To counteract the cold--an oppressive "Oven"!

To quote Tony Kushner's Ethel Rosenberg, history is about to crack wide open--and with it (say the stage directions), goes the ceiling, too!


We'll spend the first half of tomorrow's class thinking about what these cracking angels of history in America have to tell us about the world at the end of the cold war. The second half we'll hand over to Evgenii Kharitonov and his gray "gay fantasia" set a little earlier in the socialist East.





I encourage the class to approach his manifesto, "The Leaflet," as a conversation with the West about "queer time" and the place of the homosexual in world history (which always pitches itself as straight, no matter which ideology--communism or capitalism--is catching). Whereas "The Leaflet" is self-consciously political and aesthetic-philosophical in its subject, "The Oven" is inversely and intensely lyric.  Consider it immanently, on its own terms, while also in sync with the asynchronous protagonists of "Pkhentz" and Queer, and similarly suffocated/liberated like Hedwig and the Angry Inch--whose namesake re-heats our cold war class in an East German oven before the Berlin Wall comes down and the semester ends... 

Getting Vertiginous (again) with Angels in America

In Millenium Approaches, the first half of his two-part dramatic epic Angels in America (which can and does stand alone as a work), Tony Kushner poses what Russian thinkers have called "the accursed questions"--those big philosophical topics that include the role of the nation, man's place in society, the social function of art,  and so on. We'll be wrestling with these issues (like Jacob/Yakov and the Angel), as well as the ones you post below for next Tuesday's class. You may find it fruitful to consider the play in conversation with Unbearable Lightness, since both works struggle to make sense of the movement of history, and the possibility of acting ethically in moments of personal and epistemic crisis. Enjoy--this is a goodie! 

Shitty metaphysics, at last!

Finally we've traveled far enough into the bowels of this unbearably beautiful book (AKA the birthplace of Tereza's soul) to talk shit in tomorrow's class! Taking a cue from Tomas's anal fixation and the stomach-turning latrine regime of Stalin's son, please contemplate the kitschy connections between the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the text in your comments below.

Of course, all roads lead back to the bathroom in ULB anyway, so you should feel truly free to post on any topic that interests you--just be prepared for the nauseating, vertigo-inducing acts of interpretation we'll be undertaking as a class. Those with delicate sensibilities may want to pack a dramamine tab and an airplane paper bag along with your notebook and the novel before heading to Thursday's class!

Inevitably--but hopefully bearably--we're mutating our motifs!

What a vertiginous discussion we had today! To repurpose a Stalinist metaphor to radically un-Stalinist ends, I'm dizzy with its success at destabilizing all meaning, as frustrating and unbearably light as that situation may be.
In sync with this swiftly tilting planet the novel has us inhabit, we'll shake up the function of motif groups in our next class. (The groups, however, will remain the same.) Please channel Sabina by betraying the original assignment, and reverting to old forms of marginalia or improvising new ones for the next ULB-based meetings.
For this purpose, I'd like you to use the blog to post questions for your group to consider on Tuesday, tethered however you like to your side of a given existential code. At the same time, try to channel your observations or questions into the issues of publicity and privacy, politics and personal life, intimacy and history. We'll start with Havel, and take Tae's presentation as a springboard for small group and collective class discussion about these topics.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Done with Midterms

Congratulations on completing the first major piece of writing for this class! And welcome to the wonderful world of Milan Kundera's book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This work intricately interweaves the lives of one protagonist with one another, their lives with that of the nation and its history, and these personal and collective histories with different ideas of history or historiographies. Thus we should read it as a philosophical novel, since it is also a self-conscious piece of literature, constructed with leitmotifs and other literary principles (of which the fictional characters themselves are aware). I urge you to take up the question of history posed by the first chapters of the book, or start tracking the major motifs, whose significance continues to accrue as the story progresses in not so linear ways. 

Strange Collocations: Daniel and Bambara

Since we reshuffled the schedule, we'll be splitting Thursday's class time somewhat strangely between a discussion of Yuli Daniel's "Man from MINAP," intended to be paired with Dr. Strangelove; and Toni Cade Bambara's "Witchbird," intended to be read alongside Ruth Zernova's "Mute Phone Calls." Please read the first two pages of Zernova's piece for something of a comparative context, and do consider checking it out in its entirety. You'll find many interesting similarities between the way women-narrators--in this case both artists by profession--narrate their felt or phenomenological experiences of the everyday. Post your comments on any of these works below--all the better if they contain some connections to the texts by other woman authors or writing about women we've encountered on our syllabus so far.

Strange Loves: Or, How Mac Students Stopped Worrying about their Midterms and Learned to Love this Bomb Movie

Sex, love and politics get even stranger over the short break. Drop your questions here on Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, George Kennan's "Long Telegram," and Yuly Daniel's "The Man from MINAP."

Killing our Darlings

Since I know you'll all be yearning for our usual meeting come Thursday afternoon, here's something to hold you over till after the break. A cast of fresh-faced stars are taking on Burroughs and the murderous primal scenes of mid-century beat culture! No less than Harry Potter will be playing Allen Ginsberg in this period piece, "Kill Your Darlings." If it opens up at a theater in the Twin Cities, we can consider coordinating an extracurricular excursion!

The Bell Jar Continues and Concludes

Cold-and-hotties, get your closing questions and comments on The Bell Jar up here by Tuesday at noon, or attach them to the previous post. You should also check out Adlai Stevenson's commencement address to Sylvia Plath's graduating class at Smith College in 1955. Finally, take a look-see at an actual goggle-eyed headline from Plath's Smith days.

And since this next meeting is our last before the modest October break, here are a couple of relevant blogs to keep your interest piqued about our pet themes of gender, sexuality, and cold war.

Bolshevik Mean Girls by blogger "It's Raining Mensheviks"and the classic Cosmarxpolitan . Enjoy!

Shrouded in Mystery and Trapped under Glass with Betty Friedan and Sylvia Plath

Post your comments below for Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique and Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar. The latter text seems to trap its motifs under glass, so that they swirl around inside with suffocating intensity. Try to catch some salient images by extracting a particular passage for us to close-read in Tuesday's class.  I also strongly urge you to consider the points of contact between The Bell Jar and "Elizabeth Arden," especially with respect to the narrator's direct call out to a displaced reader. Could Esther Greenwood be that "you" whom she summons? Ethel Rosenberg perhaps?

Out of this World and into the Kitchen!

On the docket for our next class is a strange and sundry blend of topics and texts to cover. We will wrap up our section on alterity and masculinity with a presentation by Taylor on sci-fi films in cold war America. Please take this opportunity to synthesize the previous material, especially Sinyavsky and Burroughs, and stick it in your mind's eye as we watch Dr. Strangelove down the road apiece. Although its genre is more accurately a political satire, you'll find Kubrick's film nonetheless forces us to think about the surreal scenarios and attendant anxieties (about gender!) engendered by scientific knowledge in a nuclear age.

So strange is this vision of the technological future for housework in postwar America, as in this 1952 print ad for the Hotpoint electric range, it shouldcause us to make connections between science/sci-fi, and the cold war family!

While all that simmers, make sure your discussion question for Thursday deals directly with the pieces on the calendar for this class, on which Eden will also be presenting: the Kitchen Debate and two texts by socialist authors writing about the so-called women's question from the point of view of women themselves. In fact, as Hannah pointed out, this is the first time women have spoken for themselves on our syllabus, and we should interrogate that detail from a metacurricular angle: why is that so? How might we explain such an omission according to larger cultural logics? More pointedly, how does the Kitchen Debate instantiate such a sexist oversight?  

Aliens, Art and Devices, Oh My! Making the Family Strange with Shklovsky and Sinyavsky

We're switching sides back to the Soviet Union for the next class, and splitting historical time down the middle again--as we did with Mayakovsky and Yevtushenko, now with Victor Shklovsky (1917/1925) and Andrei Siniavsky (ca. 1957).  As you may have surmised, the revolutionary avant-garde during Lenin's leadership found "comrades in posterity" during the cultural Thaw of the post-Stalin period. The critical continuities between "Art as Device" and "Pkhentz" will be immediately obvious to you, I'm sure. So please read the works on their own terms and in conversation with one another and the surrounding culture of the Cold War. Consider the following questions:
- What does Shklovsky define as the purpose of art and the task of the artist? Against what extant definitions is he working?
- How is art a device? What does it do and how?
- Is “Pkhentz” an allegory? Of what?
- What is the role of reading, writing and words in “Pkhentz”? Mark all the places texts appear in the story.
- How might we compare the description and function of the sexual grotesque in Sinyavsky’s and Baldwin’s stories?
-Finally, what are the stakes of "Pkhentz"'s taking an estranged or "defamiliarized" approach to art at that time? I suggest you think not only of Shklovsky's Russian notion of defamiliarization, but of the English etymology of this word. How have our texts made the family strange so far, and how does Cold War culture East and West try to make it automatic or familiar to the point of critical impenetrability?

Andrei Sinyavsky AKA Abram Tertz, post-GULAG.

Flipping out, going mad, and meditating in the midst of Mutually Assured Destruction: Mad Men and Frank O'Hara

Our talk on Tuesday about hipster psychology as a response to the sustained crisis of the cold war primes us for the first and last episodes of the contemporary TV drama, Mad Men.

Please be sure to read the poems by Frank O'Hara that provide the season its framing metaphor, while also connecting us to our Russian hipsters by claiming a common ancestor in Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lenny Bruce gave us the set up for the Cuban Missile Crisis last time, so let his line We're all gonna die! hang over your head while you're watching, too.

Hipsters, Part Two: The American Beatnik and Other Cool Cats

Lenny Bruce, raising his own eyebrow,
no doubt in a call-and-response
routine with the many he raised...

On the heels of Thursday's discussion about the Soviet Stilyaga's blue suede shoes, we hop over the ocean this Tuesday to meet his American counterpart in hip--the beatnik, jazz man, and the other faces in the crowd of cool cats who congregate in the seedier sections of major cities, like New York's East Village and San Francisco's North Beach. As you read Norman Mailer's seminal essay about hipster psychology, race, and the atomic age--a piece at once perspicacious and highly problematic--think back to our previous readings, and the ways they dealt differently with many of the same themes. Likewise for Lenny Bruce, who needs no introduction other than a name before he starts 'talking dirty and influencing you,' to paraphrase the title of one of his books.

For those of you who have watched Mad Men before Thursday's class, you may recognize Bruce as a smaller point of inspiration (beside Rat Packer Joey Bishop) for the show's Jewish comedian Jimmy Barrett. I mention this, and footnote Mailer's own downplayed Jewish background, because Jewish identity and Anti-Semitism are major if mostly unarticulated questions of the Cold War in the US and USSR. I encourage you to start thinking more systematically in this direction, perhaps starting with your discussion questions. 

Hipsters, Part One: Soviet Stiliagi

Mikhail Svetlov, Andrei Voznesensky,
Bella Akhmadulina and Evgenii Evtushenko

Soviet Hipsters or Stiliagi

Now that we've encountered Yevtushenko's poetry in motion with the Cuban-Soviet film collaboration, Soy Cuba/Ia Kuba, we're well positioned for our Thursday rap session on the return of revolutionary Romanticism, postwar nostalgia for futurism, and youth culture during the Khrushchev Thaw. You'll be getting to know other cold war cool cats in the coming couple of classes, so please post questions below that deepen our introduction to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, his fellow stadium poet, Andrei Voznesensky, and, in a remediated or retroactive way, to Vladimir Mayakovsky--with whom American hipsters will also connect their ethic and aesthetic desires. Feel free to ask about the hipster figure more generally.  

"I am Cuba" Questions

In Tuesday's class we'll be watching the second half of the visually/musically/conceptually stunning film collaboration between Russo-Soviet and Cuban artists called "I am Cuba," and framing this conversation with selected works by the screenwriter/post-Stalinist youth poet extraordinaire, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.



(*Pay special attention to the poem and the person, Mayakovsky. You've encountered him before with the cartoon "Black and White," and will again with Yevtushenko's poet-peer Andrei Voznesensky, and once more with Frank O'Hara on our Mad Men/Cuban Missile Crisis day.)



Please post your curious questions and other interested observations below... 

Cold War Exoticism: William Burroughs's Queer

Leave your questions here for Queer. Feel free to draw connections between Lee and the other 'difficult personalities' featured in last week's reading. What do Lee, Anthony Burns, and Jesse have to say to one another? What does Queer have to say about the Cold War? And what in the world do Lee's routines have to say about any of this? 

 

The Sado-Masochism of American Racism: Baldwin + Williams, Part 2.

Please post a question below that explores the continuities and contrasts of these complementary short stories, possibly stirring Circus and the Soviet cartoons into the pot as well. If you desperately want to post about only one of them, feel free. Otherwise I welcome you to respond to one of the questions posted about these texts--whether in this or the previous thread, by you or your classmates. You should also feel free to begin interrogating Queer, though I have a hunch we'll be spending the bulk of our meeting puzzling through these other two, and setting up what comes next in Burroughs's book.

American Authors Confront Race: James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams

- What connections do James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams explore between race, gender and sexuality?

 - Pay attention to the narrative texture of Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man." How does the story introduce its characters? Who is narrating? - What is the “thrilling silence” Big Jim C. talks about?  And what is the function of black song in the story?

Black and White in the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

If the Soviet film "Circus" spoke to you, somehow sparked your interest or left you scratching your head in a good way, I encourage you to make it the subject of your first 1-2 page reader response (due Tuesday, September 24 before the start of class). You'll find some questions to guide your thinking below. Keep in mind: these are possible directions to pursue in your paper, not top-down directives. Feel free to find your own theme and write a couple of coherent paragraphs of analysis about it.

--How are Americans and America depicted? How are Soviets and the Soviet Union depicted? How are Germans depicted?

--What kinds of oppositions—moral and ideological—separate the US and the USSR in the film? How does the film shore up these oppositions with black-and-white/light-and-dark imagery?

--How does the film demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism?

--According to the film, what are the US’s and USSR’s attitudes about race?

--What are the USSR’s attitudes about gender? For instance, who are the new Soviet man and woman? What are their psychological and physical attributes?

--How does the film handle the issues of marriage and romantic love? (Think not only of Marion and Martynov but also Raika and Skameikin.)

--Is this film propaganda, art, entertainment or some combination of the three?

--Why does this ideological struggle take place in the circus? What is the significance of Marion’s “Flight to the Moon” and Martynov’s “Flight to the Stratosphere” acts? What role does technology play in the film?  

--The dominant metaphor of Circus is that the USSR is one big, happy family. Do you agree or disagree? Support your answer.

--What can this film accomplish—artistically and politically—because it is a musical?

--The concept of genre is crucial to the analysis of an artistic text. Circus is not just a musical comedy but also a melodrama. What kinds of emotions does it attempt to invoke in its viewer, how, and to what end?

--What kind of viewer does this film assume? How does it embed these assumptions into its structure?

--How does the film use language—proper and improper Russian as well as non-Russian languages—to convey its ideological message?

For many of these topics, I encourage you to perform a close-reading of the film’s musical refrain, “Broad is my native land.” The lyrics are pasted below: 

Broad is my native land,
Many forests, fields and rivers!
I know of no other land
Where man can breathe so freely!
From Moscow to our furthest outposts,
The southern mountains to the northern seas,
Man walks as the master of
His own vast native land!

Welcome to The Cold War Gets Hot!