The Work Of A Poet Never Ends

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Calvino On Borges

If I had to say which fiction writer has perfectly achieved Valéry’s aesthetic ideal of exactitude in imagination and in language, creating works that match the rigorous geometry of the crystal and the abstraction of deductive reasoning, I would without hesitation say Jorge Luis Borges. The reasons for my fondness for Borges do not end here, but 1 will mention only the main ones. I love his work because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of an attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic); because they are texts contained in only a few pages, with an exemplary economy of expression; because his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures. As an example let us take his most vertiginous “essay" on time, “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" (The Garden of Forking Paths), which is presented as a spy story and includes a totally logico-metaphysical story, which in turn contains the description of an endless Chinese novel—and all this concentrated into a dozen pages. The hypotheses on the subject of time enunciated by Borges in this story, each one contained (and virtually hidden) in a handful of lines, are as follows. First there is an idea of precise time, almost an absolute, subjective present: “reflexioné que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y sólo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mi" (I reflected that everything, to everyone, happens precisely, precisely now. Century after century, and only in the present, do things happen. There are innumerable men in the air, on land and on sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me). Then there is a notion of time as determined by the will, in which the future appears to be as irrevocable as the past; and finally the central idea of the whole story—a manifold and ramified time in which every present forks out into two futures, so as to form “una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos" (a growing and bewildering network of divergent, convergent, and parallel forms of time). This idea of infinite contemporary universes in which all possibilities are realized in all possible combinations is by no means a digression in the story, but rather the very reason why the protagonist feels authorized to carry out the absurd and abominable crime imposed on him by his spy mission, perfectly sure that this happens only in one of the universes but not in the others; and indeed that, if he commits this crime here and now, in other universes he and his victim will be able to hail each other as friends and brothers. The scheme of the network of possibilities may be condensed into the few pages of a story by Borges, or it may be made the supporting structure of immensely long novels, in which density and concentration are present in the individual parts. But I would say that today the rule of “Keep It Short" is confirmed even by long novels, the structure of which is accumulative, modular, and combinatory.

Italo Calvino
Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Stockton Lit Bash 2012

I had a great time at the 2012 Lit/Lang Bash party at Stockton. It was good to see some friends and get to know the new crop of literature majors.  

My Spring 2013 On Campus Coffee Consumption: A Tag Cloud

At the request of a few of my Literature & Film students, I kept track of my coffee consumption on days I taught. As you can see, I seem to focus on Dunkin Donuts and the local and very cool Daily Grind, but also some Starbucks as well.  

It's Just One Pig Replacing Another

“I didn’t consider myself a nihilist at that time but certainly Black Flag had songs like ‘No Values’, which Greg wrote, that espoused that mind set. But I believed in shooting the cops, I believed in violent revolution. I thought we should just clear the fucking slate and I don’t think that any more. The real villains just make money off the blood of the common person in a violent revolution. It’s just one pig replacing another.”

From “Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag

I have been thinking about this quote a lot in regards to the events happening in Egypt right now. It sure fits our own political structure here in the USA. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian...all of them are pigs. Women, workers, students, and veterans just keep getting screwed no matter who runs things. Choosing between these people is about as sincere a choice as picking Pepsi over Coke. 

Books Read In 2012

1. Being A Green Mother by Piers Anthony
2. The Tent by Margaret Atwood
3. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
4. Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort
5. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
6. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
7. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
8. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
9. The Mind of Italo Calvino by Dan Cavallaro
10. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin
11. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
12. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
13. Crossed by Ally Condie
14. Noir by Robert Coover
15. Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
16. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow
17. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue
18. Football The First Hundred Years The Untold Story by Adrian Harvey
19. My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles
20. The Map & The Territory by Michel Houllebecq
21. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard
22. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
23. Fifty Shades Darker by E. L. James
24. Fifty Shades Freed by E. L. James
25. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
26. The Life & Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas Jefferson
27. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
28. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
29. The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason
30. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
31. Batman The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
32. Batman Year One by Frank Miller
33. Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
34. Paradise Lost by John Milton
35. Batman-The Killing Joke by Alan Moore
36. V For Vendetta by Alan Moore
37. The Watchmen by Alan Moore
38. Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabakov
39. King Lear by William Shakespeare
40. Authors In Context: Virginia Woolf by Michael Whitworth
41. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
42. The Quran (Sher Ali Holy translation)
43. Sir Gawain & The Green Knight
44. The Tel Quel Reader

Careers For Literature Majors

In February, I asked asked to speak at Stockton on a panel about career paths for Literature majors. I was thrilled to head down there and work with the Literature program and Career Center. I spoke on an hour long panel with other alumni from past 5-10 years, including a few people I had classes with, and had a great time speaking with current students and catching up with some faculty. Before the event I took a long walk around campus and ran into some other faculty and works I had not seen in a long time. I would love to do another one of these events in the future.

Stockton's Arts & Humanities program has their own Tumblr blog which also has a nice recap of the evening.  

Check out the nifty mug they gave me for participating in this event.