"Together with Shakespeare and a handful of the greater novelists in English, Chaucer carries the language further into unthinkable triumphs of the representation of reality than ought to be possible. The Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, like Hamlet and Falstaff, call into question nearly every mode of criticism that is now fashionable. What sense does it make to speak of the Pardoner or the Wife of Bath as being only a structure of tropes, or to say that any tale they tell has suspended its referential aspect almost entirely? The most Chaucerian and best of all Chaucer critics, E. Talbot Donaldson, remarks of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales that:

The extraordinary quality of the portraits is their vitality, the illusion that each gives the reader that the character being described is not a fiction but a person, so that it seems as if the poet has not created but merely recorded.

As a critical remark, this is the indispensable starting-point for reading Chaucer, but contemporary modes of interpretation deny that such an illusion of vitality has any value. Last June, I walked through a park in Frankfurt, West Germany, with a good friend who is a leading French theorist of interpretation. I had been in Frankfurt to lecture on Freud; my friend had just arrived to give a talk on Joyce's Ulysses. As we walked, I remarked that Joyce's Leopold Bloom seemed to me the most sympathetic and affectionate person I had encountered in any fiction. My friend, annoyed and perplexed, replied that Poldy was not a person, and that my statement therefore was devoid of sense. Though not agreeing, I reflected silently that the difference between my friend and myself could not be reconciled by anything I could say. To him, Ulysses was not even persuasive rhetoric, but was a system of tropes. To me, it was above all else the personality of Poldy. My friend's deconstructionism, I again realized, was only another formalism, a very tough-minded and skeptical formalism. But all formalism reaches its limits rather quickly when the fictions are strong enough. L.C. Knights famously insisted that Lady Macbeth's children were as meaningless an entity as the girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines, a view in which Knights followed E. E. Stoll who, whether he knew it or not followed E. A. Poe. To Knights, Falstaff 'is not a man, but a choric commentary.' The paradox, though, is that this 'choric commentary' is more vital than we are, which teaches us that Falstaff is neither trope nor commentary, but a representation of what a human being might be, if that person were even wittier than Oscar Wilde, and even more turbulently high-spirited than Zero Mostel. Falstaff, Poldy, the Wife of Bath: these are what Shelley called 'forms more real than living man.'" Eternal hessian Harold Bloom, from his Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer (1985, Chelsea House Publishers), because Chaucer is legit as fuck.

"Oh, I'll show you misogyny."

The feelings I don't have, I don't have.

The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have.

The feelings you say you have, you don't have.

The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

The feelings people ought to have, they never have.

If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got them.

So if you want either of us to feel anything at all,

You'd better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.

[D. H. Lawrence, "To Women, As Far As I'm Concerned."]

"It reminds me of the drunk guy standing off at the café. Know what he said? 'The most important thing, ladies and gentlemen, is not love, war, money, happiness, a woman. No, the most important thing, is the subtle difference.' Yes, kitten. But hell will freeze over before you grasp that." Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's Charlotte et son Jules (1960)

Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

“In Gravity’s Rainbow a character remarks, speaking of the V-rocket, ‘We’ll all use it someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.’ In both novels technology, the instrument that man thinks can further his evolution to the superhuman, is really the death trap that hastens his reduction to the subhuman. The tendency toward the inanimate is, as Nathanael West put it, ‘a tropism for disorder,’ a tendency away from pattern,’ from certitude, from ways of knowing what has happened and what might happen next. Stencil disguises ‘to involve him less with the chase,’ to protect the scrap of humanity which the chase itself provides. What Stencil really fears is that, as in the case of Kilroy, humanity itself is only another disguise. ‘Approach and avoid’ is Stencil’s rule, because to find V. would mean the loss of everything. ‘Disguise is one of her attributes.’ She is metaphor for the connection that makes any meaning, knowledge, or humanity possible; and she may be, in Fausto’s terms, the Greatest Lie of all.” Richard Patteson, “What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in Pynchon’s V.” (Critique Vol. 16, 1974)

From a Beautiful Day in Northern California

Because my Canon is in the midst of an existential crisis (it's actually pretty sad), the other, primary roll from this trip (i.e. of the wedding) was completely fucked. Thus I only have a few shots from this one day I spent driving up the coast with some of my family members, and I would have liked to have gotten more even of that (it was breathtaking), but even these were a battle, as the shutter is broken, works every twenty attempts or so. But I'm pretty happy with them. On a side note, I do need to upgrade my scanner situation; the prints are fucking beautiful.

glad to know you don't discharge a drop of your procreative juice

Been living without the internet for two weeks. It's been incredibly quiet and good. Working on a short screenplay which is bringing me great joy. Getting ready for classes to begin. Reading Moby-Dick whilst sneaking breaks to re-read V. in front of the big, open window, the morning sunshine, the afternoon rain. Strong, musky bloody mary's. Summer is really over.

Read this in Harper's yesterday morning, an excerpt from Jean-Baptiste Botul's satire The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant (1999) regarding Kant's repressive views on the preservation of, as Base Commander Gen. Jack D. Ripper would put it, our "bodily fluids":

"One must guard one's saliva. To spit is a waste of resources. For example, one may use his saliva to make digestion easier: says Kant, 'One ancillary advantage of this habit of breathing with the lips always closed is that the saliva secreted is constantly wetting the throat, and at the same time the saliva aids the process of stomachal digestion.' It may also act, when swallowed, as a laxative. One can also use saliva against a cough to end the tickle of the larynx. One must, then, according to a technique invented by Kant, 'turn one's attention entirely from this stimulation by forcing oneself to focus attention on a distant object.'"

On the subject of masturbation Kant offers us this gem:

"One must forcefully show him [the teenager] what makes [masturbation] so repugnant, one must show him that by committing this act he makes himself an enemy of the propagation of our species, he should be warned that it will sap him of his physical forces and that he is turning himself prematurely into an old man."

Well I guess that's all there is. I've been drawing up some cartoons, pretty nerdy and pertaining to the life of an English student, which I will definitely post, but most likely not anytime soon. Once (if ever) my internet is returned to me, I'm going to move over to WordPress, so I'll probably put them up there keep a look out.

[Immanuel Kant via Jean-Baptist Botul via Harper's, Sept. 2010]