Wednesday, May 14, 2008


So buy my guitar, okay?

A bit of spring cleaning, including weeding out the string'd instrument collection (okay, partially so I can justify the next impulse guitar purchase). Nothin' special – an Epiphone (that's the downmarket brand of Gibson) Les Paul with the nifty tremolo arm that one doesn't encounter too often these days on Les Pauls. I bought it in a fit of Neil Young-worship, then realized that getting the Crazy Horse sound has less to do with having a guitar that looks like Neil's than it does with the single-coil pickups & just the whole amplifier/effects stack. But this one's way cool, & is going for a song: "fit & finish," as they say, are to my eyes comparable to the Gibsons. And mention Culture Industry if you win the auction & I'll give you a break on the shipping.
***
After many back-&-forth e-mails, my department chair has finally lined up external reviewers for the promotion process. Three real doozies, I must say – all I can do is fall on my knees like Wayne & Garth & moan, "I'm not worthy!" (Tagline from my days of obsessive Sir Walter Scott-reading: "Party on, Gurth! Party on, Wamba!")
***
Reading, desultorily. Malcolm Bowie on Lacan; Jacques Derrida on the Freud archive (which I thought I ought to have read before teaching the biography seminar, but have decided I didn't need to); Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, which makes me wonder why nobody writes middlebrow literary history anymore – it would be great fun to do for 20th-century poetry what he does for 20th-c. music; a half-dozen books of poetry; Dashiell Hammett, who might just be God; & Bourdieu, who is.
***
This is Culture Industry's 500th post. Golly. Long strange trip etc...

3 comments:

Don Share said...

Closest recent thing I can think of to Ross for literary history would be Michael Schmidt's books, e.g., Lives of the Poets, which covers at least some contemporary poetry...

Happy 500th!

Anonymous said...

500 posts -- keep going, Mark. Yours is a fine blog.

Are you still knockin' your noggin against Hegel? As a counterpoint to Kaufmann's meanderings, you might want to check out Robert Pippin's Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness.

Cheers,

Paul Naylor

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