Thursday, May 18, 2006

Kasimasi article's up
Hey, it got posted!! And the folks willing to put the effort in seem to have really liked it! Or at least were impressed by the dancing act.

"Bravo for staying true to yourself."

*BEAMS*

Also: I decided, shortly after posting this thing, that I could no longer worry about the fact that I wasn't getting to everyone. One day, perhaps, I will be able to get complex ideas across in three sentences (without semicolons - those are cheating), but that's going to take me years, and it's certainly not going to happen if I continue to just drop messages in bottles. The change I have to be able to make is to begin writing only for those who can learn (or, more properly, those who are open to it). I'm not yet at a point where I can approach those who basically just want to vote for their favorite Bleach character or those who, so to speak, "already understand it all," so I might as well go for the ones willing to pay attention... not necessarily to ME, but paying attention in general (and there are, I think, quite a few of those running around). After that, who knows.

I say over and over again in my analyses that I'm not trying to "explain" anything, if explaining means dissecting a show and tacking the different pieces onto a premade model of "how things are" or ripping away all ambiguity and mystery. What I write and the models I come up with are dependent on the show rather than the other way around... though this does not, of course, mean that I'm necessarily right or that I'm offering the only reading possible, nor does it mean that I avoid the danger of violence. My goal is to think what each show itself thinks, to be able to trace the movement of what it concerns itself with. I try to do this by bringing out, in an explicit way, the "vague" understanding that I already have of it and which allows me to appreciate it at all in the first place... in other words, I try to learn what I already know. This is certainly a method of some kind (it's clearly based in Heidegger), but it's not at all something to be picked up in a class on "literary analysis."

My hope is that there are people out there who are interested in understanding the things they enjoy in more detailed ways, but who find the usual sorts of "this is actually a phallic symbol" stuff silly and superficial. Perhaps these are people who've (in some liberal arts course) had to "apply" Marx or Freud or Campbell or god knows who else to something they liked (say, a novel), and had the results read like very good Marx or Freud or Campbell but have nothing at all to do with whatever the novel was about. These are the ideal folks I'm looking for. If it doesn't sound too pretentious, my hope is that those willing to learn will stumble across what I've done and recognize that there's another way of doing things. Which is not to say that they should be taking up my crap (I'm too long-winded and I talk about love and justice all the freaking time), but rather I'd like them to learn going to the work itself and thinking it through rather than simply comparing it against something else.

The point, if you like, is to teach and to learn paying attention. I myself haven't grasped this well enough yet.
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