Eliot for your morning, Hegel in the evening.

From the second of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot:

...Had they deceived us,
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

And to somewhat clarify his meaning here (poetics must be murky; philosophy too), Hegel's owl of Minerva:

The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this gray in gray, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.

Perhaps a to-do list is in order.

There's a Chinese curse: "May you find what you are looking for." And the Rolling Stones realized, "You can't always get what you want."

The implication is that nobody really wants to get what they're searching for. The drive for it arises from the ignorance that complete achievement would be crushing. Your ego would fail, miserably incapable of reconstructing itself in relation to the achievement of complete satisfaction. You'd have to then define yourself by the possessed. It's continual goal-setting for safety. Because of this, there's no completion - you can't win life. There's more to be had.

Here's the epiphany. (Yes, I prefer to blatantly over-dramatise the trivialities of my own life - I embrace this practice fully because I see we all inevitably form the centers of our relative universes anyway. So, "epiphany.")
We can't stop searching. We create our own meanings. Nihilism may work (or not, whatever - haha) in theory, but the realization that we're not going to get there doesn't mean we shouldn't start the journey anyway. Life is one grand, interrupted action and it is only assigned significance because hey, we're human. There's no reason to stop those cycles, but there is literature to make it feel valid. May you keep searching.

Art Spiegelman, "What the %@$*!! Happened to Comic Books?!"

I went to see Art Spiegelman talk last night at my university. For those who don't recognize the name, Spiegelman is the author of Maus, a renowned graphic novel about his father's experience of the Holocaust which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992.

Not only is Spiegelman a talented writer and thoughtful comic artist, I was pleased to find he is also wonderfully well-spoken and entertaining as a speaker. His presentation, entitled "What the %@$*!! Happened to Comic Books?!," was fast-paced ride through the history of comics and the rise of the graphic novel in today's world. Indeed, even his manner of speech replicates the poised control of the graphic artist, who internally converts time into space in order to fill and arrange the panels properly. At least speaking for myself, I can say that Spiegelman was able to keep me absorbed in a topic I had no real interest in, as he flew through early comic history, the role of comics in newspapers, their subsequent ebb and redirection into 'comic book' form, and ending with his own place in the presently maturing graphic novel scene. He ended there relatively modestly, I would argue, for his stature both within the genre and outside of it (Time Magazine named him one of the top 100 "Most Influential" people in 2005).

I'd say I was most interested in his discussion of the aesthetics of the comic form. I was unaware of how much thought is required to lay out the page in a way that not only communicates the story in a compelling manner, but guides the reader through a sheet of paper packed to the brim with content. And negative spaces matter: with page space at a premium, an empty panel (or two, or three...) speaks volumes. Spiegelman at one point claimed, "I'm interested in what leaks outside the panels." A skilled graphic novelist will understand this. The contents on the page point to what is left unsaid - the weight behind the mere 'lines on paper.'

Art Spiegelman has recently published In the Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel written about the events of September 11th. He has also done some brilliant and often controversial covers for The New Yorker magazine... which anyone who knows me recognizes is a personal favorite. Regardless, I would recommend reading the Maus books to start off.

Huck Finn!

I've been misguided in my prior judgment of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As my first reading of Huck Finn, the linguistic techniques used by Twain in writing this novel emerge fresh – unclouded by a previous experience with the text – and candidly influence my perception of the book’s driving forces. I’m not sure I could have wholly appreciated, as a child, the nuanced way in which Twain is able to portray the speech of such varied dialects. Reading this novel without the background of my study of the English language’s context and development, would probably have resulted in my dismissal of it as a simple adventure story. Surely a notable relic of American children’s literature and national character, but nothing more.

Of course, that impression would be proved insufficient to judge the true merit of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s linguistic skills are of a very high caliber, shown through his ability to methodically depict a number of American dialects in this text. The vernacular speech leaps from the pages - it's fascinating to hear it do so - and crumbles the years past between my childhood (the one without Huck) and my... post-childhood (the one discovering Huck's charms). Huck Finn is delightful because he is pure and simple in a novel that may not be quite so simple. I caught myself laughing out loud several times towards the end of the book.

And besides, who can resist Twain’s “Notice” preceding the body of the text? “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot…”

Waltz with Bashir

I went last night to see Waltz with Bashir (a friend and I wanted to catch it in theatres before it stopped showing), an Israeli animated film about a character struggling to regain memory of his time serving as an IDF during the first Lebanon War - specifically, the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Such a political animated film about war may seem contradictory, but director Ari Folman treats it artfully. This is not to say it's ever anything less than tragic... it's absolutely devastating.
I noticed the color range in the film contributed much to its effect, leaping from almost monochrome to sharply brilliant. It's an interesting way to illustrate the way our memories, especially those of the horrors of war, can be so vivid whether or not they're "correct." We construct stories to seal the gaps, and similarly, we construct stories to conceal what we've experienced. Digging into the rifts can be valuable even when it uncovers a terrible truth about oneself. But the context of war strips away the human element, and that's probably the most detestable part about it.

Romanticism and sentimentality; debate with self.

It has taken me far too long to discover Goethe.
At age 20, I have.
The writing of The Sorrows of Young Werther is, I feel, perfectly aligned with my sentiment. Werther's character is, heart and soul, impassioned to the point of self-destruction. He leaps from consuming love to utter hopelessness in an instant. Before choosing this book (quite on a whim), my reading of Romantic literature had been mostly limited to the British: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, and so on... Having never studied German, I read it in English translation, yet the effect is there. Almost too overwhelming to handle, especially because I see so much of myself in young Werther. I may have issue declaring national identity, but I declare myself a full-blooded Romantic. All general statements from me such as these must exist with a disclaimer, of course: I am a Romantic, yet I am one living in and responding to a modern age. I would embrace Modernism if it could definitively be called a movement now though it would destroy me, as anyone. Word on the street is that Modernism's dead or something anyway. Post-modernism's by nature ambiguous. (I'm rambling.) Maybe I am a Pomo Romantic.
And in a fit of passion, as soon as I began Werther, my one objective became to finish it and promise myself a reread of it very often. A return to history... smacks of straight Modernism, don't it? Yet the lack of declaration above, in the guise of a statement of identity, must drive it into the prefix Post- realm...
Ha, looks like I need to be reading some David Foster Wallace now. Except it'll have to wait, since War and Peace is next on the list and there's a novel to command one's faculties.

Yeah, and read White Noise by Don DeLillo.

I was sitting here thinking about how many forms of communication are open to the Internet world today, and it made me a little nostalgic for when my friends and I would chatter excitedly about a new website or exchange screen names. Everything was so feverishly novel - just imagine, we can meet people who live on the other side of the world; we can create chat rooms based on interest (especially important for those of us who felt there were few others to whom we could really relate in our own middle school). We can be anonymous and reveal secrets that those inhabiting our offline worlds might not accept about us.
It seems that kids growing up with all of these new generation networking websites - some even those directed at elementary schoolers! - would take all of these forms for granted. Internet living is becoming interweaved into modern living. I mean, I got sucked into the online world pretty quickly as a middle schooler, but at least I had experienced a childhood of running around in the woods for hours building forts, warring with Super Soakers in the summer, playing board games and Truth or Dare at slumber parties, walking to the neighborhood pool with friends... and I read books, piles and piles of books. There's one you never outgrow. I wouldn't be surprised if children in elementary school these days go straight inside the house after getting home, and escape directly into the allure of screen glow.

I mean, look at attention spans. Ooh, meta-thought: Is this post too long for success online?
What works today is that which can be delivered in snippets, preferably portable so technology can follow one's movement anywhere. Blackberrys, iPhones, the Kindle...

I saw a mother talking with an attendant at a Metro station. Her son was bawling hysterically over a handheld video game he had dropped getting off the train, while the two adults tried to console [ha, ha] him.