Andrew’s Photos – Blog

Finally, another human on this planet that does not think that Toni Morrison is the greatest writer alive. B.R. Myers writes of Morrison’s new novel A Mercy that:

How shallow and vague that is; how glibly it breezes through the life of the mind. A Mercy is eked out with a few set pieces, but even they rush us through; the book never seems to settle into narrative “real time.”

For all its cheerlessness, the novel is anything but grittily realistic. Some scenes, such as one in which a character gets out of her bath “aslide with wintergreen,” evince an effort to make even these miserable lives picturesque. But Morrison’s failure to evoke the period is more the fault of her all-too-contemporary prose style: “1682 and Virginia was still a mess.” No one likes an archaizer, apart from a million Cormac McCarthy fans, but a novelist writing of the 17th century should at least avoid language that is jarringly inconsistent or out of place. Reminiscing, the slaves vacillate between would-be-poetic English and an equally improbable sort of Hollywood Injun: “Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in.” Anachronisms abound, from New Age lingo like “She gives off a bad feeling” to the dialect of the postbellum South: “her borning young.” We are even told that our Anglo-Dutch trader had “gone head to head with rich gentry.” What, and not drunk their milk shake?

For the one required class on campus Freshman year we were required to read Beloved which I found to be a self-indulgent and arrogant piece of literary crap. I have never been able to understand why Toni Morrison gets the praise that she does for her novels while other American writers simply get overshadowed.

Link to the original article.

In “Discipline and Punish” he writes:

It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not exceed, in savagery the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency of crime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration.

Just found that interesting in light of all of these discussion concerning the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the United States’ role in extradition and torture.

Another interesting quote I found while reading the first chapter of Deleuz and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”:

Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit an to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (page 7)

I simply found this interesting because I found it to be quite relevant to my feelings toward the teaching and learning of languages like Ancient Greek or Latin. I’ve always been troubled by the way that we do not fully comprehend the structure or construction of these languages, but yet we still make assumptions about language usage and meaning. I believe that we do this by breaking the languages down into a single realm of meaning that may or may not have been applicable or relevant for the general populous of the time.

For a class on Contemporary Theory (more properly modern French thought) I am in the midst of reading A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the translator’s foreword to my edition Brian Massumi writes:

A concept is a brick. It can be sued to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none fo the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power releations encrusted in the laws? All and none fo the above “What interests us are the circumstances” Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture.

Just thought that was interesting and worth sharing. Enjoy.

From a story posted a little while ago on The Guardian about Obama’s chief speech writer:

When Barack Obama steps up to the podium to deliver his inaugural address, one man standing anonymously in the crowd will be paying especially close attention. With his cropped hair, five o’clock shadow and boyish face, he might look out of place among the dignitaries, though as co-author of the speech this man has more claim than most to be a witness to this moment of history.

Jon Favreau, 27, is, as Obama himself puts it, the president’s mind reader. He is one of the youngest chief speechwriters on record in the White House, and, despite such youth, was at the centre of discussions of the content of today’s speech, one which has so much riding on it.

For a politician whose rise to prominence was largely built upon his powers as an orator, Obama is well versed in the arts of speech-making. But today’s effort will tower over all previous ones.

Reading about the people that President Obama has surrounded himself with just fascinates me. His ability to find talent and surround himself with it is just astounding. Regardless of how the next four years go I do hope that someone composes a book a la “Team of Rivals” about his campaign and his presidency.

Link via Barack Obama’s inauguration speech … crafted by 27-year-old in Starbucks | World news | The Guardian .