MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

World-weary readers! Once again I find myself, really briefly, in the city of broken dreams and shattered promises. If you are in the hood, please swing by the Center for Fiction tomorrow (Fri) evening, where I will be participating, with Rivka Galchen and Mark Athitakis, in a panel titled Criticism Beside Itself.

Speaking of criticism, my former grad school classmate, Enrique Lima, has just started a pop music blog which I warmly recommend to all my world-weary readers. I will quote only the opening line from the brilliant post on the use of sampling by Flo Rida, Jay Z, and Kanye West: “Jameson is right: we live in an age that has forgotten how to think historically.”

CRITICISM BESIDE ITSELF

A brief outtake from “Natural Histories” (New Yorker, 24 October 2011):

Although Çağan and I both eventually went to Stanford for grad school, we rarely crossed paths. One day, however, I received an announcement for a lecture he was giving on the wildlife of Sulawesi, Indonesia, where religious warfare had overshadowed the endemic fauna, including “tiny primates that look like gremlins.” As I contemplated the attached image of a spectral tarsier—its enigmatic little face, meek half-smile and gigantic eyes—I was deeply impressed by the range of human and nonhuman endeavor on earth. Right across campus in the literature department, I was studying the mimetic theory of religious and sacrificial violence. Had it ever occurred to me to think of the saucer-eyed creatures living out their parallel existences in the underbrush?

SPECTRAL TARSIER / PHOTO BY ÇAĞAN ŞEKERCIOĞLU

Topographically diverse readers!  I would like to share with you two beautiful pictures of The Possessed in exotic locations.

The first comes from Senem, an anthropology PhD student at Rutgers University, in my former home state of NJ:

The statue represents “William the Silent, who is said to start whistling when a virgin walks by.”

The second picture was taken by Sunil from the UK, during a visit to Cappadocia:

Many thanks to Senem and Sunil!

A shout-out also to Cynthia Haven of Book Haven for a recent blog post which includes, among other amazing things, a kind of non-verbal sound bite about The Possessed from René Girard!:

René told me he hadn’t read it, but when I explained the plot story about the graduate student, he chuckled sagely.

I’m chuckling sagely right now!

Coming up next time: SPOOKY READER DREAMS.

Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

(more…)

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
Find Jobs in Your City

It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)