Curtis White, you wimpy little bastard

[them_apples]

     well, don't get too excited. i haven't really gotten anywhere with this crazy kid, yet. but i did spend about three hours reading his fuck-you fest the middle mind last night when i couldn't fall asleep.

but this is a blog, after all, and blogs are meant to be digestible little tidbits, not the three-page tomes i usually post. just little

Comments

Re: Further reading (of course)

[them_apples]

well, i think i like his non-fiction better than the americana-pastiche fiction i've read so far. unfortunately, i think the one i have a chance of actually genuine liking is america's magic mountain, which sounds promising despite being a straight-up transplant like i was saying earlier didn't work. and i know you've been dying to get me to read requiem, which i'll be starting probably today, since i left middle mind in the back of someone's car, but the first few pages, along with the overt structure seem a bit disheartening. smart people aren't always smart artists, and white even directly addresses this at some point in MM. there's a world of difference between just flaunting your smattering of modern-day culture in with a requiem structure, and say what joyce did, or eco does in foucault's pendulum.

as for his reading of private ryan... i wasn't saying it wasn't a good one. and the end message is pithy. i just thought it was bizarre that six pages earlier he complained that close reading was being overused to analyze popular culture as having some sort of relevance, and then he does exactly that. and even this, what i'm doing right now, is a close reading of white. it's so inculcated in intellectual discourse, and i don't think people even notice they're doing it anymore. but wasting it on something like saving private ryan, or forrest gump, i don't know how useful it is. and this argument is separate entirely from my personal concern that close reading, along with deconstruction, can only be a negative act. sure, now i'm *more* aware that saving private ryan has a barbaric, jingoistic message at its center. i'm no more inclined to take it seriously now than when i saw it originally and dismissed it as patriotic crap. oh, so now i have more reasons as to *why* it's patriotic nonsense, and more ammunition as to why patriotic nonsense is (a little bit) dangerous. that would be incredible if it made me reconsider my stance on something i'd been taking in earnest to begin with, but... it's saving private ryan. i don't need a close reading of AI to know that was shit, either. now... a close reading of Minority Report might be useful, particularly given PK Dick's original purpose and statement of the balance of power in government in the original, and how that was treated in the movie. but: what's the point of analyzing any commercial artistic endeavor? not much. it destroys its platform in new ways, but doesn't leave anything in its place other than the knowledge that it's bad for more reasons than you originally thought.