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Deeply sorry that there’s been nothing here of late. Beginning of the semester, that’s all….

….well, aside from the fact that I’ve been a bit anxious about the fact that this site has degenerated into a forum where I say rude things about silly stuff in the media and/or make relatively useless statements of disgust about geopolitical events.

Not sure what to do about that. I’m hard at work on things not conducive to blogging, so there’s little else for me to say. With luck and a better attitude, this will change relatively shortly.

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(Another in a short series of hyperventilating, hypocritical posts, wearing my worst bits right there on the sleeve, about a serious subject: the decline and fall of the american cultural sphere. I visited the bookstore today, and almost passed out from the preciousness of the novels on offer…. Of this sort of post on my part, one might justly refer to Eliot’s description of Othello’s final speech:

What Othello seems to me to be doing in this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself…Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatising himself against his environment…

Ouch. Got me pegged

I miss NYC on an hourly basis. I’m sure there are times that I’m really missing my kidless life in NYC, and that many of the more attractive elements of the city and my life there would prove to be more frustrating than anything else now that I wouldn’t be, you know, doing the 4 AM plastered F-Train thing now and again. I can’t see any good films here; I wouldn’t, if I were still there, be seeing any good films, eating much good food. You know the deal.

But there are also times that I miss NYC even given the fact that I’m now a parent, even because I’m a parent. Miss, for instance, Cobble Hill Park, where my little one spent what outside time she spent during her first two months of life. (She was born just a block or two away…)

And the promenade. The Central Park Zoo, the carousel there, etc… Oh, and I’ll even cop to a healthy strain of snotty snobbery about the folks with kids that live on my street, their lack of acculturation, the fact that most of them grew up here and have never left and go to something called “the lake” during the summer rather than say, Shanghai or Buenos Aires, where I would go were she a bit older.

But then, every once in a while, I get an anti-nostalgic swift kick in the ass from something that I read.

Welcome to the age of the rocker mom. Kids who might otherwise have their parents ferry them to the soccer field are now being enthusiastically chaperoned to dive bars. Rock, once the realm of outcasts and dangerously attractive miscreants, is practically a curriculum choice. In Park Slope, after-school classes are offered at private and public schools, and Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (an offshoot of Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon) is in its second year. On the syllabus are the classics: Ramones and Clash and Pixies songs that youngish parents revere, and that their offspring have been hearing since birth.

Rather than being cause for rebellion, grown-ups are rock mentors. Several, in the great tradition of Jack Black, have even become coaches, teaching teens and tweens the rudiments of rocking that normally take several alienated years to fumble through. Nowadays, punk isn’t just sanctioned by parents and school teachers; it’s good, clean fun.

The Care Bears—singer-guitarist Sophie Kasakove, 11, bassist-singer Lucio Westmoreland, 11, and drummer-singer Isadora “Izzy” Schappell-Spillman, 10, all classmates at Park Slope’s Berkeley Carroll School—couldn’t be better poster children for this burgeoning movement if they’d been carefully pre-auditioned for a reality show. They wear standard rocker gear—jeans, Converse All-Stars, Black Sabbath T-shirts—but they’re also polite overachieving kids, cramming in band practice between art class, homework, and Hebrew school.

Oh good Christ.

And look. I’ve been around the block a few times. I know that this article is just a hyperbolic distillation of a certain tiny subset of NYC - actually, very specifically, Brooklyn parents. I know that this sort of thing is written to provoke exactly the sort of reaction that I’m having right here for you to read.

But still. There is a heady dose of that sort of crap to be had back in the City. And I further know for a fact that my dad spent a good part of his life silently hating me for the “opportunities” I had - the fact that I, for instance, had my education paid for and didn’t have to “earn” it via a football scholarship like him. I lacked, and likely still lack, authenticity in his eyes. He is probably right - but, hey, that’s the dialectic. He’s not read his Thomas Mann and never will.

Flashforward to me. This probably belongs on Kotsko’s tuesday hate thing, but I hold a not so secret antipathy for those who have intellectual, culturally sophisticated parents - Young American Authors whose fathers are Old American Authors. Young colleagues who’s parents are featured in the Norton Anthology of Theory (once lived a couple doors down from one of those….) That sort of thing is so deeply woven into me - this really visceral dislike for those were reading the Brontes at 12, who grew up in either Cambridge, and who call mom for advice (and contacts) when it’s time to write a book proposal.

I am, you see, authentic, or is it organic, as far as this goes, or so I tell myself. Obviously, its all a projective show, I know. But, god, can you imagine? The Care Bears, the writhing on the floor irony of their group’s name dribbled from dad’s coffee cup, lapped up less than furtively by the daughter. She’ll end up an investment banker, you know. Or, well, more likely the way things work, prominently featured on iTunes.

The band then turns to Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” sung by Lucio. His dad—Rip Westmoreland, son of William C., the late Vietnam-era general—is a vintage-guitar collector, so Lucio’s playing a Fender Precision bass approximately three-fourths his height and four times his age. His voice, currently in the midst of dropping, cracks a little on the knotty lyrics and melody, but that’s not what halts the song.

…snip…

“[Care Bears’] taste in music is sooo much better than when I was their age,” says [Lucian] Buscemi, son of actor Steve. “We haven’t really helped out with the way they play, but I guess we’ll help them become more known by recording them.”

No, I know. They’re baiting me with this crap. Written just for me, and the rest of us who walk around feeling like “the rest of us.” Steve Buscemi’s kid records William Westmoreland’s grandson. Perhaps all four could come together to produce a hybrid of Ghost World and Apocalypse Now, in which a moody strange guy with a hesitant taste for younger women holes up with his record collection just on the wrong side of the Cambodian border. Soundtrack by the kids.

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So I am contemplating a move over to my own site / WordPress. But holy shit is it ever time sucking, playing around with this stuff. Can’t decide… I’ve bought my domain name… But I’m very worried that, really, at base, typepad is good for me because it does everything that I need it to do with a minimum of difficulty. Anyone want to chime in, pro or con?

UPDATE: I think the grand WordPress experiment may have come to a close on my end. It’s a lovely little bit of software, and I actually succeeded in launching a site, importing my posts from here (minus images, as they’re tough to untangle), and I learned a ton about how this crazy internet thingy works. But I think I’m going to stick with Typepad. For a few reasons:

1. While I was relatively successful playing around the ftp uploading and even a bit of code editing, I can’t see wanting to do that on anywhere near a regular basis. And I think you’d have to.

2. I really like the backside post composition in typepad. Between the on-line imputs, and Marsedit, I’m all set, and I’d hate to leave those behind. WordPress would theoretically work with Marsedit, but it seems very complicated to get it to work correctly…

3. My ultimate goal was to start using my own domain name, which should still work under typepad. I’ll set it up soonish

In sum, while it’s nice to head into Open Source territory, right now it would simply add a layer of obsessive complexity to my life which I really don’t need… So typepad it is.

Luckily, I only bought a month of hosting from a small orange for $5. What a deal. And I do recommend it as a host if you’re looking for one. But I’m not going to be out all that much cash for my little vacation into the world of web formalism…

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As I work on my “real” writing, I increasingly find myself looking to embed images within my text, just like when I’m tapping away at adswithoutproducts. (Obviously, I could insert images - like, I know how to do that in Word - but I work in a field, literature, that doesn’t let you get away with gratuitous illustration.

And then there’s the burgeoning world of video. No one gets to put that in their book…

For instance, I am working today on this famous passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongwoes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongwoes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.

And at one point as I worked on it, I found myself momentarily thinking that I would embed this into my text ((Via here):

But of course I did not, I could not. I will have to make do with a footnote and a link that will assuredly look strange to anyone who is not a blogreader. Blogreaders, I think, would get the not quite non-sequitur-ness of the gesture.

Now see, if was writing for an appropriately electronic medium, a freeform one that’s not, say, just a repository of print-type articles, the stub of a new book might have grown out of this right-angle point of contact with my first. The Joyce material might have proceeded along down the page while a new line of thought, taking up the topic of these particularly modern anti-narrative narratives like Stephen’s list, like the Eames’s film, these synchronic stories which gesture at a new fictionality both impossible and absolutely necessary, dictated by changing world conditions, the erosion of forms, technological emergences, etc…

Perhaps I would have dropped what I’ve been doing with the work that includes the Joyce chapter and taken up this new line. Or maybe both at once. Working in this fashion - a fashion that’s a bit closer to blogging than the academic mongraph, or perhaps would be a hybrid of both, would give a whole new meaning to the notion of scholarly oeuvre. One work per life time, branching 2 dimensionally, and then 3, and so on. And it would end up - or start out - looking something like this:

(which is a visualization of adswithoutproducts, from here, via here)

So while this might sound like a circa mid-1990s paean to the radical new possibilities of HTML for criticism and imaginative works, it’s not. That has all been said before, many, many times. Rather for me this youtube epiphany makes me realize that the technology is already getting old - we are getting used to it, it’s becoming second nature. And it’s starting to show, as is bound to happen, in the way that I work, but more importantly the way that I think.

UPDATE: It dawned on me only after posting this that the issue I’m working through with the Joyce quote above actually has quite a lot to do with the issues I’m working through in this post. The subtle registration of the important question very young Stephen has asked about the “poem,” the experiment that he has conducted, and what his author’s ultimate answer to that question will be… Stephen’s question is about the limits of conventional form and the conventional temporalities that these forms drag along with them…

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OK, so I’ve just spent an awfully long time messing with the categories on this site. No more generic typepad categories. And I’m going to take them seriously from now on.

This site, among other things, is a place where I drop thoughts about some projects I’m working on / going to work on / would love one day to work on. You can follow along with these projects, as they unfold, through the categories from here on out.

For instance, try out consciousness….

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