I Couldn't Like Emerson More

I've never had much respect for books I can read in one day. I don't know why that is. Wait, I do know why that it is. My high-frequency books are Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Botho Strauss' Die Fremdenfuehrerin. They're all complicated works that need careful attention and much consideration. If you can figure something out too quickly, then maybe you shouldn't have bothered with it all in the first place.

Right.

Having stated this, check out this jewel of a thought from Emerson regarding Jane Austen's work. Man, I love this guy! Boom, this is how you write about Jane Austen.

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming? ‘Tis “the nympholepsy of a fond despair”, say rather, of an English boarding-house. Suicide is more respectable."

New Videocast: Anxiety and Wanderlust in the German Middle Ages

This is the most recent recording for my second podcast series De Amore: On Love with Brikena Ribaj.
This piece is about the character of Gahmuret in the German narrative from the Middle Ages, Parzival.

The question I tackle here is: "Why is it that the best of knights are always in a state of anxiety?" "Why do they have the urge to move from adventure to adventure?"

Familiarity with Wolfram von Eschebach's Parzival or the earlier French version, Perceval, the Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, can help but it's not a must.

All the episodes are now uploaded and running on iTunes as well as the blog.

You can view this episode here.

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New Podcast Series

HetPer is proud to announce a second podcast series called De Amore: On Love. This series will focus on the concept of courtly love in the Middle Ages and how it is transmitted and received in later times.

These podcasts will be strictly literary in nature and the majority of the direct and indirect literary and historical references will come out of the European Middle Ages. The focus will mostly be on German, French, and Italian texts.

Stay tuned for the upcoming first episode which should become available in a few days.

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New Podcast: Literary/Cinematic Analysis of Voyager, Part II

The new podcast is Part Two of a two-part literary/cinematic analysis. In this piece I compare and contrast the Swiss novel Homo Faber and its cinematic adaptation, Voyager. In this podcast I explore the relationships and relations between the key characters in these two narratives.
To listen to the new piece, click here.

The podcast is also available on iTunes under "Gendering the Media with Brikena Ribaj" along with the other weekly contributions.

Note: I picked this photograph from sartorialist as it oozes the kind of urban feel I get from Schloendorff's Voyager.

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Gendering the iPod: Theory and the Media

As a result of Ike's aftermath, we found ourselves without power here in Columbus, OH. We are still, as a matter of fact, sans electricity. Starbucks, however, is open and all the outlets were occupied today.
Slogan of the day: 'In Starbucks We Trust'....?
So, my hat goes off to modernity this week, more specifically, electricity.
Now.
Some of you have asked questions about certain Gender Theory jargon items. Ergo, I'm posting this as an example of literary theory applications to various Pop Culture notions.
I contributed this piece a while back for public radio. As I've already intimated in previous posts, I happen to fully agree with Nietzsche's music-loving, dying Socrates in that music precedes other forms of speech/language. And this piece is premised on the power of expression that music engenders.

In this piece I gender the iPod.
Click here to hear a gendered reading of the iPod.

graphs per apple, google images

Thanks to Robert Giroux!

Thanks to the legendary publisher, Robert Giroux, we all got to enjoy brilliant literature.
The Times features a wonderful story on the literary giant.
A bit says:

"I was eating a sandwich at my desk when our receptionist called. “Mr. Salinger is here,” she said, “and he wants to meet you.” I said: “Mr. Salinger? What’s his first name?” And she said, “Jerome, his name is Jerome.” I said, “Send him in.”

In he came. He was very tall, dark-haired, had a horse face. He was melancholy looking. It’s the truth — the first person I thought of when I saw him was Hamlet."

Read all here.
graph per ny times

Rhetoric and Literary Terms

Whether one is serious about rhetoric or not this is a most useful link. And it's hosted by Utah's own Brigham Young University. Thanks, cougars!

A few interesting lexemes to add to one's vocab:

"# accismus
A feigned refusal of that which is earnestly desired.
# anthypophora
One asks and then immediately answers one's own questions (or raises and then settles imaginary objections)
# anticategoria
A retort in which one turns the very accusation made by one's adversary back against him.
# diasyrmus
Rejecting an argument through ridiculous comparison.
# elenchus
A logical refutation.


pointer via MR

Swimming Literati

Whereas this, I enjoyed very well. Go for a swim when done. This literary experience will undoubtedly better your time in the water.
A most eloquent essay by Willard Spiegelman.

"To a bookish, intellectual youth, a transformative revelation occurred when, at the age of 23, I decided that I had a body that required tending to. Does one have a body? Does one inhabit the body, a soul within a carapace? Are you your body? The philosophical dimensions of the questions interested me at the time. In graduate school I lived next door to the university swimming pool. Swimming seemed the easiest and the most expedient exercise, and one that depended on no one else’s schedule. For sheer convenience, running or walking is always the easiest thing to do: neither weather nor location should ever inhibit you. Swimming demands both a place and scheduling, but since I was free at 10 in the morning when the pool opened, and since it was never crowded at that hour, I had no excuse other than laziness for not doing it."

and

"Although we know that the ancient Greeks enjoyed swimming, the activity underwent changes in popularity. Under Christianity it declined but was revived with spectacular energy at the start of the 19th century. In Britain, the homoerotic, or at least the homosocial, angle was strong, as it was in Germany. Cyril Connolly summed up the old Etonian tradition in a prewar journal: “a fusion of my old trinity, grace, greenness, and security” came from his sense of the tradition of “two friends going down to bathe.” Hellenic worship of the body and pastoral sinlessness merged, at least in the imagination. Bloomsbury swam. Rose Macaulay as well as Virginia Woolf swam naked with Rupert Brooke before the Great War. Iris Murdoch was one of the last great English river swimmers."

...

"Ludwig Wittgenstein articulated the connection best: “Just as one’s body has a natural tendency towards the surface and one has to make an exertion to get to the bottom—so it is with thinking.” The opposite might also be said: the body unaccustomed to the water has a tendency to sink; only buoyancy, innate or learned, can keep it up. And with thought, the same is true: we divide our focus between what remains on the surface and what seems to lie below it, seldom realizing that the very metaphor we are using to describe the mind’s realm has an analogy in water and our experience of it."

Also, "an enlarged version of this essay will be included in his forthcoming book Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness."

text and info per the american scholar

John Keats and Posthumous Glory

You lovers of Keats will like this.
"When John Keats died in February 1821, just 25, his friends believed that it was the reviews that killed him. In truth the critics could hardly have been less kind, especially about Keats’s second book, “Endymion.” “We venture to make our small prophecy that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50” pounds “on anything he can write,” a reviewer for Blackwood’s Magazine wrote. “It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet. So back to the shop, Mr. John.”
graph per ny times