New Statesman - Claude Levi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory

Practical deconstruction:

Lévi-Strauss claimed to have discovered the fundamental differences on which all kinship and myth were based, and produced a simple combination of differential oppositions that, he thought, underpin even the most complex and apparently dissimilar myths. Myths were privileged insights into thought, and here his second thesis came into play: "primitive" societies or, as Lévi-Strauss termed them, "societies without writing" are more authentic than societies that have succumbed to writing. Ever since Montaigne, and receiving its fullest expression in Rousseau's noble savage, there had been a current in western thought which saw in "primitive" societies a richer, less alienated relationship between men and their world than that which obtained in "civilisation".

Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all kinship systems would be conceived as variations on a single theme, and all myths would operate around a set of basic differences - and second, a demonstration of the superiority of forms of thought that came before writing, before the fundamental alienation that occurred when writing intruded into an authentic idyll.

However, Lévi-Strauss's dominance of western thought evaporated after Derrida devoted a 40-page analysis to the anthropologist's foray into the world of the Nambikwara Amazonians. Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss's position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist trying to persuade little girls to break tribal taboos.

Derrida not only demolished Lévi-Strauss's sentimental valorisation of the Amazonians, but took an axe to his "scientific" project. Linguistics was based on the discovery of the phoneme, the basic element of sound difference from which all meaning in a language flowed. Yet the anthropologist's mythemes were always the result of interpretation.

Morrissey's Guardian Interview Comes Early: All Bow Down and Shriek - somedizzywhore.com

Vocational advice:

Referring to his own experience, he tells me, "Once you feel it and other people feel it, too, you stand and are authorised as a poet. I was the boy least likely to, in many ways. I was staunchly antisocial. It was a question of being a poet at the expense of being anything else, and that includes physical relationships, strong bonds with people. I think you discover you are a poet; someone doesn't walk up to you, tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, you are a poet.' "

Xanadu Redux

Endless critical insights into Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Sometimes, it's the only poem that really matters, as Bill Benzon writes:

I became interested in “Kubla Khan” during my senior year at Johns Hopkins in a course taught by the late Earl Wasserman. As you know, Coleridge had declared “Kubla Khan” incomplete: It came to him in an opium-induced reverie (opium was the aspirin of the time); he was interrupted by a man from Porlock; the reverie was dissipated and, with it, most of the poem vanished. The text was oh! so incomplete. I sensed that the two sections of the poem—the first, about Kubla and his pleasure-dome, the second, about a poet and his vision of the damsel with a dulcimer—had the same structure. I also believed that “Kubla Khan” became complete by asserting its own incompleteness: “Could I revive within me . . .” But he couldn’t, and so this incomplete poem asserted its own fragmentary nature, from within itself, thereby recursively attaining closure. It was a trick of the times.

Benzon uses a structural approach to demonstrate how Coleridge uses the story of his opium-induced reverie as a framing device for the poem as well as a way of disguising its more complicated views on dream, memory and the poetic imagination. When I was in school we did something similar by looking at how the poem is built around the concepts of Imagination and Fancy (which Coleridge described in the Biographia Literaria). Cool stuff.

But not as cool as this:

"America" - Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

Audio Link

Because Whitman deserves better than a lousy series of Levis commercials.

"Tell Me a Story" -- Robert Penn Warren

From The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren:

Tell Me a Story

[A]

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

[B]

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

Talk Amongst Yourselves, Part 3

Milch wants us to move from the fanciful associations we have to the imaginative associations we can share with others.

From "Tell Me A Story" by Robert Penn Warren:

Tell me a story.


In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.


Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.


The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.


Tell me a story of deep delight.

Later, we learn that writing is the process of accumulating images so that the fanciful associations of the dead past are transformed into imaginative associations in the future tense of joy.

We must rest transparently in the spirit that gives us rise and reject despair. If we cannot rest transparently, and force upon it a form and logic, then we are in despair. Resting transparently requires faith.

(This notion of despair comes from Kierkegaard).

Anything you think about writing when not writing is wrong. The outline is an expression of despair.