Novel Talking: The Autotelic Otiose

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Xlibris Corporation LLC, 2000 M12 20 - 284 páginas

Novel Talking; or, The Autotelic Otiose A Menippean satire on television and marijuana. Dialogues and fantasy futures by a Shakespeare scholar concerning the impact of modern media and recreational chemicals on post-literate Bicentennial America.

A Review of Novel Talking

It is one thing for a temporarily retired academic to retreat to the woods, deliberately regress to personal and cultural adolescence, and dream in silent solitude about stand-up classroom verbal eloquence; but it is another when these dreams become a theory of human nature going all the way back to the primitive Siberian shaman and are urged on us as a description of modern western man. It does not help much that the author, a teacher of Shakespeare, acknowledges each irony in turn: social science theory is nothing but autobiography, writing is a dream of speech, solitude creates fantasy company. Each admitted irony, each existential paradox wafts this quixotic author further from his mundane chore---to write well.

To be sure, the author agrees. Marijuana, he says, generates first draft or "epiphanic" thought, and the book is thus a composition text, an illustration of pride and flaw. "If indolence has been the hallmark of my execution (for quite a while, in several areas) should I not make it the focus of my educational effort?" Thus will the "stone soup" of this Peter Pan "preserve", if not communicate, the "creative vision," which he defines as "an idealistic blurring of forms which allows autobiography, cultural history, ethical paradigm and ecstatic witness to reveal common roots in ego and fiction."

In method and subject (roughly, being stoned and watching the tube) Novel Talking is adolescent pastoral, aware of itself as an idyll. It is a survey of the four seasonal literary modes, comedy, tragedy, irony and romance, each presented with a behavioral analogue from the social sciences,. The pattern for tragedy: the western body-soul dualism derives from the cultural practice of swaddling. Its first articulation is by the ancient shaman, who performs an imitation of a wrapped (rapt) memory of an imagined unwrapped act, a magic spirit flight from the body, an ineffable claim convincing enough to arouse, sustain and focus to his profit the fight-flight tension (the mingled rage and ridicule) of the gathering within the sound of his voice. In further discussion the swaddle itself becomes an analogue for various contemporary sedentary recreational states, including television and chemical euphoria, which are contrasted with group ritual behavior in order to suggest ways to deal with emerging national patterns of "domestic equality and mutual grooming."

This is a rather heavy argument to be founded, as the author says, only on cultural generalizations and, more importantly, on purely autobiographical analogies. He further asserts that it is only because of the fashion of the times that he speaks in this way. He is only a Boy Scout, an acolyte, only a shaman stoned. He has a theory of gentility, of manners, and God is a personal laugh track. He is looking for work. We seek, he says, only what we lack. At the college level of this author's prime pedagogic fantasy (only one of several) this search translates as a form of residential literary and critical counseling ("minor arbitration, general assaying, duck rowing"), a kind of WASP male Uncle Tomming or intellectual groping for pay that can only be imagined, perhaps, after three years alone in the woods.

It's going to have to be a no-frills fantasy, this academic niche, because the writing of this book will compel poetic justice, academic logic and Dame Fortune to all insist that its author teach composition for a living. And that would be, after all, the best framework for coaching the logical and literary mise-en-scene of a gathering of shamen. Heaven help his students. &nbs

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Página 45 - Be not afeard ; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again : and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.
Página 67 - With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above : but to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiends' ; there's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption.
Página 107 - ... reading silently and never otherwise, and after a while we would go away, conjecturing that during the brief interval he used to refresh his spirit, free from the tumult of the business of others, he did not wish to be disturbed, for perhaps he feared that someone who was listening, hearing a difficult part of the text, might ask him to explain an obscure passage or might wish to discuss it with him, and would thus prevent him from reading as many volumes as he desired. I believe that he read...
Página 107 - The Cult of Books," claims to have found the exact time, AD 384, when this event took place. Borges cites St. Augustine's account in the Confessions (Book VI) of his teacher St. Ambrose reading in his cell in Milan: When Ambrose read, his eyes moved over the pages, and his soul penetrated the meaning, without his uttering a word or moving his tongue. Many times ... we saw him reading silently and never otherwise, and after a while we would go away, conjecturing that during the brief interval he used...
Página 102 - Oh feet bound for the present time in the world, that they may be always free with the Lord! Oh feet, lingering for a while among the fetters and cross-bars, but to run quickly to Christ on a glorious road!
Página 113 - Meaningful implications are lost in the flat word passivity — among them the total attitude of living receptively and through the senses, of willingly "suffering" the voice of one's intuition and of living a Passion: that total passivity in which man regains, through considered self-sacrifice and self-transcendence, his active position in the face of nothingness, and thus is saved.
Página 164 - The feeling of piety is very dear to me. I would sacrifice a great . deal to be a Saint Augustine but modernity is so Chicagoan, so plain, so unmeditative. I thoroughly believe that at this very moment I get none of my chief pleasures except from what is unsullied. The love of beauty excludes evil. A moral life is simply a pure conscience: a physical, mental and ethical source of pleasure. At the same time it is an inhuman life to lead. It is a form of narrowness so far as companionship is concerned....
Página 170 - Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world's not.

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