Please take a moment to fill out the course evaluations at:
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/ote/evals/
Deadline is December 12.
Author Archives: MRickenbach
Allen Ginsberg – ‘Howl’
Howl
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural
darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering
on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and
Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the
windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and
listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for
New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, […]
Blog Post, Friday 11/25 (midnight)
On Tuesday we watched Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). For this blog post look through your questions on the handout you received in class and choose one or two of the discussion points to elaborate on. Think through the question in relation to the last few weeks of our in-class discussions, and the theme of this course in general. Your post should be at least 300 words long (if you took the time to write down your ideas in class while watching the film, this shouldn’t take you too much time).
Extra Credit Blog Post: For the rest of Thanksgiving Break, please also read Roberto Bolaño’s “Sensini” in the Anthology (original Spanish version is here if you’re interested), and write a 300 word response to it on the blog by Tuesday 9pm. I want you to focus on your papers over break as we’ll close out the semester with a lot of attention on these final projects, but for those of you who could use an extra blog post, this is for you.
For Tuesday, November 29, please listen to the two podcasts on Nihilism linked on the schedule. They’re each between 30-45 min and are in response to each other. I think you’ll find them very interesting and it’ll give us something to talk about in class when we start thinking about wrapping up the course. You’ll hear a lot of familiar voices and reference points to what we’ve done over the past month or so. If anything comes to mind that might fit in to the discussion to come concerning what these podcasts deal with, please bring it in or post it on the blog. This could be anything from music, to political groups, from films to events, etc. I want us to start connecting what we’ve been studying to our current world and our own experiences.
Other than that, be safe and have a happy Thanksgiving!
Art and Self
Angie found a great (though short) video of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama who suffers from a Depersonalization disorder. While we have at some points touched upon the interest in certain movements of the 20th century in mental disorders (Surrealism especially), we haven’t really looked at it concretely. This would be an example of how they might have viewed the link between the creation of art and the ‘disorders’ that artists either suffer from or attempt to channel. That is, to explore another reality which opposes the notion of a unified and singular sense of Self. Yayoi Kusama’s disorder sounds eerily familiar to something we saw in Clarice Lispector’s short story. Thanks, Angie!
You can find the video here (hopefully it works, I couldn’t find an independent link):
https://www.facebook.com/playgroundenglish/videos/vb.259754044357933/373177613015575/?type=2&theater
And here is a Wikipedia entry on the disorder she suffers from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization
Blog Post, Tuesday Midnight
Read through the two handouts (Critchley, Lacan) and think about how one (or both) might relate to our reading of Clarice Lispector. These are both rather difficult pieces to get a grasp on, but try to raise some questions regarding the main points of the readings. Min 300 words. Due Tuesday midnight.
Blog Post, Thursday 10 pm
In a 350 word blog post, respond to the worldview that Beckett proposes. Use specific examples from the text. What challenges does the nihilistic tone of the play pose? What opportunities does it seem to offer, even if only implicitly? Due Thursday, 10pm.
Blog Post 11/9
In an attempt to begin to synthesize what we’ve been discussing in relation to Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, consider one of the main themes we’ve attacked (Power, Responsibility, Justice [The Moral, The Good]) and write a 350 word blog post in response. Also, make sure to first watch Jacques Ellul’s interview which is posted on the blog. How does what he has to say relate to the play? Please post by the end of the day Tuesday, Nov 8. And make sure to go vote!
Jacques Ellul on Technology and Responsibility
Blog Post for 10/31
For Monday night’s blog post, watch and respond (min 350 words) to the two films Un Chien Andalou and Ballet Mécanique (both on the video page of this blog). Consider the both the form and content of the works and think about how they represent what we’ve read in André Breton’s Manifesto on Surrealism. What sort of a ‘logic’ is at work in these films? What effect do they have on you and their intended audiences of the time? Think about some of the key themes we’ve been discussing in class, especially those we covered in the Futurist, Creationist, and Dadaist manifestos (shock, violence, the disruption of normal and conventional tastes, mores and senses of ‘correctness’). I think you’ll find these two films to be very appropriate for the holiday weekend. Enjoy!
Lu Xun – Diary of a Madman
Here is the image that Lu Xun probably saw in 1905 that convinced him to move away from Medicine and into Literature. What struck him, apparently, is the look of apathy on the faces of the onlookers. Think about how Lu Xun might have considered literature as a way to heal this antipathy. What might that say about literature’s place in the world in general? Or at least its possibilities?