On Wednesday I have to get on the plane to Brisbane and before then?....finish up the 'interesting' article for CI and, if possible, the one on Milton's illustrations for the visual culture conference website...sending both off....the Milton one is basically not capable of being made presentable, but I dont want to do the work it would require for it really to work....so fuck it...and then I need to prepare for the theory orals on Tuesday: this seems as hard on me as on the students since I haven't read most of this stuff for what must it be? 15 yrs?...and in most cases my sympathy for it has long since gone gone gone...Paul de Man?...there's a grotesque discrepancy between the ambition of his arguments and his capacity to make his case stick...there are occasional glimmers I guess but for the most part the essays I am reading are embarrassing: the famous essay on the 'rhetoric of temporality' finally rests on a piece of (someone else's) influence scholarship which declares that Julie's garden in La Nouvelle Heloise is a version of an allegorised medieval garden ...what??...and Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka arent much better: this isnt Kafka, its an exemplification of where D&G had got to theoretically circa 1980 or whenever they wrote it, though I have more sympathy for them politically than for de Man...whose real enemy over and over again is Rousseau as it has been for counter-revolutionary thinkers since about 1792....I really dont know why we ask students to read this stuff; at best it's symptomatic of its historical moment;

that's work: at home, pay the xmas bonuses to the doormen, not as easy as it sounds since there are nine or so of them, and I have to hand each his envelope (doorwomen dont seem to exist, not in this building anyway); get dad's autobiographical ms copied to take back to my mother and the girls; figure out if and what to pay Lisa's dentist, since we're in dispute with him; print out the ms of cultural studies book so I can work at it over Xmas; begin to figure out a paper to give in Dunedin (I have forgotten about that one, and its urgentest of all I guess); get John organised so he can stay here and cat sit...etc, etc...

reading: late at night (ie. about 10 pm) instead of watching tv, which I can no longer do (really: have never been able to do, it's too boring): Joe La Sueur on Frank O'Hara...a form of literary criticism I really like: these poems spark off these memories in me (i.e. Joe La Sueur) of the times they were written, this against the backdrop of my (ie Joe's) going to live with O'Hara and then being kicked out....it seems a very open and unegotistical book, with only a few moments of (rather self-conscious) bitchiness....you get to think the reason Frank liked Joe so much was not because he was so fucking gorgeous which he so obviously was (and which of course he knows and lets us know) but because he was so nice... not stupid either...if that's not the case, Joe's an exceedingly clever self-publicist....Frank's particular presence in the world doesnt really come out in the book though: it's clear by the end that in his social circle he's a kind of star, but is that because of his work (and his fame) or because of his personal charm?...about this, the photos are ambiguous: they look like photos of a charismatic person, but not necessarily so...there's an element of feyness or something there which hints at something else...and then the poems themselves dont seem written by a real social presence: they're too inward and self-involved for that...for all their bright exteriority...
reading other than that: issues of the Believer which I really like...an new idea for a periodical (and new ideas in that world are rare), which mightnt wear well but while it's fresh it's great...it's a new kind of middlebrown literary magazine, or rather here the middlebrow has become another specialised market, taste-culture niche....I will have to settle into some more solid reading soon, when I get a moment...but when?...not over xmas I think...but I am looking forward to the sun, and to Melbourne coffee shops, and my old haunts...readings, joe's pizza shop, smith st, even the university campus, site of dread and failure though it basically is....and to Otago and its great pinots..and what I imagine to be beautiful open spaces

A long time since I did this, mainly because I have been crazy busy but also I guess because I dont much like the writing I do as a blogger...it reminds me of the diary I wrote years ago (whatever happened to it?) when I was in prison....I couldnt believe that this priggish, self-conscious person had anything to do with me, but even so could never change the tone...it's funny I dont do this with emailing or even I think with letters (not that I ever write any anymore)...then I know who I'm talking to, now I am mainly talking to myself which is silly because it's unnecessary and affected and so I lose touch with myself....but really I am writing to a future self who might be interested in what I was doing in the past but that doesnt seem to help me with these problems of address unfortunately...T.S. Eliot said of writing if you only you get the tone right then everything else follows...
Reading: Stefan Collini's English Pasts (nicely written, I like his resistance to populisms, but why doesnt he get it at all about what drives cultural studies which he thinks is all down to a bunch of louche individuals' 'dissatisfaction'.
Also (for my paper in Otago) Thomas Arnold's Letters, which I'm getting into.

Logging on from the Starbucks opposite the British Library again...taking time out from an orgy of newspaper reading (and from the library itself, where I am trying to figure out a line on illustrations of Milton during the eighteenth century, not going anywere at the moment sadly)...whenever I'm in Britain I find myself immersed in the dailies, this time the Guardian and the Independent...the press here creates a whole world of its own....mainly it's a soap-opera created by beat-up after beat-up (at the moment the Dr Kelly versus Alistair Campbell versus BBC embroglio)...but there's also a sense in which the culture is being created in continual commentary on itself, a process doesnt exist quite in this way anywhere else...much of the commentary is forced and silly (the demands of continual journalist production are unmeetable)...but none the less it adds up to something: a thereness (a phantasmal thereness) which doesnt exist in Australia or the States....there are good material reasons for this of course...the press here is national and manically competitive, a majority of the population adheres to more or less traditional British identities, and and the middle-class at least need constant reinforcement of their class difference....
The Guardian has gone off though...like all the papers it carves out its own audience, partly a real one partly one that it imagines for itself and conjures up rhetorically....but it's become complacent...it addresses its readers as a bunch of liberal consumers...intelligent, hip, socially concerned, affluent...in a word, self-satisfied...and the real heart of modern culture is lost...its self-loathing, its longing for something else...which you wouldnt expect to catch sight in a newspaper, except this one takes itself so fucking seriously....
Another thing: why isnt the criticism of the politicans who led us into the Iraq war going anywhere in Australia?...it as if the political culture there has a double-layer of cynicism...nobody cares because everyone knows the Howard government is a US lapdog (cynicism layer one), and nobody cares because nobody believes what the Bush administration say anyway, their real motives aren't expressible in the public sphere (cynicism layer two)...so shameful (and I guess in some places, ashamed) silence...

Am sitting in the Starbucks across the road from the British Library connected to the web wirelessly and feeling very amazed, cool and complacent....my love affair with London isn't over....only real time in the States can make you really appreciate Britian...here people assume that they belong to single society, in the US the terms under which people will participate socially seem always under negotiation: that's the basic difference....it's true that capitalism there is more efficient and has, as they say, colonised more of the life-world so that money rules everyday life to a greater degree than it does here, and it's true that, for instance, over there blacks have their own culture and dont connect to whites in ways which are just not the case here so that whenever a white man (or even more woman) meets a young black man walking towards him on a lonely street late at night there's trepidation..but all that's secondary: it's the relations between individuals and community which is key to differences between the places...of course in the end there are benefits to the US's individualism too, especially for loners....but here in London (as against NYC) it's nice to bathe in at any rate the perpetual promise of a collectivity we all share...even if most people on the streets are transients...tourists, students whatever... and what about Australia????...why have I always been so indifferent to it???

A long blogging absence. Its strange how this desire for self-expression, or at anyrate for self-recording, waxes and wanes. Partly because it's not focussed I guess: it doesnt have an obvious point, in the way that writers diaries usually do for instance—they record usable material, even a weirdly inexpressive one like Evelyn Waugh's. And then I leave for London next Monday and won't be doing much blogging there I guess. Probably the real diary writer writes to find, which must also mean to invent, themselves too. I'd like to do that, but maybe I'm too much here already. Or there's not enough of me for it work like that.
But then the original idea of this was to record consumption, as a kind of corrective or penace for consuming. And I have bought an ipod this week (useful when travelling??), spending much of the last couple of days transferring music onto it...and a bunch of books at Strands...the last time I was in NYC I avoided it, and it's really not a shop I like, there are so many books there, and so many books no-one really wants, that literature itself seems to lose some of its value, but this time, with an afternoon to kill in the Village found myself there and none the less bought about three hundred dollars worth of books almostnone of which are necessary to anything I want to think or do, at least right now. Yet I was delighted to find a volume of Bishop Warburton's letters to his publishers and other literary figures...who's Bishop Warburton???...the mid eighteenth-century divine who dominated the establishment intellectual life of his time, an overbearing, pompous man, who sucked up to Alexander Pope, edited his work argubly against its true spirit, and a polemicist for the confessional state. As I argue in an academic essay, he helped produce sentimentalism or at least Sternean sentimentalism in reaction to him....he's important because he represents a way that modernity did not proceed....the other books more for collecting: and one time in this space I'd like to try to figure out

Went to the launch of Iain McCalman's book on Cagliostro at the Australian Ambassodor's very grand house at DC the other day, after an afternoon spent shopping in Dupont Circle. (Books, records including three of those amazing Proper/JSP box sets: but are ten cds worth of the Carter Family in the thirties too much of a good thing???) It was fun: I only met one other academic there, otherwise mainly Embassy staff and an assortment of the rich and connected. Had a brief conversation about Rupert Murdoch's brilliance with a Murdoch fan (who turned out to be the Australian's Washington correspondant, a bitter-sweet admiration) , and another more contentious conversation about the costs to New Zealand of its anti-US (or, rather, its less than totally enthusiastically US) foreign policy. This with a very smooth expat (he left NZ in the early seventies) who, so his card says, heads up an international investment firm.
In the world of the liberal-arts academy views like this have become impossible: our world is more or less defined against the hegemony of the market, and of the US's global power. Partly this division has to be structural: an effort by the weak and beleagured humanities to define a territory and a project for itself. But it's not only structural. If the contents of the humanities canon contain any kind of purposiveful ethical charge, it's an anti-populist one. And it stands for the autonomy and self-sufficiency of cultures. Or seems to. Didn't the humanities by and large support imperialism? And fit in easily with racism? As the conservatives like to remind us, there's a generational thing going here too: the humanities are now dominated by people who were young in the sixties and seventies, when youth culture had almost no connection to policy-makers (except in attempts to reform or resist them), and pretty much rejected the terms in which formal government and business proceeded. Liberal obsolence before our time.

At any rate it's refreshing to talk to people coming from somewhere else, and hear frank and innocent expressions of something like the conservative, establishment point of view. And why exactly are they wrong? I guess at the heart of at all, and past all questions of social justice and rights and diversity and so on, I'd say that they lack guts and imagination.

Have been reading Nirad Chaudhuri's The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. A strangely compelling book: Chaudhuri's an anglophile Indian, writing about his Bengali family in the twenties and thirties, intersparsed with philosophical and historical reflections. He attempts a rigorous objectivity, writes in a neutral, rather charmless, resolutely grammatical style, and because he has not a cultural nationalist bone in him presents a very different India than the one that we have become accustomed to in the post-Rushdie moment: violent, litigious, money-grubbing, unsentimental. Indeed by comparison with Chaudhuri, it becomes clear how Rushdie, for all his political dissent, is in the business of magicing and sentimentalising the sub-continent. But Chaudhuri cant maintain his 'objectivity' of course: his conservativism and fuddy duddyness, a kind of imitation of an imaginery 'civilised' Englishman seeps through it. And because the India that he comes from is in many ways so awful, and his family so unnurturing—his descriptions of his mother's regular fits of what he calls 'hysteria' are particularly horrific— the stiff-upper-lip stance comes to seem like a flight from chaos. Maybe thing will change in the book, I'm only about half way through.
Reading this while listening to the Blue Note cds of Grant Green with Sonny Clark, recorded in the early (?) sixties but only released in the eighties (I have a pirated copy of the cds, bought I think in Beijing so I'm not to clear of its history). Anyway it's wonderful music, made before 'funk' became reified but headed in that direction, and made before the guitar sound went fuzzy and chordal: clean pure music. Its chastening to think what Chaudhuri would have thought of it: the problem with him (and the education into the West that he received) is that he obviously couldn't have listened to it at all.

Writing this section of my book on the web makes me think about my own use of it. What did I do on it today? Partly it depends I guess what you call the "web": at one time it meant the world wide web which was just one service on the Net, the easy one. Today it seems to mean the whole thing. And the web isnt just a service it absorbs and transforms most of the old communication technologies: telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishing, and adds some new ones: audio downloading, linking, info-tracking (or whatever its capacity to record and publish usage immediately is called). To use the old Hegelian lingo: it sublates the old media.

Me on the web today: check my email first thing after breakfast and then once every couple of hours or so till now before going to bed; order some books (a nice fat check has come in) and fiddle with my want lists on Amazon and ABE; open up at&t news site a couple of times during the day to make sure no big disaster has hit the world while I was doing something else; go on to Limewire and try mainly unsuccessfully to download some Son Volt tracks, because I came across a reference to them somewhere or other (I think reading the paper this morning) which seemed intriguing; randomly checking out some blogs and bookmark one's I might one look at again (Lessig's Blog looks definitely promising) and then just before the day comes to end spend some time on Apple Music downloading 30 second samples of a bunch of pop albums, following the trail of "people who bought this also bought this' leads....

If this is at all typical of net usage, what might it mean? More time available for consumption; things that one used to do out there in the world (mainly in shops) you now can do at home; more cultural fragmentation which means more choices (Lisa is watching tv, I am reading and then webbing). Not much else? Certainly no victory of dematerialisation or virtuality, those catchcries of technoculture theory. The whole 'virtual' thing was a red herring. And if everyone moves onto the Web like this the social effects will likely be profound: less culture in public more cultural consumption in domestic space (withdrawing some of the movement between neighbourhoods that came in with the car); the emergence of new domain between the public and the private—the domain of this blog, which is not just for me but not really for anyone else either, its neither secret nor public, its not signed but not quite anonymous. Lost in the vastness of the web's chatter, and enabled by that.
But of course no one knows where the web is going, what it will deliver. So predictions are all the more tempting and all the more useless. One day it will just form the armature of the culture and society we have: like electricity or the car or the telephone, whose impacts were probably no less profound (what does it mean to say that?)

Where should we put the tv?

the new sound system arrives...which now has the big (but not huge) tv (36" I think) perched on top of it...dwarfing that part of the living room (which is officially called the receiving room)...in the US, bourgeois interiors tend to conceal tvs and or hide them away in their own special room...the home theatre thing is class coded low....is this pretentious?... as if, against all the realities, civilised life were lived out of range of the media.......I dont like to watch tv much myself, but when I do its best to be comfortable...and anyway it's a social thing, tv.. .bad as it is, it's a better bet than conversation, often.

Typing

Isn't there more to life than sitting hunched in front of a computer screen scribbling (if that's the phrase) away?