william watkin's blog (since 2003)

The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 masterpiece “The Scarlet Letter” tells the story of one Hester Prynne, adulteress.  As punishment for her crime Hester is forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her clothes at all time so that everyone in the New England community where she lives can see the mark of her shame.  This public marking has the effect of destroying Hester’s life making her an outcast, a despised other.  It would appear that A stands for alterity as much as it does for adultery.  When I studied this novel over twenty years ago I will admit I didn’t quite get it but, like the ineradicability of sin itself, it stayed with me so that when I read a couple of weeks ago that asylum seekers in Cardiff had been forced to wear red wristbands by Clearsprings Ready Homes in order to be fed, I finally got the point of Hawthorne’s enigmatic work. The Red Wristband Policy I particular, the management at Clearsprings Ready Homes did me the p...

If the last century belonged to the philosophers of difference, then this must be handed over to the purveyors of philosophical indifference of whom one name stands out: Giorgio Agamben.  What is philosophical indifference?  The standard dictionary definition of the term meaning not caring either way, finds voice in the first age of philosophical indifference stretching from Stoicism to Kant’s attack on philosophical indifferentism in the opening pages of the first critique.  It is the inability to make a single, true for all time philosophical decision in favour of one position or action over the other.  Indifferentism occurs especially when, as is always the case according to Agamben, the two positions you could care less about either way occupy that of on the one hand a unified, founding, common, one and on the other a multiple, actualising, proper, many.  So, in a sense, since the Greeks, philosophy has been a dispute over the prevalence of indifference: we...

“Popular Songs”, 10-11 “The involuted consonance (“car with the cur,” “gone to a longing”) of “Popular Songs” anticipates the wilful music of “Two Scenes”, whilst jarringly disjunctive lines point towards the novel-collages of The Tennis Court Oath.” (Shoptaw 30).   I will hand over to the authority of Shoptaw in fact for most of the analysis here.   So, Shoptaw notes the songs of the 1930’s that embedded throughout the piece: “Blue Blue Ridge Mountain”, “The Garden of the Moon” and so on.   He quotes Ashbery as saying: “it was written in an attempt to conjure up the kind of impression you would get from riding in the car, changing the radio stations and at the same time aware of the passing landscape. In other words, a kind of confused, but insistent, impression of the culture going on around us.” (Shoptaw 31, citing Ashbery).   This is actually a good general summation of Ashbery’s own sense of composition as a combination of an actual circumstance in ‘reality...

This is a poem about duality so in this sense the title actually refers to what the poem is ‘about’. John Shoptaw notes, for example, the phonic mirroring of the poem which he sees as an element later phased out as is the “linear introversion” to be found here. Thus we have the following phonic recurrences: “we see us as we”; “Destiny...destiny”; “News...noise”; “...hair/Air”; “-y” and rhymes of section 2; and “...old man/...paint cans”. This simple but subtle semiotic device is then developed structurally as well, as the title hints. So ‘scene’ 2 reflects back internally onto ‘scene’ 1. “Machinery” recalls the train as does the canal; general honesty recalls “truly behave”; “history” relates to “destiny”; “fumes” to the “air” in the “mountains” (cf. “Answering a Question in the Mountains”); “dry” speaks to the “water-pilot”. Finally there is an example of what we should call image logic or associative deduction which is perhaps, in the end, Ashbery’s greatest talent. The “warm and ...