tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post113194855616590047..comments2024-03-21T07:37:30.475-04:00Comments on Light reading: I shouldn't read these thingsJenny Davidsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02295436498255927522noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-1132346371489197032005-11-18T15:39:00.000-05:002005-11-18T15:39:00.000-05:00You’re both cracked. Geeking around with Hegel and...You’re both cracked. Geeking around with Hegel and art-rock is “guy-ness”? N+1 editor grunts: “Yes, we’re men ... Behold a Guy”?<BR/><BR/>Technically I, too, am a man, but the fact of the matter is that I have only two penises while I have three or sometimes even four vaginas. My grandmother warned me that if I kept playing with those things they’d get stuck that way, and she was right. Don’t touch it, or them, she said. Then she fell asleep again on her sofa while watching General Hospital, which is presumably where she learned how I was or was not to surgically modify my own genitalia. I’ll admit it was kind of hard to cross my legs, but the truth is that all of this more or less escaped my notice until the census taker visited with his sharpened pencil and his yellow workbook. Take off your pants, he said. No, I said. Take them off or I’ll say ‘phallocentric’ and ‘heteronormativity’ at you, he said. Gee whiz, I said, just give me a goddam second.<BR/><BR/>Yours,<BR/>J. D. DanielsAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-1132073788165830752005-11-15T11:56:00.000-05:002005-11-15T11:56:00.000-05:00Criticism, even of the most rational kind, sometim...Criticism, even of the most rational kind, sometimes, one discovers, has a way of invoking the atavistic in both critcizer and criticized. That's no reason to shrink from it -- but be forewarned.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-1131983899314327492005-11-14T10:58:00.000-05:002005-11-14T10:58:00.000-05:00I have to admit that reading this issue made me fe...I have to admit that reading this issue made me feel like I do have to renew my subscription after all. You have certainly put your finger on the whole Rousseau-Wordsworth-Emerson-[well, I like some of Nietzsche b/c it's so crazy]-Benjamin-Greif thing. Next time I see you I will have to ask you about recommended strategies for coming to grips! It may be that I am simply destined to fail to appreciate that strand of modern criticism....Jenny Davidsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02295436498255927522noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6959297.post-1131965381302400162005-11-14T05:49:00.000-05:002005-11-14T05:49:00.000-05:00Dear Jenny,I won't pretend that I haven't heard so...Dear Jenny,<BR/><BR/>I won't pretend that I haven't heard some of these criticisms before, but now that you've gone semi-public with them, I think I'll also repeat myself semi-publicly, for the record, as it were. First, though, since you seem to have liked a majority of the pieces in the issue, why not renew? <BR/>Yes, we're men, and yes there's something often alienating about being forced to read from the standpoint of an intimate other--men or women of roughly the same social class, educational background, and familiar world of experiences. So much gets assumed and so much then gets left out and one's much more likely to feel skeptical and irritated than carried away into a truly other world. But what irritates me when I read this genre of criticism about n+1, and about Mark's writing in particular, is the way that it instantly sweeps a minority kind of masculinity into a big oppressive "Guy-ness" or male-ness. Would Mark or the composite character, "Intellectual Situation Man," be welcome in the now gender-balanced boys' clubs of the White House, the Wall Street Journal editorial page or the New Republic's, or even in the contemporary academy? I'm reminded of a nameless Renaissance studies professor, a woman, who once dismissed a question of mine because it belonged to a kind of intellectual history typical of Jewish male academics in the 1960s. Which is to say, the worm turns. Patriarchy exists, phallocentric analysis and heteronormativity exist, but I don't think reading n+1 is an existentially oppressive or exlusionary experience for those without y chromosomes. There are and probably there will continue to be pieces in n+1 that say "Behold a man" or "Behold a Guy," and some people will not want to look. Another question I'd ask, after your balanced review: why do you feel these pieces to be "dominant" and dominating? <BR/>I know that your particular dislike of Mark's writing comes from his style as much as what he has to say. I would love for you to come to grips with your hostility to the whole Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Nietzsche, Benjamin line of aesthetic criticism. And I'd challenge you to find moments in Mark's essays that are as full of Johnsonian, male hot air as the James Wood sci-fi/historical novel sentence you rightly nailed. As a reader, you can always refuse to read something because you don't care enough about the topic to take it seriously, but if you find yourself reading it despite yourself, late at night, engaged in fervent argument, and, yes, even rational dissent, I think we've done our job pretty well. -MarcoAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com