I couldn’t help the Sesame Street Live reference in the post title.  Here is supposedly a clip of Heidegger with English subtitles.  I say supposedly because I am having buckets of trouble with my internet connection today (actually near everyday anymore).  I’m sure I’ll get around to watching it someday when my internet overlords allow me the bandwidth to view a youtube video of all things.

Richard Rayner from the LA Times talks about some reissues of Vonnegut’s early works.  If I may have a soapbox moment, I think he misses an important point about Slaughterhouse-Five.  The opening line of the main narrative “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” does not lead to an either/or argument about Billy’s sanity.  He doesn’t have to be sane and truly (re)living the events depicted in the novel nor does he have to be necessarily insane.  By being unstuck in time Billy wanders back and forth through events in his life while at the same time he’s actually enacting our day to day entrapment in history.  This is part of the beauty of a book that deals with so hellish a reality as the fire bombing of Dresden.  On a simple level we each have experiences that we cannot let go of, or are not allowed to let go of, and The Children’s Crusade is certainly representative of one of those.  To be unstuck in time is partially to be stuck in time.  The traumatic experiences of the war cannot be escaped and whether or not Billy is sane is of secondary importance to the larger trauma that keeps Billy bouncing around in a book.  Tralfamadore is as real as the book since the experience of time that they propound is the experience of reading:

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.  The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.  They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.  It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads ona string, ant that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” (27)

What Vonnegut beautifully takes out of the equation for a human experiencing time as the Tralfamadorians do is control.  So Billy and the reader both bop through time continually haunted by events not entirely different from the way trauma leads us to relive things.

The irony that a novel focusing on this aspect would continually serve as the haunting point of return for damn near every review ever written about him would, of course, come as no surprise to Vonnegut.

Textual Detritus is a running series of notes focused on my reading list for exams related to my PhD studies.  These are not reviews so I will refrain from explaining plot lines.  These posts also contain any number of spoilers for the books in question though I’ll try to keep them hidden behind a cut.  Simply, the idea here is to get some of my immediate thoughts down in a coherent manner for later use or discussion.  As such, I make no claim about the level of thought, coherence, or grammar to any of these posts.

Continue reading “Textual Detritus: Inherent Vice” →

Go read copper.  You’ll thank yourself for it later.

Some interesting bits about Monty Python from the New York Times here.

I honestly don’t have much to say that others haven’t already said.  Nonetheless, I thought this story was by far worthy of note.

This article form the New York Times about renting textbooks has my opinion fairly split.  On the one hand, I’m all for lowering the costs of texts (something I actively try to do when I pick out textbooks for my courses).  On the other hand, I see some problems.  First, if book rentals means that publishers will stop issuing new editions every year then we might be getting somewhere.  The article itself indicates that the publishers get no money from the sale of used books, hence the new edition which will ensure increased profit (minus some chump change for a new cover and forward by some scholar or other).  There’s also the troubling aspect of merely renting knowledge.  A brief example: if I assign a writing handbook for my class, having students merely rent it entirely defeats the purpose.  At least 80% of the students in my classes end up desperately needing a handbook that covers basic grammar so I assign one that does just that.  75% will need that handbook when they leave.  It’s not that I ignore teaching the topic, or that my students are unable to learn, rather it’s just a topic that needs refreshing and to be looked up from time to time.  Sure they could buy the book, but how many will be motivated to do that?  There’s already the likelyhood that students will sell back the book anyway, but it seems to me that a student is more likely to keep a resource like this if there’s no more money to be paid.  If it’s paid for already, why not keep it?  If you owe $20, forget it.  It’s an issue that becomes even more distressing in regards to English Literature or History.  What happens when we view these books as not being intrinsically worth owning on their own merits.  What happens when we merely rent our education?

That said, I’ve had my fair share of useless textbooks that I’ve sold back after the term, and I get the usefulness of this in some cases.  Still, it feels like it reinforces a disturbing trend.  Maybe, instead of renting, we should look at lowering the cost of education all together, the price of textbooks included.

One of my peers at the University of Oregon, Whitney Phillips, on the Obama/Joker/Socialist meme going around.