back and ready for...something.

Having overcome the various tribulations involved in naming furry freeloaders and HAND CANCER, I am ready once again, dear readers. to Recommend Something To You.

I rarely get a chance to read anything for fun when I am in the grasp of the semester, but I recently read Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
by Daniel Radosh.

I am sort of obsessed with Christian pop culture. I am not a Christian nor do I have any interest in becoming one, but the bizarre grasp - you could say the stranglehold - the religion has on the culture, science, and politics of America fascinates me. So I'd wanted to read this book for a while and after only a small battle with my university's library (apparently they only have 1 copy and it's just for undergrads, WTF?) I was able to borrow a copy (but I strongly suggest you buy one through my Amazon store, because there's a recession going on, and I have a lot of student loans).

Radosh resists the trap of sneering intellectual contempt for the stuff he studies, even when I feel it's warranted, and for that he should really be commended. The book is organized as a series of adventures as he goes to a Christian rock festival, a "Jesus junk" convention, a Christian theme park in Florida, etc. While I was admittedly hoping for it to be more amusing than it was, Radosh has a lot more sympathy and empathy than was necessary.

Anyway, the Christian pop culture industry is insidious and worth $7 billion a year in America. If you ever wondered about the banalization of culture, about why well-organized groups throw a fit every time a film's released that has a bad word in it, this book goes a long way towards explaining why in an entertaining, accessible way. It is Recommended. Enjoy!

Also recommended: Hell House, 2001, a great documentary about Christian "hell houses". Entry to follow. Maybe. Depends how bad this semester eats me alive.

BOGO MONDAY!

Today's recommendation from me is a double-whammy. As in, two for the price of one. Yes, two recommendations. And since the recommendations are free to begin with, this all works out to an EXCEEDINGLY GOOD DEAL.

My first recommendation is participating in Infinite Summer. Of course, those who read my other blog already know about this (and are probably wishing I would shut up about it), but Infinite Summer is a kind of virtual, online reading group, a communal project with the goal of slogging through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest during the summer. Yes, all 980 pages plus 100 pages of footnotes. It started yesterday, but you can totally catch up.

Infinite Jest is a book I had been meaning to read for quite some time. Haven't we all, really? But that is about as far as many people go with it. I am firmly convinced that a large portion of its reputation is due to the cliché of pseudo-intellectual hipsters who continually see fit to namedrop the novel and discuss its importance and influence without having actually read it. To me, this project is at least partially about destroying this image with which the novel has been saddled. It's about not being the stereotypical pseudo-intellectual who skims Wikipedia entries for a faint grasp on a book so that one can name-drop it in conversation. It's about setting an achievable goal and turning it into a small but not insignificant personal success. It's about following through on things. 

Speaking of following through on things, that is the topic of the second recommendation: knowing when to say when. I am overextended and overwhelmed and exhausted right now. I have too much on my plate:

• Infinite Summer
• various other books I had intended to read this summer
• preparing for the impending semester
• my goddamn job
• packing things to move out of my apartment by July 31
• At least 2 cds worth of cover songs to record as thank you gifts for the autism walk
• An entire EP to write and record
• artwork for these two projects
• the increasing demands of Its Flaws Were What Made Us Have Fun, which appears to be developing the beginning of what could almost be considered an audience.
• a few other stressors of a more personal and private nature that I will not be discussing here.

The point of all this is to say that I am going to be taking a temporary break from writing recommendations on this blog. A hiatus. As you can see, I do have a lot I am dealing with right now, and I think that the pressure implicit in a blog like this to produce content daily, as well as the irrational guilt I feel whenever I don't produce anything, has taken its toll on me and only caused more stress and anxiety. I know that I often joke about plans as being promises to be broken, but I don't like breaking promises, and therefore, I am not making these promises. Maybe I will be able to resume posting after I've moved out of this apartment; time will tell.

In the meantime, though, I do intend to follow through on Infinite Summer, and I hope you do, too. Not to push the other blog again, but I have posted links to some valuable resources and tips over there. Until next time, have a great (Infinite) summer.

but, you can't get any poorer than dead

Today's recommendation is Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away.

When I was about 18, I read J.L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words, which is one of the shortest philosophy texts ever written, and the easiest to understand, and the most endearingly titled. It is about performative speech acts. When speaking becomes doing. When you christen a ship or bet on the outcome of an event or marry 2 people. I have come back to it at several points in my life (see: "Short, easy to understand") and I'm coming back to it now. And I find it a useful frame through which to understand O'Connor's final novel, which deals with the fraught execution of a performative speech act Austin never discusses: baptism.

I romanticize the south. My parents are from the south, more or less. I was born there. Even though I grew up in New Jersey, I became a real person in the bastardized south - Florida - and have spent many formative summer evenings of my life on Amtrak trains in motion, speeding through crystallized slices of time and space and Carolinas. So, I have a perfectly good notion of what I think the South is and should be, and I suppose I seek that out in my reading. Sorry if that's regionalist. I was once accused of regionalism in a regionalist writing class in college.

The Violent Bear it Away teems with rage and explosions (metaphorical and literal). The rage and explosions coalesce around the tension between rationalism and Something Else, something atavistic and instinctive that was once called holy; between city and country; between knowing and believing. Then, of course, O'Connor presents each dichotomy with farcical distance and textually raised eyebrows. I'm not sure I liked that.

In the end, a novel - a story of destructive inner and external turmoil - is mounted over the act of uttering a few words and sprinkling a few drops of water; or, whatever you take Baptism to be (it is obvious from this review how I feel about evangelism). In a larger, meta sense, the story's existence seems a performative act of some sort itself. Here is where I always lose sight of what a performative speech act may or may not be. Thus, I will leave it to you, dear Blog Readers.

we are very poor

I haven't been feeling very well lately; there's been little I've felt like recommending other than please, please curing my migraines and sending me money so I stop worrying and having daily, horrible anxiety attacks about how I have absolutely no safety net in the vile, rapacious capitalist society in which I live and also please send reassurance that the world isn't hurtling towards an apocalypse, or at least that it's fast & soon & relatively painless. Full stop.

But that's not much of a recommendation.

Instead, apropos of that:

Today's recommendation is another underrated writer. Today's recommendation is Juan Rulfo (c. 1917-1986), for his brutal depictions of poverty, for his haunting (haha) novella Pedro Paramo. His books were ones I left with "friends" for "safe-keeping" when I moved overseas and never got back; for this reason, they're tinctured with nostalgia and I don't care if I'm slightly wrong; I haven't read his works in years. I'm writing as I remember and that seems somewhat in the spirit of Rulfo himself. His works are brutal and decentered and decenterING. He was a photographer, and his short works, in the way they effect you, in the ways they leave you with an image, in the ways they don't just tell a story but tell a society, a fractured, post-apocalyptic society - really show that. His works always reminded me of the computer and video games I played growing up, where without explanation you were suddenly hurtled into a scorched-earth world, forced to unravel a mystery, forced to talk to characters and unravel riddles, and even then it made little sense, but it was the world, it was the only world, and you had to unravel it, you had to work with it, because it was the world - now. Rulfo's works were short, elegant, brutal, each word a carefully-chosen economy, even in translation: they said what they had to say and only later, I'd pause and shudder and think about just how brilliant and perfect they were.

Thus, I Recommend them to you.

The Burning Plain & Other Stories can be purchased at Powells Books
Pedro Paramo can be purchased from Powells (alliteration is key to an understanding of the world).

N.b.: Confession: I have only read Rulfo in translation; I am sure if you can read his works in the original Spanish you will get even more out of it.

there is no leaving new york.

It's been a while since I recommended something at you. Doing nothing all day long is so much more time consuming than I thought it would be.

Today's recommendation is The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I got this book for 50 cents at the library book sale (Attn Nicole Krauss: I am sorry I could not contribute to your fabulous royalty check that way, but I'm POOR; please feel free to contribute to my fabulous student loan fund via paypal). I wanted to read something light before I resumed my not-so-fun summer of soul-rending media theory, and this book served its purpose.

Honestly, I'm of two minds about this book & I've spent a week losing sleep about whether or not to Recommend it to you, my beloved blog readers. For one thing (Originally, I wrote "on the one hand" there, then I went back and realized I do not, in fact, have 4 hands), I am very sick of New York novels about precocious Jewish children who have lost their fathers connecting with older people who happen to have survived the Holocaust. Seriously, it's a cottage industry, and it's neither original nor plausible; I don't necessarily seek realism in literature, but I really hate precocious children in general. I think that their overrepresentation in contemporary literature is symptomatic of literature's overconcern with, and over emulation of, the cinema. I know that sounds funny, coming from a cinema "scholar" and all, but my BA is in literature, so I feel somewhat qualified to make that assumption. Frankly, I think the trope of writing through the eyes of a precocious child is a big cop-out. The writers want to affect an innocence & naiveté but they want to keep their snappy one-liners. And of course, having grown up in a media-savvy generation, they only know how to respond to situations with pregnant pauses for laugh tracks & big-eyed, affected wonder.

Another thing I didn't want to like about the book was, well, how elitist it is. This is a book for people with 6-figure incomes (or student loan debt loads), multiple degrees, therapists, and piles of books. This is a book for those who sneer at grammar and see no redeeming features in the masses, if you want to look at it negatively. This book is heavily informed by Borges, who is a writer I adore, and I adore him because I am a reluctant, overeducated elitist (True story: When I was 8 and could not sleep my father tossed Ficciones at me, and I've been a fan ever since, 4realz). This book is totally informed by a Eurocentric worldview, and as much as I identify with that, I find it very problematic lately. I'm not sure this book would be as meaningful or make as much sense to someone who hadn't read Borges or seen Shoah. I admire intertextuality, though, and if this book gets one person to read Borges, I think I'll take back the elitism part of this pseudo-argument.

However, in the end, what really sold me on this work was the problem of language. The book centers on a lost or missing text that has been translated and is being re-translated. The book centers on the problem of a missing object, and whether an object - a narrative - can exist without originals. The book deals centrally with a text to which the reader only has partial access (sort of like Infinite Jest and some other works I can't remember right now; this semester has killed my brain). The novel, in a sense, deals not just with the schmaltzy story of Loooooove and NEW YORK and DEAD FATHERS (not in the Barthelme sense) but with the inadequacies and slipperiness of language. I don't find this book interesting because of the story or the characters, but because of what the text as a whole engages with and tries to represent. Who is an author? What does it mean to translate a work? What does it mean to invent a story? Can a story be owned or attributed? Where is the essence of a story, in which words?

These questions obviously don't have pat answers - and certainly not in The History of Love, but the book begins to take them up, and for that, it is Today's Recommendation.

Stay classy, blog readers.