apologies if this makes no sense, but i didn't have money for beer, books and food, so i've got barthes on barthes and drunk.
raw norton, on the use of detail, the fact that these authors aren't doing the same thing with it isn't a problem at all. what we need is some kind of commonality and a point of difference; god knows, if everyone wrote books like IJ, i'd give up and learn to fix boats. IJ's mass of detail straddles a wierd line between the obsessive list-making you mention and a wierd distracted-by-shiny-objects shandyism, where every detail's set down because there's no sense of what's important. it rests very nicely against the calmer detail work in the nicholson baker book, of which more later.
to be honest, i'm a bit nervous of the burns book. i thought it made the whole thing a bit straight-forwards; i may be odd, but the narrative disatisfaction was part of the kick for me. i mean, for academic purposes such as mine, it doesn't really matter what actually happens in the book, if you see what i mean, so it's not an issue in those terms; i just really got off on the fact that i spent quite a lot of the last week wandering around wondering what the fuck was going on, only to cease to care because some sexy wee footnote came flying by and flashed me. that said, i read the beckett trilogy on the bog, so i'm a bit of a glutton for intense mental and visceral pain.
by the by, having sat around and done Deep Thought on this, and realised that making the poor wee sod read the trilogy just because i like it'd be poor tutorial technique, i've dropped the 'illuminatus!' angle; though i still think there's something there, it's more a paratextual thing about footnotes and appendices than anything massively revealing, so many thanks to all for chewing that one over.
i went back and re-read 'mezzanine', and i think we'll be using that now, along with some salinger; working around the redefinition of epicness, and whether you need a huge book to be truly epic. footnotes (my new obsession) aside, the wierd scope of the baker book'll be very useful; it's at once extremely narrowly-focused and very broad. huge respect, barbelith, you've done me a favour here. this was a singularly wierd and skin-of-the-teeth teaching job, and i was a wee bit scared, but life looks much rosier. the poor bastards i'm teaching eliot in the tutes directly on either side of the IJ one may be faced with yoda-like syntax and constant unabashed farting, but it'll be character-building.
i'm even going to get bakhtin into it, and you know you're alright when you've got bakhtin on-side.
at risk of attempting to direct the thread, please, talk to me more about IJ. i hadn't read it before, and am now half way through on the second time; it gives me pants-joy, so prolong the pleasure. |
