It has been hot here in Seattle. A very pleasant thing, for the most part, tho I have spent most of the time working away in a basement apartment.
Last weekend, Capria and I did our first solo backpacking/camping/flyfishing (me)/photography (her) trip. It was a lot of fun. Old growth forests are awe-inspiring things. The fishing wasn't great, due to the water conditions, but I caught a few small cutts and rainbows on dries, which was fun.
I'm hoping to do another small fishing outing on the Cedar River on Friday evening, but it is still pending.
In other news, I had to drop my Greek class. It was too advanced for my abilities. But I picked up a class on Proust, which is super. So it works out.
Last night, on the suggestion of Johnny T, we watched City of God. Fantastic.
The summer seems to be moving too quickly already. But we are doing a lot of cool things. Hope all of you have been as well.
Game 7 of the Stanley Cup is tonight. Go Edmonton. Game 6 was awesome.
Shameless self-promotion: some of you may be interested in my first attempts at internet journalism--check out John Totten's article as well.
Thanks to all of you who let me know you're reading. I know dialogue can be a hard thing to foster, but join in whenever you can.
This time tomorrow, I will have completed my second year of grad school. My own teaching is over, and I have some final revisions on some essays. It's a good feeling.
I have some thoughts on Blood Meridian as a novel for not only always but particularly today.
Deleuze and Guattari have this theory of plateaus which lends itself to bastardization. Essentially, reality can be understood as a concentration of forces, which they call plateaus, or intensities. These plateaus are constantly coming in contact with one another, dissolving, merging, redissolving. We don't see one history, we see many historical intensities; not one politics, multiple political forces; not one literature, many literary forces playing on one another.
Or doing battle. What fascinates me about the thousand (and one) plateaus is the the border between them, the in-between plateaus. The friction between two intensities. More than the thing itself, this is where contact is made, sometimes pleasurable and sometimes violent, and sometimes a violence which seems, inexplicably, pleasurable, precisely because of the rupture between beings that the violence designates.
McCarthy may have read D&G, but he didn't need to. His novel excells beyond their theorization into the viscerality of bodies in the universe which cannot help but confront the terror of this passage between elevations. As Judge Holden, the brutal center of Blood Meridian declares, "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage." The residual namelessnes, the unsignified force which you see only in the contact between otherwise invisible and all-powerful plateaus: this is the vision that charges McCarthy's novel. The dark half of mannicheanism, perhaps, or a negative agnostic theology which claims to see God's face not in the symbolism of a sacrificial lamb but the viscera of Holden's "holy war." Not a call to jihad, a war which is made holy by the proclamations of some law giving Deity, but war holy as itself, in itself, the impossibly paradox of a fully imminent transcendental sign which signifies nothing outside itself.
The story, in its utter simplicity, could not be more compelling. Its movement back and forth between the new borders created by the Mexican American war highlights the permeablity of the geographic and political boundaries which accompanied the emergence of North American nationalism. But these new nations are built upon the ruins of earlier civilizations which do not recognize those lines, and the story follows a group of bounty hunters hired by local governments to hunt down Apache raiders. The result is a repitition of battle, aesthetic, at times darkly comical, banal:
spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos. . .
McCarthy's battle is akin to Faulkner's "blood" and Melville's white whale. It is internal, affective, inescapable. . . and defies feeble attempts to contain it in a frame, an ethic, or a language. It can only be sought after, and only at an unthinkable cost.
Working on the last paper of the quarter and the year right now. I keep reminding myself that a week from right now, I will by fly-fishing with my dad in PA. There are trout swimming in those rivers right now. And I've got their number.
Speaking of numbers: I know my blog posts haven't been that beefy as of late, but they haven't been entirely irregular either (about every 10 days or so). I am not one of those people who plays big brother and watches who and when people come to their blog. And that means I don't know if anyone is actually reading this stuff.
Which doesn't bother me, since I wouldn't really read it either. But I'm not quite solipsistic enough to publish on the interweb for my own sake. So, if you are out there, and you read this for whatever reason: feel free to speak up from time to time. It doesn't have to be much, of course; a simple "howdeedoo" is all this pilgrim would ever ask of anybody. Or maybe you want to say a bit more. Perhaps your cat has worms and you just need somewhere to vent. The comment section is there for you. I'm not much of a cat person, myself, but I'll understand.
Of course, the best way to hear back from people is to actually write provocative stuff. I'm not much at that, but I've recently discovered someone who is. Cormac Mccarthy, whose book Blood Meridian I've finally accquired and begun reading. Unfreakingbelievable thus far. So if you want provocation, stop reading this blog and go buy this book. Or go buy this book, read it, then come tell me what you think of it.