Thursday!

* Is Tim Pawlenty the candidate to beat in the 2012 Republican primary? Some followup here and here suggesting maybe not.

* I liked this post from Matt Yglesias on the Alan Grayson "scandal" and rhetorical moralism in American politics.

* Matt also thinks TMBG needs more science studies.

* Winds shifting: Reid promises a public option. But Orrin Hatch has declared that bills with less than 70 votes don't count.

* Stephen Joyce has lost his lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss. Tim is glad.

* Wes Anderson is coming under fire from his fans for apparently signing a pro-Roman-Polanski petition. People I admire really need to stop signing petitions.

* Classic old-school video game The Incredible Machine is now a $10 download.

“‘Dhalgren’ is like the ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ or the ‘Ulysses’ of science fiction,” says fantasy and sci-fi novelist Gregory Frost ("Shadowbridge").

And it is no less controversial than Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce’s respective masterpieces: Legendary scribe Philip K. Dick called “Dhalgren” “a terrible book (that) should have been marketed as trash.”

Presenting a profile of the great Samuel Delany.

I'm a big fan of the blog ads without products—they're doing good work. Take for instance their two most recent posts, "simple modernism" and "Ulysses and the past disaster", which together make a tight little argument about modernist literary production:

When I claim that preoccupation with the everyday is one of the defining characteristics of modernist narrative, I mean the everyday that takes place in lieu of or in resistance to the event. Or even better, the everyday is what takes the place where we would normally expect to find the event - the historical event, yes, but more specifically - technically - the action that turns and in turning provokes reflection that is the most fundamentally characteristic gesture of narrative itself. It would be utterly easy, in certain sense, and utterly literary, in a specific sense, to organize narratives that deal directly with the events of the period: colonial brutality, the advent of total war, bureaucratization verging on dehumanizing totalitarianism. War and sex, violence and news all give themselves to retelling in fiction - but for some reason, the most memorable texts of the most memorable period of fictional production during the past century and a half refuse to take the bait.

This is a place where "sophisticated literary device" and "plain old authorial failure" can sometimes be hard to differentiate, which is why Aw/oP turns to the final page of Ulysses and what Franco Moretti has to say about the book in Signs Taken for Wonders. It's by no means a perfect or final reading of the book—it dramatically undervalues, I think, the overawing transformative potential of everyday sensory experience, which in Ulysses is the only thing of any value in the world, as the aside on epiphanic handjobs implicitly admits—but it's an interesting and worthwhile one.

Lately I've shied away from reviewblogging, partly because I don't think I'm especially good at it but mostly because I haven't been moved to write about anything I've seen. Synecdoche, New York moves me, but only to say "Go see it."

Almost certainly the best film of 2008—only Dark Knight really comes close—and Kaufman's best film since Being John Malkovich, Synecdoche can't really be described without being reduced to a series of gimmicks. I wouldn't even read reviews of it. Just go.

For those who have seen it, or who plan to flaunt my sage advice, the best writing I've seen about Synecdoche has been from Adam Kotsko, who writes, insightfully:

While watching Synecdoche, New York this week, a thought occurred to me: the reviews that presented the movie as an elaborate puzzle requiring multiple viewings to unravel are wrong....

[T]here is, within the frame of the movie, no “underlying reality” that can be uncovered through the work of decoding, not even that of Caden Cotard’s dream. All the action is taking place directly at the surface. That’s what the proposed title “Simulacrum” is telling us (a name he suggests to Claire, not Hazel, pace Dargis).

“What really happened” is only what you can see: Kaufman is being brutally direct. No amount of plot summary can get at what it feels like to be watching this movie, and to get to caught up in trying to decipher “what’s going” on is to run the risk of failing to feel what it feels like to be watching this movie.

I'd even go so far as to suggest that Synecdoche should really only be viewed once. The novels to which one might be tempted to compare it—Ulysses? Pale Fire? If on a Winter's Night a Traveler?—are surely not "elaborate puzzles" to be solved but do possess rich textual subtleties that reward an nth reading. Synecdoche, I fear, may not only lack these subtleties, but may in fact be significantly worse when re-viewed in the context of a known whole.

In particular I'm afraid any rewatch would just direct us more and more towards the notion that [SPOILER—HIGHLIGHT TO READ] Cotard is in the process of dying, likely from suicide committed either very early in the movie or perhaps slightly before it began, and Synecdoche is his dream. To the extent that the suggestion of any "underlying reality" can be deciphered in Synecdoche, it seems to me it can only be this one—and just the slightest taste of that is more than enough.

But wherever they point us, I feel fairly certain the uncovering of any "clues" upon rewatching would only throw the movie's vital ambiguity off-balance. It'd ruin it. Synecdoche's a truly great film, that is to say, but probably just the once.

UPDATE: Copied from Facebook wall scribblings:

my fave reader review from the nyt:

This movie was really boring! Just like life! This movie thought it was original and cutting edge but wasn't! Just like life! This movie has been made before about seven trillion billion times! Just like life! This movie was way too long! Just like life! The first half was okay but the second half made up for it! Just like life! I almost walked out of this movie! Just like life! Some people don't realize how awful this movie is and actually think it is good! Just like life!

Who was the dominant writer of the twentieth century, if indeed such a question even makes any sense at all? In rejecting Alexander Solzhenitsyn's claim on the title, the Paper Cuts blog nominates George Orwell. As you might expect from the last time we played this game, I don't think anyone can really challenge Joyce, unless it's Kafka or (maybe) Gabriel García Márquez.

Tim ups the ante with Wordles of Ulysses and Paradise Lost. I'll take up his challenge with five killer Wordles: the scripts of Wes Anderson.











We see again that Wordles are both fun and smart—here, for instance, the inescapable importance of want is highlighted, as well as the crucial distinction between thinking and knowing. Yeah.

BONUS: "Hotel Chevalier."

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce felt the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of aesthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after "an instant of all but union." By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

Check out this 1946 Atlantic Monthly review of James Joyce's major works, Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake.

An Irish man would like to read you Ulysses. If you don't have time for that, there's always this quick but comprehensive summary. Both links via MeFi.