things of little relevance

Nerve sends a professor of medieval literature to a Twilight screening. Hilarity ensues.

I am a professor of medieval literature. To me vampires signify the dubious inventions of that literary half-talent Bram Stoker or the evil grandpa-looking Nosferatu of the golden age of German silent cinema. And though I live only in the deepest recesses of European libraries, I have been told that there is a contemporary tome called Twilight and that it has resulted in some sort of stateside cultural hub-bub. Under normal circumstances, attending the premier of a film intended for shrieking teen girls would be the equivalent of volunteering for the cinematic torture in A Clockwork Orange. But these are lean times, and the world’s foremost universities aren’t exactly clamoring for scholiasts of Chaucer. So here I am, a sturgeon decidedly out of its intellectual water, swimming amok in the mass psychosis that is midnight screening of the opening of New Moon.

First of all, if you are a heterosexual male who claims he can’t meet women, there is no reason on earth why you should have skipped the film’s premiere last night. Despite the late hour and pouring rain, a line of women — mostly in their late teens, twenties and thirties — stretched around the block. Four sold-out theaters full of estrogen and popcorn and excitement, oh my. Sometimes too much excitement. As the movie began and the title card slowly (very, very slowly) appeared on the screen, two drunk girls next to me decided to rabble-rouse.

To be completely honest…do you really want to date a woman who is crazy about Twilight? Maybe it’s the repressed culture snob in me, but I don’t want to be friends with anyone obsessed with the vampire franchise. Also, is there a male equivalent of Twilight?

Excerpts from the shortlist of the Bad Sex in fiction contest!

Apropos of that, an old article about the difficulties of writing a sex scene (SFW: It’s from The Telegraph, not Fleshbot.).

(I am also silently laughing at the girl taking photos of herself on Photobooth in Butler.)

“Inappropriate” is “unacceptable.”

The “Kepler” opera by Philip Glass—one of my favorite things I’ve seen this semester! Calling it an opera is slightly misleading, it was really just a Philip Glass concert. The libretto was not great. Maybe it’s a translation issue. When I saw Dr. Atomic last year, the libretto was also sub-par; I think basing a libretto on primary scientific documents is interesting in theory, but in practice…

“Every intellectual gain calls for a loss of sexual potential.” -Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Earlier this semester, I was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with two of the larger tomes I own—Richardson’s Clarissa and Montaigne’s Essais. Lev proceeded to mock me for the books’ immense size. I joked, “You know what they say about girls who read big books…” to which he aptly retorted, “They don’t have boyfriends.” In all earnest, this anecdote is one of my favorite memories of the semester, if not all time.

After reading through a bunch of Oxford early modern and 18th century professors’ profiles, the following gave me pause.

Dr Ann Pasternak-Slater

Research Interests:

Evelyn Waugh; George Herbert; stage imagery in Renaissance and modern English drama; English prosody; Russian/English literary translation.

I just have to say, if I am ever an academic (this is a huge if right now, it’s one of those if’s that does not mean ‘when’ but leans towards ‘if by the love of God I get in anywhere and maintain my sanity’), I would love to offer a class on P.G. Wodehouse.

Perri emailed me an interview with Cormac McCarthy in the WSJ. I’m not Cormac McCarthy’s biggest fan (confession: I liked the movie No Country for Old Men better than the book…), but the interview is pretty great:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

And as Perri aptly puts it in her e-mail:

“Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Cormac McCarthy, on what might as well be graduate school in the liberal arts.

Too true!

Harold Bloom reviews R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis in the NYRB.

Illustrating the Hebrew Bible has been a grand quest for painters, with Michelangelo and Tintoretto perhaps dividing the palm. A cartoon or comic book reduction of Genesis ideally should be the work of an unlikely fusion of Rembrandt and William Blake. That is not a fair criterion to invoke when considering R. Crumb’s venture into the Book of Genesis. Staring at the women and men of Crumb’s Genesis, I dimly recall someone showing me an issue of Mad magazine. To my untutored view the work of Crumb recalls that publication yet somehow also is touched with what I remember as the doughty proletarian style of Ben Shahn. At the least, Crumb’s cartoons have the initial merit of strangeness in their portrayal of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the first book of the Hebrew Bible.

The review is unintentionally hilarious. Bloom clearly has little idea of who R. Crumb is, and instead spends most of the review praising Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.

Zizek has a twitter?! (via Paul)

A few choice tweets:

To paraphrase: I would rather write advertisements than grovel for tenure. Corporate culture pervades US academia.

If you are asking me to predict the future I will only be able to point you towards www.google.com. There you can search for the future.

The question should not be: how much money do I make criticizing capitalism – but rather, how much could I make if I did not?

Critchley will start tweeting as soon as he realizes he can write a book about it or something.

I am on the toilet. Part deux.

I am on the toilet.

I’m still holding out. This blog is more than enough internet presence for me.

I have sometimes referred to Trader Joe’s wine shop as a bar where you can’t drink, but the mentality is very much the same. Apparently Whole Foods is also a meat market…Dispatches From the Whole Foods Produce Aisle (via Hae-Joon by way of Hae-In):

You don’t just go to Whole Foods to pick up groceries. The only place you’re guaranteed to run into someone with a liberal arts degree, a facial piercing, and a love of modernist Russian novels will be here checking out the hemp pasta on display. Girls who make their own clothes, speak five languages, and are very into communist poetry can be found sprinkled throughout the store like blue-light specials. Hipster chicks aisle ten. Feigned bisexual sensibilities aisle five.