"Is it better to burn out or fade away?"

The title of this post is from Jack Black's character in High Fidelity as he's considering Stevie Wonder's legacy after rejecting a customer who is looking for a copy of "I Just Called to Say I Love You."


It is a difficult question, one that I have been thinking about the past few days while reading William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. I ended up liking the book and would recommend it as a thought-provoking read and enjoyable aesthetic experience, but during the first quarter of it was feeling that it wasn't very good and was another example of a text that is revolutionary when it is published, but loses its power outside of its original context (two filmic examples that immediately come to mind are 2001: A Space Odyssey and Midnight Cowboy). It just seemed like a bad prose rewriting of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (which makes sense because Ginsberg played a large role in editing it); it takes a little while to find its unique voice. Anyway, it was nice not to be disappointed by the novel's end.

Being Scholarly

Today has been an excellent, well-rounded day of scholarly activity. I taught the first quarter of my favorite book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, in my Masterpieces of American Literature course, read some early Allen Ginsberg poems in preparation for a lecture on him that I am attending tomorrow, and wrote an abstract on the role of nudity in Samuel R. Delany’s work for a queer studies conference next October. Ginsberg and Delany are two of the inspirations for my beard (Walt Whitman is the third); it was a happy coincidence that they both played a role in my day. Writing the abstract was my favorite part of the day because it came so easily. It was one of those rare writing experiences where I can barely type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. This was in part because Delany is consistently very open about his body in his nonfiction and about his characters’ bodies in his fiction, so there is a lot of material to write about, but also because now that I have a job for next year I can focus on my scholarship again, which I have missed deeply. It feels good to get the creative juices flowing, to be reminded that I can still think in a scholarly way after not having done so since November, really.