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a summer of fifty

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To argue for the “creativity” of the cell is to align human creativity with the life force, with the restlessness of need and the will to thrive. It is to reclaim the artwork as an instance, however remarkable, of the general creativity of humanity, which is creative not only because it must reproduce itself, but because it must try to adapt itself to an ever-changing environment. That this collective struggle is so often experienced as beautiful is obviously to our benefit as a species.

Mark McGurl, The Program Era

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On this Sunday: "Sunday," an awesome amazing track from Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean.

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What she did with me—I must have been eight, or twelve, who remembers—was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. [...] And finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, "Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?"

David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

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It is man who is our enemy: the vast seething moiling spiritless mass of him. Once to each period of his inglorious history, one of us appears with the stature of a giant, suddenly and without warning in the middle of a nation as a dairymaid enters a buttery, and with his sword for paddle he heaps and pounds and stiffens the malleable mass and even holds it cohered and purposeful for a time. But never for always, nor even for very long: sometimes before he can even turn his back, it has relinquished, dis-cohered, faster and faster flowing and seeking back to its own base anonymity.

William Faulkner, A Fable

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Big thank you to the organization that put the entire film of Oscar Micheaux's 1920 silent film Within Our Gates up on YouTube, for our viewing pleasure!

Micheaux was the first successful black film director, and the film has an important place both in the history of cinema and in the history of the Harlem Renaissance. Micheaux rails against whites who see education or religion as a way to keep blacks "in their place" (a direct quote from the film). But he doesn't propose that the educational institution itself is inherently flawed. Instead, he thinks that education is the only road towards African-American empowerment and social integration. The film is short and moves quickly through the plot -- and it's a cool change of pace to watch a silent film. The major Hollywood film was only in its early stages, and from time to time you can see some awkward growing pains. Both actors in the opening scene, for example, are visibly uncomfortable. But it's also fascinating to see certain parts of the cinematic formula already in place. You can really see a medium being made.

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cycling through

With the exam next week, I have a bit of a backlog right now of books I've read that still require posts. I'll do a quick nod now to the York Mystery Plays, the oldest text on the list. This series of short plays was written sometime in the fourteenth century (when York hit its heyday after the Black Death), but continued to be performed well into the sixteenth century.

The "cycle" of plays was performed each year for the springtime Corpus Christi festivities. Rather than being shown on a central stage, the plays were performed from on top of a series of wagons that would process throughout the city, stopping to deliver different parts of the play. Think the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade… but the symbolism's in soliloquies instead of in Mylar.

Taken all together, the York Mystery Plays recount, like, all of the Christian religious narrative. But they're broken down into forty-eight parts, each of which was assigned to a particular guild, or type of craftsmen. So the Skinners do one part, and the Scriveners do one part, and the Mercers finish the whole thing off. The word mystery at the time mainly meant "occupation" or "trade," and was unrelated to the contemporary meaning of the word. Only around this time, in the fourteenth century, do you get the first stirrings of the idea of mystery as a religious revelation -- and it's that root that eventually morphed into the word we know and use today.

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How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must be the truth?

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

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the ace of reason

Late in the list, an early practitioner of the modern detective story: Edgar Allan Poe. Two of the stories on the list, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," feature gentleman-investigator Auguste Dupin, who would later serve as the model for Sherlock Holmes. The other is one of Poe's classic excursions into the Gothic genre, "The Tell-Tale Heart." All these stories were published in the 1840s and predate The Moonstone and The Sign of the Four from the other side of the Atlantic.

Poe was a big believer in the importance of rationality, which Dupin embodies in an extreme form. Dupin's deductive talent comes from his ability to gauge perfectly his opponent's style of thinking; that is, he reasons exactly how someone else reasons. The example given is of a child who wins all the playground guessing games and manipulates all his playmates, simply by understanding exactly how his playmates are trying to manipulate him.

Interestingly, although this emphasis on reason aligns with Enlightenment ideals, Poe openly disses scientific or mathematical study as increasing anyone's deductive skill. Instead, he finds a poet to be a far more difficult intellectual opponent. What poets and great detectives share, according to Poe, is a capacity for imagination… which here looks a lot like some kind of intellectual empathy.

Poe extended this idea to the realm of literary theory. He believed that an author's job was to anticipate reader's responses and to produce precise effects. Careful deliberation is the name of the game. A hundred years later, Roland Barthes totally dismantles this idea that authors can control all of the meanings of their works -- and even before Barthes had the idea to étoiler a text, other authors had expressed suspicion about Poe's superwriter claims. This approach to the relationship between writerly intention and readerly deduction (which we could maybe also phrase as intentional writing and deductive reading) contrasts directly with the perspectives later offered by Oscar Wilde and Henry James. Unlike Poe, Wilde and James underscore both the impossibility of ever truly knowing a thing, as well as the endless multiplicity of possible meanings.

And that's all decades before the poststructuralists arrive on the scene. It's sort of like the whole "Under Pressure" situation, like semiotic multiplicity is the hook that Wilde and James come up with -- but as much as I like the parallel between Wilde and Queen, it just feels wrong to liken Roland Barthes to Vanilla Ice.

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To look at a star by glances--to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly--is to have the best appreciation of its lustre--a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. ... By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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how to spot a gothic novel

It's difficult to imagine two novels more different than Sozaboy and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. But that's the beauty of the list: unexpected sequences. If Sozaboy represents a reality too brutal for words, The Castle of Otranto has its melodrama dials turned up to eleven, all in order to make its bourgeois readers swoon. But both are invested, for very different reasons, in conjuring an intense emotional reaction in the reader, a reaction so strong it reaches into the body. (Of course, for a modern reader, Sozaboy does this far better than the outdated  Otranto.)

Published in 1764, The Castle of Otranto is on this list for the same reason it's usually on lists of the literary canon: it kicked off the "Gothic novel" genre that became enormously popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Gothic novel is characterized by a certain setting (misty, frightening, Romantic with a capital R) and tone (high drama). But it also has a number of other little characteristics that can help you identify it, like searching for an animal's prints in the snow.

YOUR GUIDE TO TRACKING THE GOTHIC BEAST

MAIN FEATURES:

- It takes place in a medieval ruin.

- An innocent damsel is in distress.

- She's pursued by a madman.

- She's saved by a handsome young dude.

- Loud sounds occur without explanation, shocking people.

- Doors and windows and other things swing open and shut randomly.

- Supernatural phenomena, like, M. Night Shyamalan levels.

- A family secret revealed. And then another one. And another one.

- A random fortunate event solves an otherwise unsolvable problem (deus ex machina, a term that has a great history).

- Things! Happening! Suddenly! Many exclamations!

Anyway, that's only a short list, and not all Gothic fiction has all of these characteristics. But that's the general type of thing that gains a book a place in the imposing old gallery of Gothic novels. 

Although the classic Gothic text fell pretty quickly by the wayside, its precepts and archetypes remained influential for a long time. Several other texts on the list are directly building upon or reacting to the Gothic genre: Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey, Bleak House, Poe's stories, The Figure of Mr. W.H., The Blithedale Romance, and so on. And the awesome genre of Southern Gothic -- represented, for example, by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor -- marks the revitalization and renationalization of the genre.

So kudos, Horace Walpole! I laughed out loud at your novel, at parts where you probably wanted me to laugh, and parts where you probably didn't. And your literary legacy has contributed to a lot of great works that I love. I'm raising my G&T to you tonight.

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"Generous youth," said Isabella, "how shall I ever requite--"

As she uttered those words, a ray of moonshine, streaming through a cranny of the ruin above, shone directly on the lock they sought.

"Oh! transport!" said Isabella; "here is the trap-door!"

--Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto