What Are You Reading 2013 - Page 134

On October 03 2013 06:43 frogrubdown wrote:
Yikes. I'd give his work a look to assess your claim, but if you're right that sounds like torture.

Where the book as conduit of textual transmission is of course liable to misreading or dismissal, the unreadable book in three-dimensional form, as palpable shape, is subject not only to touch but to its frustrations, vulnerable not just to wear and tear but also, in Morrison's conceit of throttled eroticism, to gingerly and unfeeling physical strokes; vulnerable as hinged mechanism to seizing up or locking down; vulnerable as sequenced surfaces to abrasion, erasure, strike out, or overprinting; as engineered scaffold of an imagined interior world, vulnerable not just to unlicensed penetration but to the wholesale evacuation or collapse of its architectonic parameters; as silent instrument, vulnerable to a craving for some preternatural mode of voice; and of course as pulped cellulose matter, vulnerable to the elements—water and in particular fire.

One legendary vexed flashpoint of linguistic deconstruction, here is the deictic "this" that in writing can only point to a marked surface, not to its referents. And perhaps no single case in fiction of such a signified object has ever been more abruptly but purposefully demonstrative than Florens's scriptive "this," designating the very surfaces thus inscribed upon rather than merely denoted by her obsessive script. It is in every way an exhaustive indi(c)t(e)ment. For night after night, in an upstairs room of the deserted mansion, she has been gouging out her story with a nail scraped along walls and floor, generating—with wild metatextual improbability—not a traditional soliloquy or dramatic monologue so much as a piece of six-sided text art like the inside of some bibliographic chamber where the very walls whisper their worst in silence.

No motor function at all, we discover, except a mobile point of view. No flesh and sinew, just, say, the strength we call "spine," plus the flanged articulations it braces. Unmuscled but taut and firm, the infrastructure of narration, if we've caught on by now the second time through, is personifying its inorganic textual status as an entity inert and nerveless until other hands are brought to it; an entity cautious though unafraid, not timid, but deriving its strength, like any implied author, from "making sure no one knows all there is to know about me" (J , 8)—including the addressed second person at the outset: "You have to understand what it's like, taking on a big city" (J , 9)—"taking it on," that is, as topic rather than inhabitant.

In the ferocity of foreseen demediation, that imagined precipitation of ashen black rain marks a transformation from scraped rage to conflagration, from symbolic scars to scattered char—with of course their narrative reclamation—that works to anticipate certain reflexive instances of Morrison's own writing. These are figurations that a medium like Ligon's shimmering coal dust can in its own way help imprint: novelistic images in typeface that talk the text of a people and the people of a text.

On October 03 2013 06:54 frogrubdown wrote:
No more! I've had enough!

If I'm understanding correctly there's nothing more to the first quote than the worst ever explanation of the type/token distinction as applied to books. Coulda just said:

If you have 3 copies of Pride and Prejudice and 1 of Sense and Sensibilia then you have 4 book tokens but 2 book types.

On October 03 2013 06:40 sam!zdat wrote:
garrett stewart is worse than hegel. he's even worse than lacan.

edit: D&G is not part of the reading list, the other essays are.

edit: I'm willing to take deleuze seriously in kinda the same way that I am willing to take foucault seriously. which is to say, foucault is wrong, but wrong in an interesting way (and his analysis is interesting even if you discard his conclusions). we'll see if deleuze can measure up to this

On October 03 2013 07:00 Deleuze wrote:


It would also be about materiality I believe.

But ouch, that is torturously embarrassing!

On October 03 2013 07:03 Deleuze wrote:


Edit: whats the reference out of interest?

On October 03 2013 07:31 Surth wrote:
You guys are seriously making me question my choice of pursuing English Studies...

then again, the professors are already doing a good job with that.

On October 03 2013 07:50 Surth wrote:
sam!z: funny, I would go so far as to change the "isn't" to "is"!

On October 03 2013 09:17 xDaunt wrote:
God, I hate Toni Morrison. I can't stand the thought that there are people out there who write papers and books about her shit.

On October 03 2013 09:24 sam!zdat wrote:
yeah, it's not my thing. but i don't like faulkner either so I'm clearly just a philistine

but the fact that this is about toni morrison is by far the least objectionable thing about this paper! it's barely even about toni morrison.

On October 03 2013 09:27 Vegetarian Wolf wrote:


I espoused a similar sentiment on a bus ride and was called a "pompous racist asshole" by a stranger.

~_~

On October 03 2013 09:17 xDaunt wrote:
God, I hate Toni Morrison. I can't stand the thought that there are people out there who write papers and books about her shit.

...While he was still begging for mercy, and still had much to say, Aeneas smashed his head to the ground, and as he set the warm trunk rolling, these were the words he spoke with hatred in his heart: 'Lie there now, you fearsome warrior. Your good mother will not bury you in the earth or burden your body with the family tomb. You will be left for the wild birds, or thrown into the sea to be carried away by the waves, and the hungry fish will come and lick your wounds!'