Intellectual Hard-on
The phrase "intellectual hard-on" is not my own. I'm not sure who first said it to me, but the expression fits my experience right now.
I'm reviewing a book on Faulkner and an essay in this work is so beautifully articulated that I underlined furiously, marked "love" in the margins and then furrowed my brow as to why I didn't include "this" after "love." My next thought was that this is another moment of my falling in love with a writer. It happens to me every so often, when I find writing that is so clearly articulated and yet, at the same time, so poetic that I am not only cognizant of meaning but also filled with a kind of awe that makes my breath catch in my breast and my heart jump--hence that fluttering of first love/infatuation.
My first intellectual hard-on, that I can remember, happened with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale--I literally gushed with praise. My second and more intense experience with being intellectually smitten happened with Julia Kristeva's "Abjection"; and then after that Derrida (as you can read in my previous blogs). Now it's happened again. Read:
"There is, then, a sense in which I think of Faulkner less as an author than as a journey, a mythic and always contemporary encounter waiting, like an interpretive stone, to mark our modernity." Houston A. Baker, Jr.
Lovely. Just absolutely gorgeous. My eyes run over this quote again, drinking the words in the hopes that this elevation in spirit continues. Again and again.
I'm reviewing a book on Faulkner and an essay in this work is so beautifully articulated that I underlined furiously, marked "love" in the margins and then furrowed my brow as to why I didn't include "this" after "love." My next thought was that this is another moment of my falling in love with a writer. It happens to me every so often, when I find writing that is so clearly articulated and yet, at the same time, so poetic that I am not only cognizant of meaning but also filled with a kind of awe that makes my breath catch in my breast and my heart jump--hence that fluttering of first love/infatuation.
My first intellectual hard-on, that I can remember, happened with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale--I literally gushed with praise. My second and more intense experience with being intellectually smitten happened with Julia Kristeva's "Abjection"; and then after that Derrida (as you can read in my previous blogs). Now it's happened again. Read:
"There is, then, a sense in which I think of Faulkner less as an author than as a journey, a mythic and always contemporary encounter waiting, like an interpretive stone, to mark our modernity." Houston A. Baker, Jr.
Lovely. Just absolutely gorgeous. My eyes run over this quote again, drinking the words in the hopes that this elevation in spirit continues. Again and again.
