[ilds] OER

[Ric Wilson]

This may be as good as it gets said Mr. Nicholson once ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Nicholson ). The paywall has a long and elaborate history, a double-edged sword, ad infinitem. On one hand, there are those who'd look toward learning as an unlimited resource yielding ROI that clearly outweighs a phenomenon like "regulated capture." But this favors the precariat learner, an intoxicatingly seductive slant once upon a time. Darley's fiction was deemed genuine somewhere in that meandering track going backwards, so his point of view was immediately adopted. Snap.

On the other hand, estates are formed and designed through the fictions society creates for securing an elite "controlling" class of producers--writers included. It may not be appropriate to re-read one's AQ if in fact in the secrecy of his panic chamber he's supplementing his viewing of an appropriately acquired hard-copy with an unrestricted digitally thieved one--an unauthorized version on his 24+" from .ru--tapping into an uncontrolled server to assist waning eyesight. And hey, friends, there's undeniable residual angst at LD for leading me on through what, upon careful review in this community's chatter, may have been a cop-out's story. Am I the junky, then? Mutinously, one may insist privately that deconstructing LD's text(s)--googling out its fabric upon a virtual loom without the benefit of rulers, deciphering every single deliberately placed loose end (foreign phrases, place references, uncanny or unheard of schools of thought)--may reverse a precariate's cravings (see also http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/a-controversial-response-to-heroin-epidemic-supervised-injections to feel me), right? With so many digital fixes to choose from,readers may conceivably take back that power of intrigue given up during their prior reads, right? I could Wiki-out his place-referents almost instantly cutting out his stickers as if a chef filleting it up into a rendering than even many much wiser than me could ever hope for or want to be.... (http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-city-the-spirit-and-the-letter-on-translating-cavafy). Taking back what was once given up, LD retrospects, "in the same streets you'll wander endlessly"

Noam Chomsky (https://web.sbs.arizona.edu/privacy) made some fairly inflammatory remarks about governance and privileged access to resources as wedges driven deliberately between classes to uphold our social constructs. (I just viewed his Requiem for the American Dream documentary, his vision of what keeps us together or alternatively pulls us apart) What I'm leading to, pardon my scrawl, is that we're lucky to find ourselves engaged as a small group (?) of individuals  who tinker with these significant concepts in literature. Behold, I sense in our threaded dialogue these forces both shaping and identifying us within our larger frameworks. Each thread connects , it seems. So my shout out to the identification of a paywall. This is good company.

Ric Wilson

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Message: 7
Date: Fri, 13 May 2016 11:47:47 -0700
From: James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com>
To: ILDS Listserv <ilds at lists.uvic.ca>
Subject: [ilds] Tunc 1.1
Message-ID: <bb1f9448-a27d-88d9-d8ec-3d056005ef1c at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

Hi Bruce,

On 2016-05-13 9:59 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> I was unaware that an article was worth ?a couple of
> thousand dollars.?  I?ll take your word for it,
> but this seems to me unlikely.

I'll remove my tongue from my cheek -- they're not worth it.  It just
makes "Open Access" another revenue stream by getting funds directly
from authors...  That then opens the trouble of pay-to-print in a peer
reviewed environment.

> Your analogy between Internet strategies to make
> money and the policies of ?the firm? in /Tunc/ is
> provocative.

It's one avenue into /Tunc/, among many I think, but just like there's
no outside to the Firm (or ideology), I don't think there's an outside
to the scenario.  We can't run like Nash to the South Seas to be a free
individual outside of the social even while we cannot accept determinism
and an omnipotent ruler behind the curtain.

> One thing about /Tunc/ bothers me.  Durrell is
> the writer of ?the spirit of place.?  He is most
> famous for the landscapes he knew first hand.

The invented scenery around the Golden Horn is also a gesture back to
Conrad, but as you note, if he's choosing a place specifically and not
based on residence, then why Istanbul?  The joint between East and West
would make sense.  But we open in Poggio's, although even in that we
really open with Dostoevsky, and in French rather than Russian (and I
think in Boris de Schl?zer's existentialist translation).

The Dostoevsky quotation signals a kinship between the narrator of
/Notes from the Underground/ and our humble Charlock.  In other words,
he's not to be trusted, and we're marking out an anti-utopian topic of
discussion wherein free will, the individual, rationality, and society
are set in potential conflict against each other.  It could also be that
Durrell used French to avoid making an obvious parallel to George
Orwell's /Nineteen Eight-Four/, which he read and admired (and wrote
Orwell to congratulate him on).

In any case, we open the book with an invocation that argues against the
perfections of a utopia because of free will and irrationality contra
self-interest. Yet, we are immediately introduced to a theoretical
science of determinism, and I think that's not far off from where we
actually end the books too: choice and whether or not it's meaningful.
Of course, Durrell doesn't answer that -- we have to wait to see what
occurs beyond the ending.

Given the politics of the 1968 moment, I doubt we're meant to take it
lightly.  And if we were inclined toward the Enlightenment, we open the
novel with a "stone drunk" (troubling...) narrator and everything
"seeming" and fake (indeed, he knows only seems): "nominal chestnuts"
and "fake barrels" leading us to "the illusion of a proximate intuition"
(as if Abel is also us under the illusion of rationality) and thence to
"a buggerish astrology" that predicts the future but is also faked on
the next few pages.

Abel, of course, is parallel to Charlock's later child, the son who will
kill Cain just as religious phrasings and Providence are repeatedly
subverted in the opening pages...

As Vibart tells Charlock, "in psychology an explanation does not
constitute a cure," which also gives us a limitation on the novel's
ambitions and how we should read it.  We're going to get an analysis of
our contemporary woes without the Crystal Palace -- this will be a
dystopia not a utopia, or perhaps if we like via Fredric Jameson, an
anti-anti-utopia.  In short, we're not going to get any solutions.  I'm
very much inclined to look back 8 years to Durrell's "No Clue to Living"
as an accompaniment -- the book aims to avoid "opinionation" or the
taking of public positions as a direction on how to live.  It critiques
without offering solutions and a false utopia, a direction in which to
point and make everyone move.

At least, that's how the epigram and first page grab me, much like how
we read the epigrams for Justine at Bill Godshalk's provocation some 9
years ago now:

https://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20070407/46fa6629/attachment.html

I think he's as right as every, still guiding our conversations.

Best,
James


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