As my fourth and final year of grad school progressively draws to a close, I choose to abandon the qualitative skills I’ve been honing and instead reduce it all down to the quantitative data.

• Number of impractical master’s degrees earned in more or less the same field: 2
• Number of letters I’ll have on pieces of expensive paper (including BA): 7
• Number of universities attended (post BA): 2
• Number of credits transferred: 16 (quarter)
• Number of credits shared between programs: 16 (quarter)
• Number of jobs in the field held through grad school: 5
• Number of jobs outside the field held in grad school: 1
• Approximate number of books read for class: 100
• Approximate number of articles/chapters/shorter works read for class: 150
• Approximate number of pages written (first drafts, scholarly): 130
• Approximate number of pages written (first drafts, creative): 500
• Number of computers worn out: 1
• Number of keyboards worn out: 2
• Number of houses/apartments lived in: 5
• Number of roommates (aggregate): 11
• Approximate number of cigarettes smoked: 29,200
• Number of jobs in the field I could get in the US: 0
• Number of jobs in the field I have outside the US: 1
• Number of countries I will have lived in while enrolled: 2
• Number of theses defended in person: 1
• Number of theses defended remotely: 1
• Number of spectacular thesis committees: 2
• Approximate percentage of theses written at home, in the library, or otherwise at a desk in solitude: 10%
• Approximate percentage of theses written at Case Study with a group of other grad students who really just want to go to Killer Burger when they’ve done enough for the day so as not to be ashamed of themselves: 90%

I have packed approximately 20 books on #renaissance #literature to take home over the break. O, qualifying #essay, when wilt thou be finish’d?! #gradschool

Here’s a great essay from Esquire reminding writers that the literary climate isn’t nearly as hostile as we like to think it is. People still read—more lately than in the last couple decades. People still buy books. Writers still publish. All is not lost.

*I dislike the term “golden age,” but that’s how the writer describes it.

A few favorite passages are below:

Writers have always been whiners. For nearly a hundred years, since at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the death of the novel has been presaged. And now, egged on by BuzzFeed and video games and just general hypercaffeinated, e-mail-all-the-time ADHD, the book is apparently, finally, about to die. At least we’ll have good stuff to read while we wait. 

…

A massive process of literary rebirth is under way. Everyone seems to understand and accept this golden age except the writers themselves. Colson Whitehead titled his Grantland series about playing in the World Series of Poker “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia,” but it could just as easily apply to a country of writers generally, naturally given to feeling downtrodden at the best of times. 

…

Not everyone reads, but everyone wants to be a writer. The release in December of the film version of On the Road makes writing novels look like it’s all double handjobs by a naked Kristen Stewart while driving to New Orleans. (from a photo caption)

Read the rest of the essay at the link above.

Here’s a great essay from Salon on the unsettling demand of modern audiences for happy endings and comic stories. A few of my favorite passages are below:

Tragedy was so popular in 1849 New York that a riot broke out between the fans of two rival actors, Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready, over which man excelled at portraying such Shakespearean heroes as Hamlet and Macbeth. By the time the melee was over, 25 people had been killed.

…

The film and television industries, with a nervous eye on the bottom line, try first and foremost to please the audience, whether or not the audience knows best. Nobody wants Romeo and Juliet to die, after all. It is just so terribly sad to invest emotionally in a fictional character only to see him or her perish unfulfilled. 

…

The problem with this understandable reaction, however, is that without their deaths the story of Romeo and Juliet ends up as little more than a 16th-century version of “Gossip Girl.” The audience isn’t wrong to want the young couple to live, but theywould be wrong if they assumed that the satisfaction of their desire for a happier ending would make for a better play. Too many years of being catered to, of being served up thousands of formulaic, feel-good endings in which victory and love are snatched from the jaws of defeat and loss, have spoiled too many of us. 

…

It’s ironic that in a culture swimming with inane, pep-talk nostrums about the triumph of the human spirit and the importance of following your dreams, we have such a hard time seeing what’s affirmative about the best tragedies. They show us that a great spirit is still great even when it doesn’t win, that aspiration, courage and hope, however doomed, are virtues in their own right. That’s why reading (or seeing) “Hamlet” isn’t actually depressing, although everyone dies in the end and the hero doesn’t even get the girl. Hamlet’s moral struggle has meaning despite all that.

Read the whole essay at the link above.

Number of appalling #mispronunciations perpetrated by #humanities graduate students in tonight’s #literature seminar: 2.
#gramsci #hegel

Reflections on #time #management in tonight’s #literature #seminar.

Robert Frost, the old windbag, said poetry begins with a lump in the throat. What say we update this sentimental nonsense to something more fitting for our era? I propose that good poetry—and all art—is more likely to start with a lump on the testicle or ovary than a lump in the throat.

Walter Ong

Orality and Literacy, p. 81

Robert Burton

“Digression of Air”

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Really interesting essay up at HTMLGIANT on occult philosophy and literature. Some interesting passages:

One thing I’ve noticed is that literary writing by self-identifying occultists is often quite bad, even as (or because) it demonstrates its principles. On the other hand, literary writers who’re interested in the dynamics of occult philosophy and practice have generally produced exciting work.

…

Chance operations and bibliomantic appropriation have been standard procedure for the generation of a certain type of work for who knows how long. That reading/writing is necromancy by definition seems worth considering. Coffined thoughts, disembodied voices being freed talismanically from their bound sarcophagi.

No matter the case, works that make the writing about the magick that the writing does seem  natural in a time of such transparency. Away from the altar and into the streets. The alchemical project of Ariana Reines’ MERCURY, the instruction/rituals of CA Conrad’s A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON, and, in a similar vein, Yoko Ono’s GRAPEFRUIT all leap immediately to mind as partaking of that tradition.

The underlying importance of magickal engagement, in writing or otherwise, seems to stem less from craft in itself and more from devotional practice. To see writing as an act of theurgy is also to experience the world(s) opened up by the act as very real, traversable and holy zones in which both the creator and reader-as-creator encounter de/re-constitution and rise in transports of joy. It hardly matters whether these spaces are cthonic, celestial or both. Barbarous tongues, secret names, endless chambers, entities inhabiting multiple forms and speaking polyglot language. No matter how menacing, no matter how seemingly indecipherable the speech of beings encountered in the space unfolding, the openness required to walk through those spaces and discover what there is to be taught requires a kind of control in refusing to tame or over-shape its mystery. This would dull the glow of the Love we need to live that goads  to make its life our own and also everything.

Read the whole essay at the link above.