your i.d., located 5 blocks on the other side of downtown. this, in and of itself isn't that much of a hassle, except that all of the downtown meters are set to max out at 30 minutes (1$)...i didn't know this until i had deposted 5$ and it only gave me 30 minutes.

posted by Jeremy at 4:55 PM

i wish i had a faster connection

While reading a recent New Yorker article about political advertisements, I looked up "The Living Room Candidate," the online collection of political ads referred to early in the article. I say cool.

posted by Greg at 1:33 AM

My first sermon

okso i gave a sermon sunday morning; as the comments allude, i actually posted the whole thing, and it was pretty long. i tried until late in the evening to make it more manageable through an expand/hide coding, but i gave up.

suffice it to say.

posted by Greg at 2:28 AM

digressions

First, I want to thank all of you for putting up with my raggedy soul-searching lately. I think that I overstated my percentages a few days agoit's probably more like 54-62%which means little except that it's a difficult decision to make. Of course I get caught in webs of daily existence, including working on my class web site (FYI, the link won't be live until late-night of this post date; it's also a draft site, too...), and trying to coordinate a ministerial search committee. Yet there's always a nagging suspicion that I have a big decision to make...

But let us put that aside, for we have important matters to consider!

For instance, it appears I am now on the receiving end of Christian Political Spam! Take a gander:

Please view www.soundwords.com
 
Surely God is concerned about the upcoming presidential election.  Romans 13 implies that a president
is God's "minister."  In the United States we Christians have the right & responsibility to influence who our
next president ("minister") will be!
 
One candidate is against God's agenda!
 
Please view the SoundWords web page for God's point of view on the presidential election.
 
Email me your thoughts on the upcoming election.  I will post it on the web page.
 
We can make a difference!

The message, believe it or not, also came with an attached photo of a bald eagle peering majestically at the world.

Curious, I visited the website, and I encourage you to do so, too! Go for the waving American flags! Go for the images of beautiful-caucasian 1950s-era Jews staring at "The Writing on the Wall." Go to see just how close the writers come to admitting that God's minister/president should be our current minister/president without ever actually writing "his" name! Go, learn how all Judeo-Christian morals are encapsulated by opposition both to gay marriage and abortion! Go, but if you begin to feel nauseous, make sure not to do what I did: turn your head away from your Powerbook.

There's a very real discussion about morality which I think needs to be had. We see stabs at it when John Kerry emphasizes "values," but, unfortunately, they're only stabs, and in Kerry's case, they're primarily attempts to co-opt his opposition's rhetoric. (And his oppositionor some of it, anywayjust turn to morals in response, as if social justice and liberal ideals were not moral positions, too.) I guess politico-religious positions always can venture toward the absurd. To my eyes, anyway, it seems more absurd this year than most. But hey! It's supposed to: it is, after all, an election year.

posted by Greg at 8:23 PM

explanations

Five years ago, when I hardly knew what "literature" meant or how rarely anyone in the academy truly thinks big thoughts, I sent the following page-and-a-half letter as the statement of purpose to my applications. It's a dreamy letter, full of big thoughts but empty of tangible ideasit's a wonder any Ph.D. program accepted me at allsave one idea that is still very much with me today. I'll point it out afterwards, but you may want to try to guess before you get to me again.

A few nights ago I went outside town, where there were no streetlights to cover the stars, to watch the Leonid meteor shower. I had heard that this year it was to be a good show, that one might see one thousand meteors per hour. Such a sight, I thought, could be like seeing fallen stars fill the sky like dust fills a sunbeam. That was a sight I could not miss. I went early, about eleven o'clock. I knew I was early, and thought that the best show would begin about one in the morning. However, astronomical events which involve thousands of episodes aren't sticklers for time like singular eclipses, I reasoned, and if in the hour I planned to sit outside I was graced by seeing only five hundred early birds, I would still go home happy. Not until much later did I learn I was fourrather than twohours too early.

I sat on the hood of my car, pulled over alongside a deserted country road. It was cold out. The metal hood was not warm. The air was damp. And the sky was starred, but blank. Regarding meteors, there was nothing. Then I saw one. It was not terribly spectacular. About five minutes later, I saw another and thought the same. I felt Orion, lounging over and behind my right shoulder, laughing at me. After two more meteors and fifteen minutes passed, I knew I would not see five hundred meteors before midnight. Still, I stayed until the fog which made the air damp stood taller and I couldn't see the stars at all. Then I climbed off the car to drive back to campus and to bed.

The drive back, however, took me above the fog, so I determined to give the sky one more chance. I turned off and stepped out the car. I looked up and, suddenly, in the eastern horizon, a fireball began. In two seconds it bolted directly over me heading due west, flaming like plastic dripping from a burning milk jug, tail lingering stubbornly in the starred sky.

After that, I stopped there nearly an hour longer.

I have thought about that night for a week now. The situation is classic: how I went out expecting to be dazzled in one fashion and returned home dazzled in another. It's the stuff that literature is made of, and I've spent this entire week attempting to to turn the scene into a statement of purpose, to use it to explain why I want to study literature in graduate school. But a meteor does not easily become a good analogy for why I wish to study literature, except that literature, like that meteor, makes me stop.

Perhaps stop is too strong a word. It was that I might see something like that horizon-to-horizon fireball that I stopped the car first; it was the hope I might see something akin to it that I stayed. Similarly, reading literature gives me pausepause to think, to contemplateand it is that I might discover something great to think about that I stay with it. But I ask: what reader does not read for this reason?

I am applying to graduate school because I want to write about literature. My desire this week was more than"Cleverly Use Meteor for Metaphor." The desire was more fundamental: I wanted to write the scenario because I still see that tail pulled over my head, although I admit my memory has probably enlarged the meteor like a lost fish. I had a similar desire to write when I first read Moby-Dick. The book astounded me, and I wanted to write about it for its own sake because I knew it worth my time and effort in research and writingand it was already a big fish. I've written about Moby-Dick in connection with a seminar I attended sponsored by the Pew Foundation. (That paper is included with this application as a writing sample.) I enjoyed the research that paper involved, and now want to go a step farther: I want to know a bit of literature so well I can write a bookor a dissertationabout it.

I am applying to graduate school because there is an entire period of American lettersthe mid to late nineteenth century, particularly the "American Renaissance"which gives me that same desire to write. I am also applying so I may study the history and writing of two genres in particular, the novel and the essay, because I see both as crucial to American writing in this late twentieth century. Finally, I am applying because I wish to learn more about writing, both its accomplishment and its teaching. Ultimately I may teach, after all.

Finally, I am applying to YOUR graduate school because...

What is that single idea still with me today? It's toward the end, the last sentence in a paragraph. Part of it I bracket, but it is this: "I want [to know a bit of literature so well] I can write a book [or a dissertation] [about it]. First, the brackets: I have to keep myself from scoffing both at my naivete ("bit of literature"? What literature, save dime novels of course, ever exists in a bit? It's either no bit, or its all bitsIt's never one bit.) and at how limited my view was. All of it was based on my experience writing one essay of which I was proud. It was an essay that actually had little to do with Moby-Dick and everything to do with our still-breathing world, but I didn't want to admit so much thenafter all, I wanted to be an Americanist! The other brackets are there to make the sentence contextually and grammatically correctthe dissertation is already a burden; it, a prescient awareness that any bit of literature is truncated silliness.

But the dream. Two verbs, one of desire and the other of possibility: "I want. . . I can write a book." Even teaching, which I've done more in graduate school than anything else, I delegated to an afterthought then. Since before graduate school, though I may have let the idea slip for even long expanses of time, I admit a singular desire to write. The degree? I can't get worked up over it if I try. A Ph.D. may gain me access to publish in a good university press, or it may not; a Ph.D. may allow me to teach at a university someday, but in the near future it probably will not (I'm in English, after all!), and, frankly, the job search through MLA, the subsequent race for tenure make me sick to think about. Even the certain benefits of academic life, such as freer schedules and the chance to work in intellectual communities, I have my doubts about: free my schedule, and I just spend my time wondering why Jai screws with his hair so much; with a few notable exceptions, communing with intellectuals mostly sets my stomach to churn.

They say about writers that nothing will stop them from writingand I'm not about to call myself a writer, because lo these five years, I've hardly written a word. I've been of a mind to explain that problem this summer, because this was supposed to be the time in which I finally put the coffee on IV mode, read 140 books, polished my "publishable article," talked to my committee, wrapped up some old tasks hanging over my head, and finally, after long, long last, I was to take my exams in early September. To do big things one must cordon them off, break them down into manageable pieces; yet even at the breaking-down I break down, my will only half of my desire which isn't very great at all.

Let's pretend that academic studies are a house, mostly built by others, but which I hope someday to add a shed around back. Every time I step to the thresholdevery time!the house seems absolutely foreign to me, as if I've never been here before; all the materials I began to gather last week all my nails and recycled boards, have been pilfered away. I suspect that there's something of that feeling in all academic life, even in spite of the peanut gallery standing by, asking, "So what are you saying here that is new?," or "Why would I want to read this?" For many people who cross that threshold, the disorientation and the heckling only invigorate, and they start again, and they get better at gathering their materials until finally they've got a shanty wall up, and they're well on their way to their own shed. Classwork, we may say, is supposed to get you so far, anyway, that you know where to get your materials easily. But I say that even after classwork was done, I never became so comfortable with the place. Some questions really intrigue me: the intersections of word and politics and word and religionboth so prominent in Americans' lives; the ways Americans interact and write about physical space and "scenes"; the means and methods of interpretation writ largebut I am never so intrigued with them as when I pursue them alone, to make of them what I will.

It's apparent to me now that the writing I'm expected to do compels me neither to write more, nor better. Fortunately, there are many kinds of writing in the world, many books to be written that have nothing to do with Charles Brockden Brown, as much as I enjoy him...

Perhaps it is that all I am saying is that I am disheartened, that I am simply rejecting the means to get exactly where I want to go. I wouldn't be the first: our department decided about seven years ago to make the comprehensive exams an interminable, rather than a finite process. Perhaps it is the case that I should quit whining and get to workI've done precious little enough of it. If someone were to slap my head and say as much to me, I would accept the criticism. Even if we do the work, are we always on a threshold looking in? Jeremy suggested as much after having finished his dissertation when he said he only knows so much as to begin the work now that he wanted to begin before. Regardless, I can't honestly say that I know why I want to look in at all, and my suspicions, my instinctswhatever you call itis that instead I want to stand on the threshold looking out.

posted by Greg at 11:47 AM

you heard it here first

So I'm 88-95% sure I'm not going to finish my degree. After mulling it over some weeks (really, months) now and talking it over at length with kl, I'll probably take a Master's degree this fall.

More to come in the next couple of days (wedding tomorrow, church Sunday). Probably I'll write Sunday afternoon.

The big question: what, then, will I do?

posted by Greg at 1:57 AM

rather boring adventures in the preaparation for teaching

so, i've finally turned in the "revised" dissertation. my conclusion about dissertations are three. (i'd be curious to know how those who spent more than a year on their diss feel about them. it's kinda funny...one of the reasons i came where i came to do graduate work was because i didn't think it a phid phactory...and it's not the way that, say florida is, but the whole pushing us out the door once course work was done, sure felt like it.)

1they are documents you turn in, not documents that you finish and polish.

2only when you turn in the behemoth are you really ready to begin to research and write the dissertation you originally wanted to.

3no matter how lousy you may or may not think your dissertation to be, once you turn it in, it feels dang good. (though you can't help hating UMI for making the darn thing widely available.

in other news, i begin classes on the 23rd. however...

as of the moment, i don't have an office. i am the last in a round robin. the new chair has moved into her wonderful corner office, leaving her old window-office vacant. the professor who was to move up the ladder (he already had a corner office, but now he gets to move closer to the main office) and take her office has yet to move, despite the office being available for about a month and him being in town doing nothing but teaching one language course and enjoying his summer. thus, the professor who was to move into his office, and get a window office has not moved yet, despite really wanting to so she can look down upon the city. therefore, i, the new hire, who gets an office on the inside of the building with no windows, and only a florescent light to illuminate my way through assistant professorship, still am officeless and have a closet full of books and stacks of articles that need a home.

in june i was assigned two courses, a latin american literary survery course (from pre-columbian lit to the 1980's) and an advanced spanish (TBA, but they told me most likely i would teach this class and that i should speak with the prof who had created the course). two days ago i went by to pick up the anthology that i will be using to teaching the survey course and that was easy and smooth. then, i emailed the prof of the TBA because she hadn't contacted me. she informed me that they had informed her that i would not be teaching that class...so, i went to the on-line catalogue, as of yet, my name isn't on the roster, which i didn't necessarily expect. but, the course i was to teach is assigned to another prof. when i wrote to the chair she informed that they had overbooked the courses for the amount of money they had and were in the middle of reshuffling and maybe i would know by monday the 9th what i was to teach.

posted by Jeremy at 9:49 AM

swing low sweet pendulum

I know, I promised this long ago. I even promised a summer of the Templars, but I can't find my copy of The Baphomet.

It’s as if Eco set out to write a history of the Templars and instead wrote Foucault's Pendulum. The amount of knowledge he has on the subject matter, the number of obscure texts on the Templars, the Rosicrucians, Hermeticism, Cabala, and all forms of occult and secret societies that Eco quotes from and steals from through out the book left me awe struck. There are 120 chapters in the novel, and each begins with a citation. I haven’t chased all of them down, but the vast majority are real and they include everything from prosaic lit. crit. studies to a myriad of 16th, 17th and 18th century works. It is, as I was saying, as if Eco set out to write a history of the Templars and Templar scholarship and realized that the only way to handle the material was in a 641-page novel.

It should come as little surprise to Eco readers that he chose the structure of a mystery thriller. He has always been a great lover of the detective story. He’s ventured into the intricacies of the king of the low-brow genres in both criticism and fiction. The mastery he shows in his novel In the Name of the Rose evidence both his love and his knowledge of detective fiction. He, like Borges, his less operatic forerunner—I thought maybe “less epic” was the appropriate modifier, but Borges is epic; his stories, though short, are often very sweeping in scope—, is interested in mystery because of what it has to say about epistemology and hermeneutics; the way that the interpreter, the object under question, the process of discovery, and the results are all part of the same messy event.

Foucault’s Pendulum, though, goes well beyond the Sherlock Holmes, gum-shoe (would leather-sandal be appropriate for monks?), detective type fiction of NR, though. In NR Brother William is simply too intelligent, as the genre demand he be. He shrewdly and masterfully alternates between inductive and deductive reasoning; few things elude his sight and his intellective powers; at times he might not be in control of the situation, but he often thinks three steps ahead of the person who wields the power and so eludes their grasp. In NR everything has already happened and the novel is about reconstructing what happened to know the sequence of events and sniff-out the culpable party. The fantastic leaps of imagination and reasoning that William makes, almost magical to those around him, all tie to concrete occurrences in the real world. It is a very grounded novel. FP is also about constructing the past, but in a radically new way. In FP there is no ground—history is open to interpretation and facts can be read however radically as needed to make one’s story cohere. The only rule is that the story and the facts be internally coherent and event follow one another in a logical fashion.

An unholy trinity—Casaubon (a phd in history or literature), Belbo (an eclectic erudite), and Diotallevi (a man who believes himself to be Jewish and so studies Kabala)—are the editors at a publishing house that traffics in “intellectual” books. They are associated with a vanity press, which helps them stay afloat and, among the “serious” books they publish are catalogues of the “great authors” of Italy. These catalogues, of course, prominently feature the authors of the vanity press. They decide, at a certain point, to amuse themselves by constructing, reconstructing actually, the history of the Templars. They come across the idea when a man with a shady past comes to them with a book he wants to publish, a history of the Templars. It is, of course, a highly unusual history that believes the Templars to be part of the Great Conspiracy. In fact, most of the great thinkers of the Western world end up associated with the Templar conspiracy to take over the world.

In broad strokes one could say that NR is about the attempt to control forbidden knowledge and the way that obsessive, draconian control of forbidden knowledge perverts the well-intentioned guardian. FP, on the other hand, is about the inability to simply toy with forbidden knowledge. Even more, it’s about the inability to examine something, anything, clinically, aseptically. In other words, there is no such thing as an objective observer…but to state it in such a blunt manner is crude, even banal. Because more than simply the inability to remain or be objective, FP shows how understanding is a creative process. It shows how the interpreter is just as much created by what he or she interprets as is the object under study and the text itself. Even more, the novel is about error. It is about how error and falsities can take on a life of their own and become fact, despite being wrong. (I only partly mean error like flatlanders, and more fully mean error like Paul wrote the book of Hebrews, to take a not too controversial example).

Just when you think he has gone too far in his critique, even parody of interpretation run amok, just when you think that he has overstated his case to such an extent that the fiction isn’t even believable, he will provide an epigraph that makes his own rantings seem tame. Chapter 84 produces a rather convoluted interpretation of Jules Verne as being part of The Great Conspiracy. His novels explore both telluric and celestial currents (Journey to the Center; 20,000 Leagues; Around the World) and a number of his protagonists through anagrams and initials are proposed as figures of the Templars or the Rosicrucians. And you think, this is indeed a case of overinterpretation (to quote the title of one of his critical essays). But chapter 85 begins with this citation from an actual scholarly work on Jules Verne.

Phileas Fogg. A name that is also a signature: Eas, in Greek, has the sense of the globe(it is therefore the equivalent of pan, of poly,) and Phileas is the same as Polyphile. As for Fogg, it is the English for brouillard…and no doubt Verne belonged to “Le Brouillard.” He was even kind enough to indicate the relationship between this society and the Rose+Cross, because, what, enfin, is our noble traveler Phileas Fogg if not a Rose+Cross?…And further, doesn’t he belong to the Reform Club whose initials, R.C., designate the reforming Rose+Cross? And this Reform Club stands in Pall Mall, suggesting once again the Dream of the Polyphile.-Michel Lamy, Jules Verne, initié et initiateur, Paris, Payot, 1984, pp. 237-238.

And with that wonderful quote, I shall be silent. Even though I have the distinct feeling that I haven’t said very much of anything.

posted by Jeremy at 1:16 PM

Last Will & Testament

The August issue of the Christian Chronicle has been out a week, but only today have they updated the web site. This is the issue that covers my congregation's multi-church supper, &c. back in June. That top photo is of my good friend (& former minister, who has graced these pages before), who is also quoted in Erik Tryggestad's piece.

I think there's plans to put online a story I sent them, but they are either behind in their updating or they have scrapped the idea. Mine's not any more enlightening than what's already there.

But here's the good part. Read Tryggestad's article, then flip over to Bailey McBride's bland and wishy-washy justification for reporting the story at all. How remarkable! That groups as diverse as the Churches of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the Independent Christian Churches can all meet together to celebrate common beginnings, to talk at length about unity of ideals, even, and to acknowledge that what is common in their heritage has hit a significant anniversary is "divisive" seems to me absurd!

Alas, to some people, it is not absurd at all. Try exercising your patience by reading the latest issue of The Gospel Advocate. (It's not available online.) Their decision to take a trowel & cement to notions of "unity" for the purpose of putting up wallsand "Putting up walls" is the title of one of their feature articlesis a very direct response to gatherings like the one we held 26 June. (Although it is probably more intended to come down on the meeting held at Cane Ridge than it is our tiny meeting.) So the spirit of sectarianism is alive and well in parts of Nashville...

At the moment, all I can think to say is, What's up with that?

posted by Greg at 9:51 AM