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I'll do those things...

just to note, in the interim, that my push-back is not about whether Wenders' film will be easy for our students--I don't @ all mind requiring hard things! It's whether it will be good (oops! can I really put that on the table here?). I'm resisting our sharing an image of the city that is alien, anonymous, disintegrating, exoticizing, interior, dangerous, intellectual: a place to be a spectator, an Other among Others...a place seen from afar...


though of course there are other dimensions of the self-in-the-city in Wings of Desire--the fluidity, the freedom, the self-definition, the intentionality of relationships--which draw me.

Last night I read (=previewed for our course) Zadie Smith's collection, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, thinking that her focus on revision might be useful for the re-writing/re-thinking dimension of our class. I don't think we want to use the book; it's mostly reviews of a variety of authors whom our students will not have read. But I do want to record here a couple of passages from one essay called "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov," because it describes an interesting shift in Smith's thinking about structure and freedom, which might be useful to us. As a student, she believed in the absolute freedom of the text; now she's more interested in the discipline of her writing practice as an intentional, directional act. I love her image of novels as spaces we inhabit:

“The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et. cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime…When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen...or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). Even the architect’s claim on his creation seems secondary to your wonderful way of living in it…..

It was meant to be obvious, to the college reraders we once were, that any restriction on the multivalent free flow of literary meaning was not to be stood for. But to speak for myself, I’ve changed my mind. The assumption that what a reader wants most is unfettered freedom, rather than limited, directed, play…none of this feels at all obvious to me anymore. The house rules of a novel, the laying down of the author’s peculiar terms--all of this is what interests me. This is where my pleasure is. Yet it must also be true that part of the change in my attitude represents a vocational need to believe in…a vision of total control…. I think of that lovely idea of Kundera’s: ‘Great novels are always little more intelligent than their authors’….

I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college any more, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader--the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with  a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but  quest for it….in a relationship that is...hesitant and delicate…we are stumbling toward meaning simultaneously, together” (p. 42, pp. 56-57, emphasis mine).