Weekend in the ivory castle
The ACLA conference was pretty monumental – apparently it was the largest one that Harvard had ever hosted, with more than 2,000 participants. Every day there were three streams of seminars, the first starting at 8:30am and the last one ending at 4:30pm with short breaks inbetween, each stream consisting of about 70 parallel sessions, each session in turn usually consisting of four papers plus Q&A – you do the maths. The conference schedule, listing only the titles of the papers and no abstracts, was a booklet of 250 pages. The choice was staggering to the point of overwhelming, in fact.
There were a couple of sessions relevant to my own thing, but apart from that I decided to cast the net pretty wide and go to sessions with topics ranging from graphical novels to Danielewski’s House of Leaves to some old school stuff on Marcel Proust, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. It was all good fun and dipping into different seminars gave a really interesting view of the variety – not only of topics and approaches but also of people. Some seminars were full of young Asian people mixed with professors in tweed jackets, paisley-print neckties and an odd combover, trying to come into terms on modern Chinese literature and art; others had Americans discussing Hašek and Kundera with russians and ukrainians.
On Friday, I noticed an intriguing session in the B-stream (the mid-day one) titled Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture and Finance Culture and decided to check it out. There was a round of introductions before the seminar got started and I opted for full disclosure – stating my investment banking background, which did raise a few eyebrows. Not surprisingly it ended up with yours truly fumbling around during the Q&A session, trying to find a middle ground in explaining the economist’s view of the financial crisis without being either trivial or tedious to a room full of literary scholars.
Anyhow, it was fun and, at least for the most part, interesting. I noticed a few familiar faces from the Amsterdam conference and made a couple of new friends to hook up with once I’m back in NY (which is going to happen tomorrow), plus a few more people to keep in contact with on different topics. All in all, a weekend well spent.
For crying out loud
It is not surprising at all that personal stereo, although invented in Germany and first produced in Japan, really took off in the United States. I have never had a problem with shutting out ambient noise and would have thought that my tolerance is pretty high in that respect. However, I am seriously considering getting myself an iPod along with noise-canceling earphones simply to be able to read in restaurants or cafes here in Boston. Americans can be incredibly loud, especially when talking to their mothers over the cell-phone or having a beer with a bunch of their friends – and both things seem to be very usual occurrences. Tonight there was a table of five people next to me at the local Thai restaurant who were talking simultaneously to each other at the level of volume that would be considered yelling pretty much anywhere in Europe. It seemed to not to bother anyone that it was next to impossible to actually hear anything – apparently it was talking that mattered.
Change of plans
A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps (Prov 16:9).
So it did happen that although I had deviseth in my heart leaving Cambridge tomorrow it was not to come to pass, amen. Trying to find some bus or train tickets for what could be expected to be a trivially simple 400-mile trip from Boston to Ithaca I was, shall we say somewhat nonplussed to find out that most of the bus connections go through New York, which turns the journey into an 11-hour ordeal onboard of Greyhound coaches that will end up costing around $100. So I decided to do a very unmanly thing and ask for some advice from Cornell on how the hell to get there from Boston in a bit more dignified way and, to my surprise, received a prompt, friendly and very thorough reply from Lisa who mentioned in passing that she will be at Harvard for the weekend herself for an ACLA conference. Continuing on the unmanly vein, curiosity got the better of me and through the marvels of modern internet search technology I learned that ACLA stands for American Comparative Literature Association and that the conference in question is their 2009 annual meeting, lasting three full days and consisting of over 200 different seminars, book exhibits, receptions, lectures, roundtables and whatnot else.
This pretty much wrapped it up right there. I spent the rest of the day trying to find me an accommodation, as Cambridge is, not surprisingly, booked solid for the weekend. I also managed to send back the pile of books that I had bought via, ahem, FedEx – it occurred to my braindead self that this is a courier and NOT a postal service only after having been presented with a credit card slip. I resisted the temptation to bang my head into the counter and just signed it off – I might as well have bought my books a cabin seat with lunch, dinner and onboard entertainment. Consider it a tax on stupidity and move on.
So, Allah willing, I will be here until Sunday, after which it probably really doesn’t make me much sense to rush to Ithaca for just a couple of days – might as well make my way straight back to NY. Or at least this is what my heart deviseth right now.
Águas de Março
Last days have been very nice again and there is a distinctive feeling of spring in the air here in Cambridge. Although the temperatures are still hovering around low double digits, it is cold and crispy in a different way than it is in the autumn. It really is an elusive thing, hard to put your finger on.
I think nothing illustrates this kind of elusiveness better than the famous song by Antonio Carlos Jobim, called Águas de Março.
In addition to the score, Jobin also wrote the lyrics, both in Portugese and in English. Now, what makes the song so fascinating is the fact that it has become one of the classic, best loved songs about the spring in the English-speaking world, while in the original, “Waters of March” referred to the rainiest month in Rio de Janiero, the start of the autumn of the southern hemisphere. And it is not only the music that is the same, but also most of the words – there are some differences due to the removal of two specific lines of March marking the “end of the summer”, a few particular references to things Brazilian and the fact that when writing the English lyrics Jobin tried to avoid using words with Latin roots. However, most of the images and metaphors are the same, such as “É a promessa de vida no teu coração”/ “It’s a promise of life, a joy in your heart”, which I believe most of the listeners in the Northern hemisphere would strongly associate with spring rather than autumn.
And God, isn’t she gorgeous 
.
Forever young
Today, for the first time over what must be about 15 years, I was asked for an ID at the restaurant when ordering a glass of wine. The waiter seemed to be genuinely surprised to find out that I was getting close to turning 38, so it didn’t seem to be a matter of some formal procedure. Not bad at all, even if I do say so myself. I guess I now just have to figure out what’s my secret.
By the way, this month marks the 50th anniversary of another rather well-preserved character – Barbie. There have been several articles marking the occasion, but this one from December last year by Guardian is certainly the best out of those that I have seen. If you can’t be bothered reading, then do check out the picture gallery it makes for some fascinating viewing. Barbie really is a whole lot more than simply a toy, it has became an icon, both loved and loathed, for a whole generation that has grown up in the Western world at times when women’s role and status in the society, as well as the society’s attitudes toward women, have gone through some pretty remarkable changes.
In terms of quotidian matters – getting a library access at Harvard turned out being very straightforward – it only took a confirmation letter to prove that I am what I was claiming to be. The first 6 days is free after which you can extend the pass for a fee (rather hefty one, I should add). I am going to stay here for another few days and then, probably on Wednesday, head on to Cornell for about a week. It feels pretty good to be at the desk again, back in the gear and actually doing what I came here to do.
Rünnak vaimsusele
Memokraadi vahendusel jõudis ka minu tähelepanuvälja eelmisel nädalal Eestis puhkenud meediakära seoses Konstantin Pätsi hauatähise rüvetamisega. Ja mis sa kostad – täna hommikul läbi Harvardi sisehoovi raamatukokku jalutades märkan õudusega, et provokaatorid on vahepeal sarnaselt rüvetanud John Harvardi kuju. Ma ei kujuta ette kuidas sellist tegu saaks kuidagi muud moodi hinnata kui provokatiivset rünnet kõrghariduse, vaimsuse ning Lääne tsivilisatsiooni vastu tervikuna. Veidral kombel ei paistnud see aga eriti kedagi ei häirivat ega ka suuremat huvitavat, kuigi vaid mõnisada meetrit eemal käis just mingi suurem üliõpilaste trall, kus terve hulk inimesi olid sarnaselt punase värviga kokku mäkerdatud – suurepärane võimalus püüda diversandid kinni n.ö. red handed.
Tõesti imelik.
Blaming the game
There is quite a remarkable article at The Huffington Post on a subject that I have myself touched upon earlier and even earlier. What makes it remarkable is not so much the fact that it appears on the most popular blog on internet but rather the fact that a topic like this can be a subject of a serious debate and contemplation in America – which is evidenced by a fact that the post in question has already been backlinked by a “serious” economic blog such as Baseline Scenario.
Now, before my libertarian friend from Lithuania gets himself all worked up over this: I find the actual suggested idea of one huge credit union called BforA, shall we say, a little spooky, and can immediately think of several things that can go very wrong with this. That being said, the underlying point of the argument is fundamentally valid and something that I do believe needs to be addressed. And the point is – the financial system has, from its never too humble but yet limited origins, now became a public utility, something that plays a major role in all of our’s everyday lives. The failure of that system can (and increasingly threatens to) be a catastrophe of similar order of magnitude as a major flood or orcane – and to be sure, has also been depicted as such. However, there is an important distinction: unlike Katrina, the Market is a human institution. And while you can’t really hold the Gulf Stream responsible for hurricanes that pound the East coast of the US every year, you can expect economic institutions to make sense and be accountable. Right now, however, they are not.
For all the power and influence the financial system has in our lives we have next to no control over it. And when it fails, we have, collectively, no choice but to bail it out. Letting it to self-destruct and re-emerge is an option for some parallel universe, not ours. So the question becomes one of how to best do it, how to achieve the situation where the financial system and economy as a whole would be both controllable and accountable towards those who currently have a stake in it only when things get bad?
The least disruptive way that could be hoped to be of any help would be extending and cranking up the regulatory framework. While certainly better than doing nothing, this is only a partial measure and is almost certain not to live up to the hopes – and for a simple reason that regulation is necessarily reactive. It is next to impossible to regulate something that doesn’t yet exist and once you get to the point of being able to regulate, the damage may well already have been done. Also, this adds very little in terms of actual accountability – it simply sets some additional, hopefully more stringent rules and closes some loopholes.
What this leaves us with is trying to figure out a way to incorporate the world of economy and finance into the broader social fabric of democracy. However, given the amount of vested interest combined with the power of that interest currently enjoying makes it a struggle up a very very steep hill.
Harvard
On the face of it, Harvard looks as confident and self-assured as ever. Starbucks cafes are filled with young liberal arts majors wearing keffiyeh-scarves to match their black and white checkered sneakers, discussing over tall frappucinos on how they slightly disagree with their professor’s take on Georges Bataille, and the tables at the COOP bookstore are populated by hopeful asian-looking boys and girls, delving deep into their GMAT and SAT prep-books. The crimson heart of American higher education refuses to get shaken by evaporation of billions of dollars of endowment money – and sure enough, after losing within last six months an amount which is roughly the size of the state budget of a country like Lithuania, what they’re still left with is about as much as is the annual GDP of a country like Estonia.
However, last night I fell prey to the academic budget cuts myself when visiting Betsy (a lucky and very interesting acquaintance from my last week’s NY-Boston bus trip) at Wellsley College, narrowly missing the last train back to Boston and then discovering that, due to the endowment not having done that hot over the last half a year either, they had decided to save money by suspending the midnight shuttle bus from Wellsley College to MIT at Boston. Luckily there was a nice asian girl walking by who called me a cab and let me into the main campus building so that I didn’t have to wait outside in what was getting a rather chilly night.
And the cab ride back to Boston turned out being great fun as well. After the initial usual “where-are-you-from-what-are-you-doing-here” part the conversation took some very interesting turns and at the end we ended up sitting in the taxi in from of the place I’m staying at for more than an hour, talking about things such as financial crisis and threats of protectionism to global trade, keynesian economics, wage stagnation and widening social inequality, pros and cons of single-payer health care system, benefits and dangers of bank nationalisation, comeback of marxism, and Enlightenment roots of liberal democracy. My driver actually got out a pen and took notes, asking me to spell some names so that he could look them up on internet later, and showed some pretty astonishing technical competence and sophistication when discussing some finer economical and financial points. At about half past one at night we finally shook hands and parted friends, both of us agreeing that this was one of the most interesting cab rides either of us had had in a very long time. This encounter led me to think that this is what may well be the real strength of the American democracy. While we both were in agreement that America has its share of troubles and problems and that the immediate future does not look pretty, he seemed to genuinely have faith in the principal tenets of democracy and civic society. It appears to me that there is a lot more people like that in America than in most places in Europe. People who believe that being a citizen is something beyond the obligation to pay taxes and the corresponding right to enjoy public services. Who believe that it also entails being informed, making an effort to understand, having an opinion, and getting involved.
So today I am moving from Boston across the river to Cambridge – I found myself a B&B just a few hundred yards from the Harvard Square. Later tonight I have my meeting at the Classics Department to go over the part of my dissertation that deals with ancient Greece. Before that I will have a shot at getting myself an access to library – if successful I intend to stay here for perhaps another week. Before coming here, I was warned by a couple of friends who had studied in the US in the past that in can be difficult to get into campuses as you can’t simply walk through the door and take a seat. Well, last week in Columbia University I did just that – all it took was a few minutes of convincing the front door security about the sincerity of my intentions and the fact that the seminar was indeed “open to public”, after which I could walk straight into a presentation and follow-up discussion on primitivism and African literature – where my initial plans of simply staying quiet and listening did not quite materialise, once again. There were several professors present and participating in discussion, and everyone was very friendly, and somebody walked up to me after the event and asked if I was from the English Department . I am not yet quite counting on the same luck continuing here, but we’ll see soon enough.
Confessions of a bookworm
I am beginning to wonder whether there is such a thing as re-hab for book addicts, as my so far relatively benign bibliophily shows some threatening signs towards the development of full-blown bibliomania. Today I spent again another half a day in bookstores at Harvard and at times it is really difficult to tell if I’m even enjoying it. Of course, I do like to leaf through books, read a few stories or poems and all that, but standing up against a wall full of books running for tens of meters in both directions where I can everywhere spot some novels that I know I’d like to read and others that I already should have read.. it kind of makes me anxious. Anxious because when standing there, the realisation that you will never be able to read them all hits you with full force and undeniable clarity. All the books are there, ready to be picked from shelves, opened and read – and indeed, I could take any one of them and read it through, and this is precisely what makes it feel so desperate.
Walter Benjamin has written is his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library”:
For a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
I can fully relate to this – and although my own library is something that can probably still be packed and unpacked within a couple of hours, its growth (rather healthy nonetheless) has so far been limited only by application of some iron discipline and the fact that we keep on running out of shelf space back at home. After my last shipment back to Estonia from Malta, Helelyn informed me in her ever sweet way that with this we are, yet again, fully booked. And here I am barely a 100 pages into David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” which means that there is still about 1000 more pages to go before I can get started with another one of the six more unread books waiting in my bag.
Speaking of “Infinite Jest” – it is a truly enjoyable read. Paraphrasing a movie review that I read several years ago – it’s a kind of a book that kicks your ass, takes your wallet, checks your address, comes to your home, knocks on the door, and when you open it – kicks your ass some more. One particular part early in the book, with two burglars and a certain pair of toothbrushes with enhanced-focus handles, got me laughing out aloud in a commuter train. And the amazing part is that, although the book is a veritable door-stopper, it is on every page as precise and sharp as a short story. There’s not a gram of fat, nothing superfluous. It cuts like a surgical instrument. Here is a sample for you, from another book, of what Wallace can do with a few lines. In a way, it reminds me a lot of Robert Creeley, a similarly surgical American poet.
On another front, I was admitted to Cornell summer school with full tuition scholarship – yay! Of course, this will mean further piles of reading before mid-June and then six weeks of hard core critical theory among some 80 other similarly inclined strange people who have decided to spend a better part of their summer musing over what have Agamben and Badiou said on conservativism and religion or Žižek on opera. Which is one one hand slightly disquieting. But while I do recognise that there is a real danger of theory-related OD looming, right now I am very much looking forward to it.
And finally, another find from bookstores today, this time a poem by one of my long time favourites Yehuda Amichai. It goes out to a friend of mine who has, quite appropriately for the season about to begin, fallen madly in love. You know who you are.
Ab initio
A few weeks ago I stumbled across an article about a study carried out in 2006 on how do people read on the internet. It turns out that the resulting pattern looks very much like a letter F: people read the first paragraph in full, the second with a slightly shorter span and then simply scan the rest of the text vertically. The upshot of this is that, at least on the internet, if you want people actually read your point you better make it straight away.
Now, with books you’d expect that readers would have a bit more of a patience – but this is something that you really can’t always count on. I’d venture a guess that most of the books are purchased (or left unpurchased) without opening them, solely on the basis of the back cover publisher blurbs. And if those aren’t enough, you will read the first page. This is especially true when buying books from amazon where, in case of most books, it is only the few first pages that are available.
So this will lead to an important if rather unsurprising conclusion that beginnings do matter, even off-line.
Last week in London at Picadilly Waterstone’s I ended up with a pile of nine books that was certainly too much, considering that I will have to carry everything I buy along with me. One of the books that I had to decide upon was a collection by Evelyn Waugh, titled Work Suspended and Other Stories where the first story happened to be Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing that begins with one of the most celebrated first sentences of in British literature:
‘You will not find your father greatly changed,’ remarked Lady Moping, as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.
To think of it, it is quite amazing how much punch does this hilarious and deceptively simple line pack. In addition to leading us into the story that follows, it also sets the mood and tells us a great deal about Lady Moping and her husband, Lord Moping, as well as their relationship. It also implies the presence of two more persons – a child to whom the sentence is directed plus a silent driver. With one short sentence, Waugh has managed to sketch two characters and tell us a whole story of their past. And this kind of an economy is something that most, if not all, of the great opening lines share.
For instance, consider this:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
- another stellar example of opening a novel, this time from Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. Like in previous quote, here as well a great deal has been left unsaid but is nonetheless understood by a reader. Archbishops do not simply walk from door to door in afternoons, and even without this unexpected visit it is obvious that the person telling the story is quite peculiar. Many readers (that also included me) will have to look up the word “catamite” in order to fully appreciate that – and this will make the situation (i.e. the bishop’s visit) even more curious.
Yet another writer justly famous for his ability to completely capture the attention and imagination of his readers with a single first sentence is Gabriel García Márquez. His One Hundred Years of Solitude opens in an incredibly many-layered way:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
First, there is the delicate temporal structure – it meshes the past, present and future all into seamless one. In the sentence Márquez doesn’t describe the heat nor the calmness of the Colonel when facing his death, he only has to mention ice. Again, like in Waugh and Burgess, one sentence can branch out into many different directions, create tensions and set up questions – and as a result we’re hooked without even noticing it.
By the way, here it is interesting to take a different kind of a approach to beginnings – if you look hard enough, you can find whole chains of first sentences, linked with each other over what can sometimes be decades and different continents. For instance, the line by Márquez is a continuation on the theme set by early Latin American classic Machado de Assis in 1881 book The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (which is itself heavily indebted to Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, dated 1759 – but let’s leave it there for now)
The Death of the Author: I hesitated some time, not knowing whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, i.e., whether to start with my birth or with my death.
Machado de Assis has been a hugely influential writer, first and foremost in his native Brazil but also in the whole Latin America, and it is virtually certain that Márquez was familiar with his works. But there is more. Read this:
In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the very moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands of lives were lost, a young Spaniard by the name of Jeronimo Rugera, who had been locked up on a criminal charge, was standing against a prison pillar, about to hang himself.
What do you think when and where might have this sentence been written? If you guessed 20th century and Latin America then you’re pretty far off – it’s an opening sentence from a story called The Earthquake in Chile, from the collection The Marquise of O and Other Stories by a German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who died in 1811.
And now, two hundread years later, take a look at the beginning of a Pulizer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, published in 2000
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
The One Hundred Years of Solitude echoes right through that sentence, to the extent that it can be considered a homage. And there are yet another kinds of links – Kafka, for instance, has linked his novella The Metamorphosis
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
with his own The Trial:
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
And finally something different and altogether more subtle – Daphne du Maurier and her truly sublime, magical and lingering opening line of Rebecca
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Although I haven’t actually read the book – and I have a sneaking suspicion that I even wouldn’t like it if I did – I have picked up Rebecca in bookstores for countless of times simply to open the first page and read this line, like reading a poem. In fact, it IS poetry – it’s a perfect iambic hexameter with a dibrach in fifth foot.
Today at the New York Public Library I spent again about an hour and half among the shelves, opening books, reading their first pages and then putting them back. In London I ended up reading the first sentence of Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing and then all the subsequent sentences of the story until the last one – it was a great story. And then I put it back on the shelf. For the next reader.
