Jacob Bender's Blog, page 5

On Hyperbolic Small-Press Pull-Quotes

During the lunchtime chatter at a recent conference, I overheard this poet complain that not only had actor James Franco published a terrible collection of poems, not only is it far-outselling far-better works, but what really added insult to injury, was that it has garnered rave reviews from actual respected poets, with such hyperbolic pull-quotes as "dramatize[s] the fever dream of American celebrity culture" and "Franco knows it like Melville knows whaling."

Of course, such extravagance isn...

E.T. Revisited

The moment I saw E.T. was now available on Netflix streaming, I realized I hadn't seen it since I was Elliott's age.  That fact struck me; like all kids born in the '80s, I have endlessly rewatched the touchstones of my childhood--Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, etc--ad infinitum.  Yet the biggest hit of 1982, a movie which, adjusted for inflation, pulled in over a billion dollars domestically, which posted Dark Knight and Avengers and Avatar numbers on a ti...

Digital Inhumanities: The Poverty of Quantification

Recently I attended a conference wherein a major focus was upon the "Digital Humanities," the latest cause célèbre in English and Philosophy today, oft hailed as the coming savior of our collective disciplines.  In one panel, the presenter showed a digital map of the Book of Matthew, with an interconnecting series of dots of various sizes representing the Book's proper names.  "Can you guess who the biggest dot represents?" asked the presenter.  "Um...Jesus?" we finally said.&n...

David Bowie's Blackstar

While I've always liked David Bowie--several of my all-time favorite songs are David Bowie songs, in fact--I certainly would never describe myself as any sort of mega-fan.  Some Greatest Hits and the obligatory copy of Ziggy Stardust were all I was ever really content to engage with; I generally found his output to be a skosh too uneven (especially the '80s!) to bother delving deeper. Nevertheless, the man's death last January hit me far harder than I ever thought it would, and I've spen...

On the Paradox of Mt. Vernon

The other big thing I able to see in Virginia this last weekend is George Washington's estate at Mt. Vernon.  The view of the Potomac from the back is spectacular, and the non-profit that owns the property has done an admirable job of preserving it for prosperity.

Nevertheless, my experience there was highly fraught.  For in one of the rooms, the tour guide points out a large key encased in glass; it is the key to the infamous Bastille, sent to General Washington as a token of friend...

On the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

I was unable to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum during my last trip to D.C. in 2013, and frankly, given the massive lines to get in, I wasn't sure I wanted to; something about seeing so many tourists herding into a genocide exhibit was kinda off-putting to me.  The crowds struck me as less memorializing than voyeuristic, gawking than remembering.  What's more, I began to wonder if our monomaniacal fixation on the Jewish Holocaust was a tad unhealthy--after all, there have b...

What Is Modernism, Anyway?

[The Review Essay from my PhD Comprehensive Examination Portfolio, which at least a few of my colleagues have purportedly found useful and informative for engaging with the surprisingly difficult question of just what the heck is literary Modernism, anyways?]

The oft-cited quote that haunts much of contemporary Anglo-Modernist scholarship comes from John Harwood: “We are accustomed to thinking of ‘Modernism’ as something that flourished a century ago, but the term itself was not widely...<![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>

Joseph Frank, the "Primitivism" of Modernism, and Mid-Aughts Indie Music

[The cover art to Animal Collective's 2005 album Feels, which mixture of the abstract and primitive will prove salient, as I hope to soon prove]  An essay that has surprisingly been on my mind lately is Spatial Form in Modern Literature, an influential 1945 study by critic Joseph Frank that was on my Comps reading list last year.  In it, Frank posits that so-called "primitive" art arises in civilizations not from any lack of skill or development, but from times of great turmoil.&nbs...

This Election is for the People of the Sun

[Emilio Zapata is not impressed with the current Republican frontrunners]  Let's be clear: this election cycle is unprecedented.  Sanders was just supposed to be the protest vote, to tug Hillary a little further left. Trump was just supposed to be yet another celebrity side-show.  Yet here we are (in a post-Citizens United world no less!) wherein folks on both extremes of the political spectrum have been rising up against the "establishment" in unprecedented numbers (even if th...

This is for the People of the Sun

[Emilio Zapata is not impressed with the current Republican frontrunners]  Let's be clear: this election cycle is unprecedented.  Sanders was just supposed to be the protest vote, to tug Hillary a little further left. Trump was just supposed to be yet another celebrity side-show.  Yet here we are (in a post-Citizens United world no less!) wherein folks on both extremes of the political spectrum have been rising up against the "establishment" in unprecedented numbers (even if th...