Notes from "American Parsifal"

"American Parsifal" is a class at Syracuse University taught by Andrew Waggoner, composer in residence and violinist. I took it in Fall 2009. The class appraises trends in the tug of war between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in America. Besides Waggoner's riffs on history and culture, we consumed and chewed on a lot of art: poetry (Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop), music (Charles Ives, Elliot Carter, early Rock and Roll, Jazz), film (Forrest Gump, Being There, Bamboozled), and essays (Louis Menand, Toni Morrison). I was pupil qua amanuensis for the course, typing away on my petite laptop to sop up the wit and wisdom for posterity. What follows are notable transcriptions and interpretations from my notes.

• "I dream up goofy, fun stuff to study.", "The history was written by men; it's really quite simple.", "I can teach any damn fool thing I want."
• Semiotics was like influenza - the US strain went to Europe, mixed with the French, became virile and nasty, and returned to the US to wreak havoc.
• Science as metaphor. Fundamental mistake: metaphors are not equal.
• "Public education in this country has been an absolute disaster for the past 50 years."
• Bush: America is falling behind in Math and Science--the same administration which had been openly aggressive and violent towards science.
• I do not want intellectual labor saving devices. The way to avoid doing that that musically is to listen to intellectually engaging, difficult music--jazz.
• "The Soviet Union was an anthill run by psychopaths."
• "The right is an easy target:" Bill O'Reily, Sean Hannity - bit players - "these are visibly stupid people."
• Three options when talking about blackness, Africanism, and other controversial phenomena:
  1. Talk about it in ultra-respectful, politically correct language with a sense of modesty and seriousness.
  2. Just talk about it.
  3. Do not talk about it at all.
  (we chose door #2 in class)
• "He wanted me to fight him, he wanted me to see him with all of his imperfections, he did not want me to turn him into something I needed; into a kind of black Dalai Lama."
• Going to a hip-hop show is a unique, black experience whites should get involved in; more black people should go to the symphony.
• There is no American music without black music, yet black music is over and over again characterized as a kind of dark, jungle music--corrosive, mad, rhythmic--capable of turning people insane or corrupting their brain with excessive, orgiastic experience.
• Forrest Gump: The film springs from the American mythos that "The truest, most authentic, and most valuable aspect of the American psyche, the American soul, is to act with innocence and out of a pure desire to remain impervious to the distractions, the temptations, the sense of chaos, all the things, in other words, that constitute humanity."
• In correspondence about this blog post: "I like the Forrest Gump quote, but maybe you could set it up so that it's clear that I hate the movie"  
• "So you can put that under your hats."

Rant of an ulkomaalainen (foreigner)

Brad: What am I up to tonight? Well, I'm hitting the Finnish again...

Brad: You're what!? What tomfoolery is this!? Why play Sisyphus?

Brad: My dear one, you can and should be a Debbie Downer if you want to be--you have logic, the majority opinion, and inertia on your side. And me? Behind me are assembled 5.4 million snowpeople (including Santa Clause, trolls, and various humanoids), some 200,000 reindeer, and 187,888 lakes. But, alas, I am not equipped with rejoinders. I shelter behind the vintaged commandments: respect people and country, avail oneself of the uniqueness, when in Roma and whatnot.

Brad: Kind sir, I see. Perfectly reasonable! I respect your respect for the Finns. Those sweaty nudists, reveling in the phantasmagoria of the northern lights, drinking the drink, and skiing the freaky fluke of Europe. Why not go native?

Brad: Assuredly, yes, a staid people with eccentric habits. I'm keen to join the club, but even they discourage learning their hairy tongue.

Brad: Haha, hairy?

Brad: Dotted, you know, not bald, but covered by a spotty turf, a prickly rug. For instance, "Miten täällä on yht'äkkiä näin vitun suuri määrä ihmisiä?" The question is this: Am I, AbelarBrad, bold enough to hug the bizarre to the bosom, to subject myself to an obscure and thankless toil? What kind of insane person wouldn't? Balls to sanity, normality, nationalism, conformity, pragmatic or instrumental logic, cost-benefit analysis, inference-to-the-best-explanation, optimization, conventional wisdom, the profit motive. Balls to the whole kit and kaboodle. Balls to Mitt Romney. I'm taking lines from the illogicians. Now is the time to suck the shock elements up the nostrils to discordianize the chains of command in the brain, the 'mind-forg'd manacles' that Blake wrote about. A friend I met this weekend said it best, "Hay que aprovechar chingada mierda, hay que aprovechar" (OK, I added the green language). Cachai? Moreover, what's a greater despoil of time: to dedicate oneself to a moribund language without hope of using it let alone becoming its master, or, given just one chance in a lifetime, failing to affix the lips to the cultural fire hose? And what is culture anyway? Bingo!, you guessed it, it starts with "lang" and ends with "uage"! It's not enough to ski and sauna to my heart's content, I need the langue and parole, I need Finnish.
So that's my rant for the day.

Brad: All hail the sultan of Finnophilia, ye squanderer of resources, cultural omnivore, engrossed in the fallacy of the unbounded, cosmopole lost in orbit. Get a real job, you eternally adolescent hipster day-tripper, you millenial, and then come talk to me--in English, if you please, the language of the ungraspable past devouring the future, the language of the always.