Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

So this guy is a dope

My criticism of his criticism (I'll flesh it out later) follows

1) The George Constanza "What do you mean Fred's Gay?" syndrome - he's talking about the movie - Scout is the heart and soul of the book not Gregory Peck - it's her book and Barra's got nothing to say about her - not one word. How on earth could you read that book and come away with nothing to say about Scout? and of course since he is ignoring Scout he overlooks the fact that the book has a lot more to it than simply the trial of Tom Robinson; that it's about a season in Scout's life and her coming of age etc

2) The question of moral ambiguity - (first of all the generalization "in all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity" is problematic but whatever) - you want some moral ambiguity Mr Barra? did you miss the ending of the book?

Through Scout's eyes we see her father as this idealized figure -

(no kidding she's recounting her memories of her father from when she was a child which by the way applies to most of Barra's criticism of cracker barrel fairy tales and sugar coated myths - we're dealing with the view point of a child Barra you idiot - I guess since Barra missed Scout's existence in the first place this was lost on him as well - and since he missed this he missed the ambiguity split between the narrator's perception and recounted event which btw has all sorts of implications including reliability of source and voice as characterization that his misreading doesnt take into account but here comes the most glaring one in this context...)

- so Barra goes on at length about Atticus being this upright paragon of virtue, a card board construct spouting homilies and platitudes etc

but then Mr Barra, Atticus decides to collude with the town sheriff to cover up a killing and let Boo Radley off the hook - did you miss this part? - Mr upright paragon Atticus Finch colludes with local law enforcement to cover up a murder.

And why? consider the parallels between a hypothetical Boo Radley trial and the one Atticus loses in defending Tom Robinson - Tom is clearly innocent, Boo less so though his actions are defensible legally. Both men face the prejudices of their peers. Boo is persona non grata no less than Tom, the strange bogey man in the haunted house.

Atticus makes a strange and one might say morally ambiguous decision here at the end for a Lawyer who spends the trial spouting 'homilies and platitudes' about justice and the rule of law etc don't you think? He tuns his back on the system and moral code he espouses and takes the law into his own hands sitting in place of judge and jury. Has his faith been shaken to its foundations by the blind prejudices of his neighbors? there's something going on there that Mr Barra has overlooked - something, oh I dont know.... what's the word for it? Ambiguous? well let's just say that the character of Atticus has a little more room in it than Barra supposes afterall.

By ALLEN BARRA

Georgia had Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers; Mississippi had William Faulkner and Eudora Welty; Louisiana inspired the major works of Kate Chopin and Tennessee Williams. Alabama had. . .

View Full Image

Associated Press
Gregory Peck and Brock Peters in the 1962 film version of Harper Lee's novel.

Well, while Zora Neale Hurston and Walker Percy were born in Alabama, those two great writers didn't stick around my home state for long. And as for Harper Lee—Alabama born, raised and still resident—she doesn't really measure up to the others in literary talent, but we like to pretend she does.

Ms. Lee is at the head of the Southern class in one big way, however: The numbers are imprecise, but according to a 1988 report by the National Council of Teachers of English, her novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," was required reading in three-quarters of America's high schools. Since its publication 50 years ago this summer, it probably ranks just behind "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," with American high-school students not only required to read the book but to tackle related projects. These range from drawing the courthouse where Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, was defended by Atticus Finch, to writing articles for the Maycomb Tribune recounting the trial, and recasting the movie with contemporary actors. (In 2006 my daughter, attending a public high school in New Jersey, cast Kevin Kline as Atticus and Abigail Breslin as his young daughter, Scout.)

One estimate credits the book with over 30 million copies sold—many, no doubt, due to the enduring popularity of the hugely successful 1962 film version, described by The New Yorker's Pauline Kael as "part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes." (Gregory Peck's Atticus, Kael wrote, was "virtuously dull," surely a phrase that can be accurately applied to Ms. Lee's model.)

Ms. Lee's only novel came along at exactly the right time: the year John F. Kennedy was elected president and the beginning of the decade in which the civil-rights movement began to change the South forever.

Naturally, it won the Pulitzer Prize. Its sentiments and moral grandeur are as unimpeachable as the character of its hero, Atticus. He is an idealized version of Ms. Lee's father, who, in real life and by contrast, according to biographer Charles J. Shields, once remonstrated a preacher in the family's hometown of Monroeville, Ala., for sermonizing on racial justice. Atticus bears an uncanny resemblance to another pillar of moral authority—the Thomas More depicted in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," which appeared on the English stage the year "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published. Atticus does not become a martyr for his cause like Sir Thomas, but he is the only saint in a courtroom full of the weak, the foolish and the wicked. And like Sir Thomas, Atticus gets all the best lines.

Atticus speaks in snatches of dialogue that seem written to be quoted in high-school English papers. Among them:

• "The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

• "Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up is something I can't pretend to understand."

• "If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . ."

• When asked if he loves Negroes: "I do my best to love everybody."

Atticus is a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams. He actually seems to believe the fairy tale about the Ku Klux Klan that he tells Scout: "Way back about nineteen-twenty, there was a Klan, but it was a political organization more than anything. Besides, they couldn't find anyone to scare." They gathered one night in front of a Jewish friend of Finch's, Sam Levy, and "Sam made 'em so ashamed of themselves they went away."

It's impossible that anyone who grew up in Alabama in the mid-1930s, when the book is set, would believe that story, but it's a sugar-coated myth of Alabama's past that millions have come to accept.

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Harper Lee's contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor (and a far worthier subject for high-school reading lists) once made a killing observation about "To Kill a Mockingbird": "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

Fifty years later, we can concede both that Harper Lee's novel inspired a generation of adolescents and that Flannery O'Connor was right.

Kerry wrote: "Dan wrote: "Now that's a classic Martyn rant!"

It's kinda nice, isn't it??"

not enough rants up in here

'one hit wunderkinden' seriously? nothing? tough crowd

Mr Othmer is out there in the tweet-o-sphere at this very moment trying to compile a list of top 5 'business novels' for a piece he proposes to write

I thought this might be a suitable topic to stimulate a little conversation so here's me kicking off with a couple

Bartleby the Scrivener - yes it's technically a novella but tough cookies
Up in the Air
Babbitt
And Then We Came to the End

to Martyn's point though the list generated by the millions in retrospect is a very good illustration of something important

in 1970 the New Yorker wouldn't know that Fear and Loathing was still a year away from being published in Rolling Stone magazine in serialized form by a 33 year old fringe journalist with only one previous book to his credit (a book at that point 4 years old with nothing to show for the intervening 4 years but a handful of magazine articles) - indeed, would the New Yorker of that time acknowledge Hunter S Thompson as 'proper author' even if he had published his magnum opus?

nor could the editors of the new yorker possibly know that at age 39 Toni Morrison was only just beginning an illustrious career that would eventually lead to nobel laureate-hood

nor that at age 34 Don Delillo was still a year away from publishing his first novel

etc etc etc

I would wager that more often than not authors of novels age into their ascendency in their 40s because it takes some living to build up a book in you unless you're one of them one hit wunderkinden

well it's fake in that the New Yorker didn't publish it as such and it's a list generated in retrospect but it's not fake in that all those authors were under 40 in 1970

saw this and thought it was rather jaw dropping

http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/a-...

Shel wrote: "As to the book/device problem for kids, I still say, think longer term. Really? Bandwidth? We're talking bandwidth? It won't be long until wi-fi or its cousin crosses the planet and internet access is completely free. It also won't be that long before the world gets all of its data from the same network that manages itself. Ten years ago I couldn't put a streaming video on my website without ten thousand warnings about file size and shitty resolution for the file itself. As for the devices themselves, that's a corporate giving thing. It'll happen. Once the devices themselves are a little more... um... kidproof, it will make more sense.
..."

I recently sat in on a panel concerning literacy and education hosted by Families in schools and the LAUSD

over and over again: no funding, cuts, cuts, cuts, and that was before the governator discovered the tax-month short-fall and had to come up with another 3 billion in cuts

during the course of the talks they mentioned the one lap-top program fondly but didnt seem to think it was a panacea for anything - interestingly for a panel focusing on the future of literacy no one mentioned e-readers, not once

they talked about parental involvement, they talked about public libraries, they talked about community engagement, funding, even corporate sponsorship of in-store reading parties

but for a group of experts concerned with the every day question of improving reading levels in schools and deeply troubled by and engaged with the business of funding cuts no one seemed to think e-readers were an answer worth bringing up

Shel wrote: "No, seriously, I know you're not that shortsighted.

Can't you see a future in which the devices are donated to schools much like one laptop per child? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Lapt......"

the money that's not there to get enough text books so they dont have to share is the same money that wont be there for e-readers (if it were this would be a non-issue in either case) + from previous posts I believe Andreaa is thinking more internationally and last I checked they still didnt have a plethora of wifi hot spots in the sudan so the kindle is a useless piece of plastic there until you get some infrastructure

Andreea wrote: " As far as I'm concerned making books easier to access can only be an improvement"

how is a $250+ e-reader (+ the cost of each e-book) making access to books easier than a $9 mass market (or for that matter a public library)?

compare the cases of Salinger and Harper Lee - she's lead a more or less normal life out of the lime-lite but simply stopping

freedom fries buddy - it's been a long time since we had France as a partner, maybe as far back as when they sent us that statue of the lady with the torch

besides - the french issues with islam also go back quite a ways - they have their colonial past to blame for it (read a little about the back ground of that Camus guy for some insight)

and in any event Im not altogether sure we ever wanted those froggy frog frogs on our side - as you pointed out they're by nature very unionist, socialist and quite snooty about their cuisine, language and beverages plus they're prone to strike in the streets at the drop of a hat

anywhoo - while you're teetering there on your paranoiac islamaphobe ledge you should try Jihad vs McWorld by Benjamin Barber

and who is we?

when did we have France?

the difference is Shields is trying to say something while Burroughs is trying to see what and how things can be said - I find the latter a more fruitful approach

The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin
William S. Burroughs



At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. AndrÈ Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicitó all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this pointóhad no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite differentócutting up political speeches is an interesting exerciseóin any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: ìPoetry is for everyone.î And AndrÈ Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: ìPoetry is for everyone.î Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaude is a Rimbaud poem cut up.

Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions ... all harmonic pine for strife.

The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance.

Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.

The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist.

Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall.

Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performance of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cutting Rimbaud and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his ìsystematic derangement of the senses.î The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.

The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduces the cut-up method of random action into game and military strategy: assume that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If your strategy is at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent will gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he can not predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by accident? We can not produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could add new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is no reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best. And the best is there for all. ìPoetry is for everyoneî . . .

Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged:

ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND. GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL: ìPOETRY IS FOR EVERYONEî DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE PROCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY, VARIATION CLEAR AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OF REARRANGED CUT DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD ìSYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENTî OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS. REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN WRITING.

From a Slate Article

The academic love affair with The Wire is not, as it turns out, a totally unrequited one. One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall. Simon has said that Wilson's book When Work Disappears, an exploration of the crippling effects of the loss of blue-collar jobs in American cities, was the inspiration for the show's second season, which focused on Baltimore's struggling dockworkers.

Wilson's class, a seminar, will require students to watch selected episodes of the show, three or more a week, he says. Some seasons, like the fourth, with its portrayal of the way the public school system fails poor children, will get more time than others. Students will also read works of sociology: two books by Wilson, as well as Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, Sandra Susan Smith's Lone Pursuit, Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America, and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's Off the Books, works that explore poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and the underground economy.

Asked why he was teaching a class around a TV drama, Wilson said the show makes the concerns of sociologists immediate in a way no work of sociology he knows of ever has. "Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the:] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than:] that of any published study, including my own," he wrote in an e-mail.

For Wilson, the unique power of the show comes from the way it takes fiction's ability to create fully realized inner lives for its characters and combines that with qualities rare in a piece of entertainment: an acuity about the structural conditions that constrain human choices (whether it's bureaucratic inertia, institutional racism, or economic decay) and an unparalleled scrupulousness about accurately portraying them. Wilson describes the show's characters almost as a set of case studies, remarkable for the vividness with which they embody a set of arguments about the American inner city. "What I'm concentrating on is how this series so brilliantly illustrates theories and processes that social scientists have been writing about for years," he said in an interview.

Anne-Maria Makhulu, a social anthropologist at Duke teaching a course there on The Wire this spring, makes a similar point about the show's power as a social document. She finds that, for many of her largely upper-middle-class students, issues like poverty and urban deindustrialization are remote from their daily lives, and simply reading about them does little to bridge that gap. The Wire puts faces and stories to those forces—Stringer Bell, the gang leader with the heart of a CFO; Bubbles, the wry, entrepreneurial junkie; "Bunny" Colvin, the police major who grows so disenchanted by the war on drugs that he tries legalizing them in his district.

"There's this question of how you appeal to young people who feel—not all of them but many of them—far removed from the type of people who are the major characters in The Wire," Makhulu says.

see, that story is luminous and limning and what not right there - all those big 10 cent words plus some

Pavel wrote: "Matt wrote: "so do rabbits"

No they don't."

they do if they are proletariat rabbits living under the thumb of Boss Wolf