Culture Industry

shameless self-promotion

2012-01-13T13:29:00.004-05:00

I am still reeling, & delighted, at the publication of Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, and looking forward to formally launching it at a reading at Our Fair University next Wednesday evening. (Locals, by all means come around!)

But I'm also pretty psyched about this:
Yes, it's the next book, Red Arcadia, due out from Shearsman in the middle of next month. You can read a bit more about it here. An altogether different collection – multiple forms, short poems and longer poems – but (I like to think) chock full of nutty goodness. By all means order now!

Joseph Donahue: Dissolves

2012-01-12T20:43:00.004-05:00

Dissolves: Terra Lucida IV - VIII, Joseph Donahue (Talisman House, 2012)

"Dissolves" is of course a verb, what the Alka-Seltzer does in the glass of water, releasing its dancing effervescence; but, as we might be reminded by director Stanley Kubrick's brief walk-on in Joseph Donahue's latest book, it's also a noun: a kind of cinematic transition – from image to image, scene to scene, perspective to perspective. One's grounds are continually dissolving & reforming in this latest installment of Donahue's serial poem Terra Lucida (serial: think Duncan's Passages, Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou, Finkelstein's Track); we find our surroundings & perspectives anew from poem to poem, from one section of a poem to the next.

What is constant, as we move among the gnostic glitterings of the poem – for it is gnosis, in the end, that renders Donahue's world lucid – moving between religious vocabularies, treasure-houses of scripture & ritual – Islamic, Jewish, Roman Catholic – moving from waking lucidity to keenly-etched dreamspace (there are number of dream-poems here, aislings as it were) – what is constant is Donahue's 2-line form, a kind of ground-bass of plangent music, here evoking Mackey, there evoking Taggart, always paying homage to H.D.

The sheer material here is hard for me to take: among other things, the death of a mother (still) touches me too close for commentary. But the magnificent image that follows the moment of that death, the drowned cathedral drawn from Debussy's Cáthedral engloutie, is nothing short of mesmerizing, haunting, especially in its climax, when the waters rise to the level of the ciborium and the Host itself is – yes – dissolved. It is dissolved, a post-gnostic might say, into countless shards & atoms of bright divinity, embedded in each of us – making the world in which we live, move, & read, one terra lucida.

[118]

year's end lists

2011-12-18T23:03:00.004-05:00

So I read the lists of "year's best" whatevers this time of year, & inevitably feel out of it, behind the times, fuddy-duddyesque, etc. And I read the excellent Steve Evans's "attention span" feature on his Third Factory, where he solicits people to name their current notable reading, and I inevitably feel out of it, behind the times, etc. But for what it's worth, here's some notables that I've read over 2011 – not a year, I'm afraid, that I'm in any hurry to revisit.

While I revisited a lot of biography in the Spring teaching a biography seminar (Claire Tomalin's Pepys, Ray Monk's Wittgenstein, James Miller's Foucault, etc.), I haven't read many memorable biographies this past year; standouts were I suppose Ian Hamilton A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold and Ralph Maud's cranky Charles Olson at the Harbor, something of an anti-biography – more specifically, an anti-Tom Clark biography.

History/intellectual history and philosophy were heavy on the ground, much of it on the Victorians: TW Heyck's The Transformation of Victorian Intellectual Life was eye-opening, & AN Wilson's The Victorians was great fun, and beautifully written. David Cooper's A Philosophy of Gardens, if a trifle dry, was well worth the slog.

I'm purposefully leaving out the bales of Ruskin criticism I've read this year, & singling out some titles of non-Ruskinian interest:

Ross Hair, Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry
Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings
Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
A. D. Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination

(The Nuttall book officially counts as an intellectual romp; from the Casaubon of Middlemarch to Mark Pattison, his supposed model, to Pattison's own scholarly interest, the early modern humanist Isaac Casaubon.)

I read more fiction than usual, for whatever reasons – comfort food, I suppose. Much of it was ephemeral in the worst sense: reread trashy science fiction & fantasy from my junior high years; stacks of HG Wells and Jules Verne. I did read Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, which I highly recommend. And after being prodded to read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower by more than one poet friend, I finally buckled down and did so, only to find it transcendently beautiful & deeply moving. So of course I read four more Fitzgerald books: each one different, each one perfect of its kind: Offshore, The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Golden Child.

And then there's poetry. This was the year of the anthologies, two of which I read straight thru – Christopher's Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse and John Dixon Hunt's Oxford Book of Garden Verse – and several others I'm at various stages of. But these were a few of the outstanding titles – but only a few – among the maybe 80 or 90 collections of poetry I read for the first time this year:

Rae Armantrout, Money Shot
Dan Beachy-Quick, This Nest, Swift Passerine
Caroline Bergvall, Meddle English
Sean Bonney, The Commons
Cyrus Console, The Odicy
Chris Glomski, The Nineteenth Century and Other Poems
Geoffrey Hill, Clavics
Joseph Lease, Testify
John Matthias, Trigons
Lisa Robertson, R’s Boat
Jay Wright, Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms, and Praise for Lois

Astonishingly enough, I seem to have read thru ten volumes of the Library Edition of Ruskin this year. But for some inexplicable reason, that fact doesn't do much to lift me out of my current slough of despond.

shameless (but virtuous) self-promotion

2011-12-10T01:40:00.003-05:00

The excellent Brent Cunningham, big cheese at Small Press Distribution out the Bay Area way (god, I remember ordering from that catalogue from my dorm room at Virginia Tech – first editions of Radi Os and The Years as Catches, strange chapbooks & oversized, ill-printed treasures by poets whose names I had heard only as strange, talismanic sounds), has posted a link on his FB page to this Publishers Weekly article, which details some of the competitive nastiness that Amazon.com seems to be encouraging in its bid to drive independent bookselling into the ditch. Among the latest: "customers regularly scan books with their smart phones and then order discounted copies directly from Amazon, or even use the bookstore’s free Wi-Fi to download Kindle e-books to their devices."

Well, John Ruskin had the remedy for that, and came up with it as far back as the 1870s: the Net Book Agreement, by which the publisher set the price the retailer would charge for the book, & would no longer supply books to a retailer who sold them below that price. While the NBA didn't come into general practice until 1900 in Great Britain, Ruskin had sold his own books under such a system since the early 1870s. This is the book: it's a half-guinea without plates, a guinea with; that's what you sell it for. You want to sell it for 10 shillings? – too bad; you won't be getting copies.

It's the dissolution of the NBA since the mid-90s, among other things, that has been the downfall of British independent bookselling. If there's no set price at which a book must be sold, then Barnes & Noble and Amazon, with their tremendous volume, will sell it at a discount, and will drive out of business the small concerns that can't afford to cut their prices. Think of it as the Wal-Martization of the book industry.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying: I have a new book out – I haven't mentioned it in this space for a full month, so I think it's time to mention again. It's called Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles. It's forty-two short but nasty poems, packed with nutty goodness. It will change your life harder than a naked torso of Apollo. And it makes an equally fine present for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or that moment when you're thinking "I need to give my sweetie something that'll make him/her say Gosh! that's just what I wanted!"

You can buy it directly from the publisher, The Cultural Society, by using this link, and everything over production cost will be ploughed directly back into Zach Barocas's master project of flooding the world with fine poetry. Or you can buy it from Brent Cunningham and the excellent human beings at Small Press Distribution, who will apply their rather nominal percentage of the take to their master project of making small press literature available to the masses. I think both options are equally virtuous.

my robert creeley

2011-12-07T22:51:00.003-05:00

One of the earliest posts on Culture Industry was a rumination on Robert Creeley after his death in late March 2005. I know he is still mourned, and I – who was never close to him – miss him still. As I said there, it's hard for me to remember a time when his writings weren't central to my idea of what poetry is. This past semester, I realized how central his poems are to my teaching of poetry, as well. In the course of an undergraduate Contemporary American Poetry class, we went through maybe 30 pages of Creeley – probably as much as any other single poet – and I think my students found him more interesting & sympathetic than almost anyone else. (Tho I'm in the midst of reading some kick-ass final papers on Susan Howe, Ronald Johnson, and John Taggart, as well.)

It's been a rare semester when some poem of Creeley's hasn't landed on a syllabus of mine, or hasn't been handed out on a xerox or flashed onto the screen from Google Docs. What Creeley is good for pedagogically – and this can be separated out, at least theoretically, from the intrinsic value of his verse – is teaching line breaks (the music of enjambment and end-stopping), pointing up minute shifts of diction, and thinking about the construction of longer sequences out of short poetic units. Needless to say, I know the anthology pieces pretty damned well after all these years.

But I've been reading Creeley more or less steadily since I got those copies of Words and For Love in the Blacksburg used bookstore lo those many years ago. But it's only over this Fall that I started tackling him in bulk, straight thru. And I've found him defeating me: that is, I've had the first volume of his Collected Poems (1945-1975) down from the shelf for weeks & weeks, taking it up and then falling back overwhelmed. Not in the sense that I'm overwhelmed when I read John Peck or Susan Howe in bulk – that overwhelming involves never wanting to read another poem again, much less to pick up a pen: the same defeat I feel when reading Nabokov or Woolf, the sense of a writerly mastery so great that it makes further effort nugatory. Creeley, rather, seems to involve me in a never-ending forest of poems, some of whose value is radically undetermined: I stumble from one to the next, unsure whether to take seriously what I've just read – is this part of the sad lumber that sometimes overbalances the valuable ore in a poet's early collections?

What I need, Ba'al help me, is a Selected. I know, that makes me a kind of critical weakling, an ingenue, an toddler crying out for pabulum when it's time to tackle the grown-ups' dishes. But it worked for Olson and Duncan. Before I made my full-scale assaults on their collected works, I spent serious hours reading selected editions, seeing how their editors had mapped out the territory, what the editorial Baedekers recommended as the to-see spots. Then, when I dived into, say, Olson's full Maximus Poems and Collected Poems (excluding Maximus) I had a baseline picture against which I could measure the poet's full achievement.

I haven't yet laid hands on Ben Friedlander's selected Creeley (U California, 2008), but the other day I happened upon an earlier Selected Poems (U California P, 1991), this one chosen by the poet who perhaps knew Creeley's work better than anyone else – Creeley himself. And yes, by halfway thru it's been revelatory, showing me the contours of the work better than the randomly ordered reading I've done over the years, and better than the page-1-thru-page-600 slog I had set myself for Creeley's Collected. That latter slog will come soon enough, & no doubt will involve an implicit revision on my part of Creeley's assessment of his own achievement. But I've begun, and a solid beginning is half the struggle, in my experience.

ruskin crossroads (revised)

2011-12-05T23:50:00.002-05:00

Shortly after I posted that last post, I launched into Fors Clavigera, Volume I, 1 January 1871. And it was grand to revisit the texts of those early letters. I had to rein myself in, & allowed myself no more than 3 letters a day. But earlier today I found myself reading the Christmas 1871 letter, getting depressed by the actual vicinity of the holidays, & realizing that if I kept up this pace I would entirely lose the chronological thread of my Ruskin reading, here in this most crucial decade.

So I've revised my plan: Instead of reading a Library Edition volume of Fors, then returning to his concurrent writings & lectures, I'll read a year's worth of Fors (Library Edition vol. 27 contains Fors for 1871-1873) and then that same year's lectures & miscellaneous writings. It will be a wobbly, back-n-forth process, but I think it'll give me a clearer picture of the man's intellectual movements than otherwise. So now that I've read Fors for 1871, I've turned back to Volume 22 of the Library Edition, & will read roughly the first half – Lectures on Landscape, delivered at Oxford in the Lent 1871 term, and "The Relationship of Michael Angelo and Tintoret," delivered later that year. (He didn't seem to give any lectures in the Fall of 1871.)

One of the advantages of this plan is that the introductions to the lecture volumes – roughly 20 through 24 – are not merely overviews of the texts contained in each volume, but contain a more or less complete running biography of Ruskin. (Indeed, E. T. Cook, who wrote the introductions, would later combine their biographical narrative material into an excellent and straightforward two-volume biography.)

All this would be easier, of course, if I had at hand at decent chronology of Ruskin. The internets (specifically, the eBay) yielded up a copy of JL Bradley's A Ruskin Chronology (Macmillan, 1997) the other week, and I'm in total agreement with the general editor's preface to the series ("Author Chronologies") to which that volume belongs:

Most biographies are ill adapted to serve as works of reference... There are times... when anyone reading for business or pleasure needs to check a point quickly or obtain a rapid overview of part of an author's life or career; and at such moments turning over the pages of a biography can be a time-consuming and frustrating occupation.

Alas, I will refrain from commenting on the job Bradley's done of it; suffice it to say that he's vague when I want him to be precise, and precise when couldn't care less. (And I'm thinking that maybe I ought to publish the detailed chronologies and databases I generated when I was working on the LZ biography.)

One of the minor irritants is the fact that Bradley is that most unreliable of chroniclers – a profound partisan. He's a Ruskinian thru and thru. When it comes to 1854 – the year in which Effie Ruskin finally fled her husband and filed suit to annul the marriage – his partisanship becomes unmistakeable. Effie found a friend and councilor in Lady Eastlake, who mounted something of a drawing-room publicity campaign on her behalf after she had left Ruskin; after all, anyone who's read more than a couple Victorian novels knows what an act of desperate courage it would be for a woman to leave her husband in 1854. Bradley's summation: "May: In the aftermath of the scandal Lady Eastlake continues to revel in spreading information."

His July 15 entry is priceless: "A judge, sitting for 'A Hearing of the Cause', declares 'the pretended marriage of [John Ruskin] and [Euphemia Gray] a nullity' and ECGR 'free from all bonds of matrimony'. In the verbal jungle of the case the 'incurable impotency' of JR is alleged." Well, I've read that judgment. It's remarkably clear and straightforward; no jungle about it, more a kind of Saharan simplicity, if indeed couched in legalese. What depths of sympathy have driven Bradley, normally a level editorial scholar, to such contortions? Say it straight, man: "The judge annulled the marriage on the grounds of JR's 'incurable impotency.'" Period.

Of course, one has to retain the scare quotes around "incurable impotency," for Ruskin, in an affadavit to his own lawyers, had strenuously insisted on his own potency, offering to demonstrate if so desired (!): it was just Effie for whom he couldn't – or wouldn't – perform the conjugal obligations. Needless to say, this is an issue around which an older generation of passionate Ruskinians have danced many elaborate dances.

On the other hand, reading Cook's beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and critically aware biographical introductions to the Library Edition, one is often brought up short as well. Of Ruskin's illness and emotional strife in 1871, Cook comments "The pain to which he referred was suffered in the region of the affections, for this year was a dark one in the chequered story of his romance." Got that? And that's all you'll get, at least from Cook.

The "affection" in question was for Rose La Touche, the Irish girl with whom Ruskin had fallen in love perhaps a decade before – when she was still in her middle teens. The story of Ruskin's passion for Rose, who was fanatically evangelical, perhaps anorexic, and in the end mentally ill, has been largely omitted in the Library Edition – though Ruskin showed his overwhelming cathexis for this troubled young woman by embroidering images of roses through all of his later works. He had written Sesame and Lilies with her in mind; he would come to identify her with St. Ursula, as painted by Carpaccio, and with the tomb statue of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia (in Lucca); after her death in 1875, she would become his Beatrice.

But Edward Cook was writing his introductions under the watchful eye of Ruskin's heir, Joan Severn (née Agnew), Ruskin's cousin, who had married the artist Arthur Severn. (Severn's father Joseph had tended Keats in his final illness in Rome.) Joan had nursed Ruskin through his bouts of madness, and through the long twilight decline of his last years. On some level she probably blamed his breakdowns on Rose La Touche's rejection of his proposals of marriage. And she was not at all interested in having the story of Ruskin's painful and awkward pursuit of this Irish girl told – no more than J. L. Bradley is interested in presenting a balanced account of Ruskin's ridiculous – and for Effie, nearly tragic – wedding night.

ruskin crossroads

2011-12-02T01:11:00.003-05:00

So I've reached a crossroads in my Ruskin reading. After he accepts the Slade Professorship of Art at Oxford in 1870, our man becomes unconscionably busy – as I think I've mentioned, his attention becomes divided in at least 3 directions: his Oxford duties, which include both his lecture series (most of which get revised into books) and his direction of a drawing school (for which he sets out detailed sets of exercises and organizes a hefty collection of specimen artworks); his pedagogical interests, directed mostly at the girls of the Winnington School, and which result in a series of extraordinarily eccentric "textbooks" – Love's Meinie (on birds), Deucalion (on geology), and Proserpina (on flowers); and his series of monthly "letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain," Fors Clavigera, which begin in January 1871.*

If I read thru the Library Edition in numerical order – and I've just finished volumes 20 and 21 (the former containing the first year of Ruskin's Oxford lectures, the latter his catalogues and instructions for the Art School) – I'll be reading several more volumes of Oxford lectures, then a couple volumes of the textbooks, before I hit Fors, the 600,000 words of which are contained in volumes 27 thru 29. And I've decided I can't wait.

To some degree Fors is the text to which my whole reading of Ruskin has been tending, the keystone work connecting the early Ruskin of Modern Painters I – as late-Romantic, early-Victorian a production as one can imagine, outside of Carlyle – to the high modernists. Guy Davenport called it "a Victorian prose Cantos." I'm not the first person to see it as a proto-blog; indeed, I had Fors in mind as a kind of model when I began Culture Industry the better part of 7 years ago (let's not mention how poorly I've managed to emulate Ruskin, okay?).

I finished a first reading of Fors two summers ago on a penthouse terrace on Manhattan's West Side, reflecting ironically, as I baked unprotected in the sun, on Ruskin's all-too-wet view from Brantwood in the Lake District, & his increasing despair as the "storm-cloud" of industrial pollution blackened British skies. I'm ready to read it again, letter by letter, allowing myself no more than three letters at a sitting. (There're 96 in all.) But I don't want to stray too far off the track of my roughly chronological trawl thru Ruskin's life-work. So I'll read the first Library Edition volume of Fors, then return to Volume 22 and read thru the rest of his Oxford lectures. Then I'll allow myself a second volume of Fors, after which I'll read his textbooks and guidebooks. And only then will I read the third and final volume of Fors.

Of course, after Fors is done, there still remain 6 more volume of miscellaneous Ruskiniana – his environmental lectures, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, his literary criticism, Fiction Fair and Foul, his luminous autobiography Praeterita, and various other stuff; and then two volumes of collected letters. (The very last two volumes of the 39-volume Library Edition are a bibliography and an index.) I'm not too worried about the letters, or at least the letters collected in the LE seem rather less "canonical" than the other volumes, as I seem to have accumulated almost a dozen other volumes of Ruskin letters along the way, which will eventually want reading.

I think this can be done. Quentin Bell recalls reading thru the Library Edition in a year; but then again, he admits that he wasn't reading anything else. I'll count myself lucky if I finish the maroon wall (as I think of the 3+ shelves of JR that loom over my left shoulder when I sit at my desk) by the end of next year. Assuming the Mayans were wrong.

*That's leaving out his incessant letters to the press and the various European guidebooks he was cranking out with his left hand; at one point in the 1870s Ruskin had seven books at once at some stage of publication.

being edited

2011-11-30T09:51:00.006-05:00

So I read two books the other day. One of them was Ian Hamilton's A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (Basic Books, 2000), a solid, straightforward, occasionally graceful account of Arnold's life up thru his abandonment of poetry. It reads in part, inescapably, like the first half of a biography (Hamilton himself speaks in the preface of abandoning his plans for a full-scale Arnold book), but it is, so far as it goes, quite a satisfying read. A book for generalists, indeed, but one from which even Victorian scholars are likely to glean more than a few useful insights.

I read the Hamilton in blocks as relief from another book – a recent study of modernism and the FBI, what I'll call simply "The Academic Book." The Academic Book was published by a fairly solid scholarly press; its author is a Full Professor somewhere, who's published several other scholarly works; and TAB, as I recall when it was released, was promoted pretty intensely both to scholarly and general markets as a ground-breaking study that would appeal both to members of the Modernism Industry and to readers who were interested in J. Edgar Hoover & his multifarious, nefarious interventions in American culture.

And it's so depressingly awful. Page after page of flat-footed, lumpish prose; factoids and anecdotes repeated verbatim from page to page; a general conceptual squishiness, a kind of blob-think that overwhelms any insights that might attempt to rise up from the page. And I couldn't help thinking, who the hell was responsible for editing this thing?

And my answer was, of course: it's an academic book; nobody edited it. It got two reader's reports, each of which suggested some changes. The author made those changes (or didn't make them); then it got sent out to a freelance copy-editor, who checked the punctuation and usage against hir copy of the Chicago Manual; and then they printed it and sent it out – like a brand new Ferrari that happens to be missing its clutch, its left front wheel, and the whole of its suspension – to hit the road.

Ian Hamilton, I suspect, is a pretty solid writer from the get-go; but I also suspect he's got good editors, & the grace and smarts to let them have their way with his prose. This recent blog post on the Chronicle made me think over the whole business, in which an Editor-at-Large at a major magazine recounts hir experience with young wannabe editors: "The students were stunned into silence as their copy was returned, with questions, comments, and lots of red marks (instructors were still permitted to use red pens then, however much they highlighted students’ errors). ‘But it’s no longer mine,’ said one of them, whose copy in fact bore fewer rather than more marks."

My heart bleeds for that poor snowflake, beginning the long process of realizing that putting one's prose before the world in a readable form is almost always a collaborative undertaking. I make no great claims for my prose. But I do know that much of the best prose I've written looked pretty damned weak in comparison to what some fine and ruthless (magazine) editors made of it; and that the pieces I'm proudest of are ones that got Rolfed, Alexander-Techniqued, and sliced-n-diced all over the operating theater at the hands of those editors.* It's a shame that the economics of academic publishing – and this is true all the way from bottom-feeder Toadspittle Bend-in-the-Road University Press up to intellectual powerhouses like Cambridge and Harvard – have made real live editors so scarce in the world of academic publishing.

*E.g., Herb Leibowitz, Ben Downing...

blurbs

2011-11-23T20:11:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means that the whole dreary spectacle of the end-of-year holidays is upon us. The holidays depress me; they make me sad, misanthropic, despairing. No, I don't want to talk about it. Go away.
***
Blurbs are a unique genre, part advertising copy and part prose poem. In the case of slim volumes of contemporary verse, mostly prose poem, and often with only a tenuous apparent relation to what's inside the book. Back when I took the TLS, I used to enjoy the feature where the anonymous editor "JC" would skewer nonsensical back cover copy, usually for interesting volumes of contemporary American poetry. With forthright English commonsensicality, he would emit hoots of derision at some tangled and impossibly abstract mare's-nest of praise, which typically gave a reader no idea whatsoever of what they might expect from the book itself. Alas, I saw any number of my friends and colleagues fall under JC's derisive gaze.

But then again, one doesn't read a blurb to learn about what's inside the book. The blurb is rather a stamp of certification: "The book by aspirant poet X has been read by established poet Z, who by taking the time to produce this blurb – 30 minutes reading the book, 5 minutes on the blurb itself – signals that you ought to read it too." After all, it's not what the blurb says that we pay attention to: it's the very fact that Poet Z has written it.

(Note, gentle reader, how misanthropic and cynical this very post grows... it must be the holiday season.)

Blurbs come in two general types: solicited blurbs and "mined" blurbs. The former are descriptive or promotional statements that the publisher has asked a blurbist to write especially for this book; the latter are bits of language yanked out of other contexts and refunctioned to serve as jacket copy, much as the movie ads quote bits of reviews (generally, the good bits; tho the editing is sometimes unintentionally funny: I recall a poster for Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, a highly unsexy but visually dazzling fantasia on The Tempest, which quoted Playboy magazine: "More nudity than any film this season," or something of the sort.) Academic publishers generally mine at least some of their blurbs from the readers' reports that persuaded them to publish the book in the first place. That's how I've ended up "writing" blurbs for a few scholarly books. Occasionally, poetry publishers will extract a few sentences out of a previously published review for jacket copy. (The cheeky New Directions quoted me on the back of one of Will Alexander's book, without even telling me; fine, but it would have been nice to send me a copy.)

Anyway, this week's mail brought me two new books that I'm mighty awful proud to have contributed blurbs to, and you can tell me whether they meet the JC test for incomprehensible meaninglessness. I shan't blog these books, but needless to say, I think they're both great; you should buy them right away:

John Peck, Contradance (U of Chicago)

John Peck is unique among contemporary American poets for the burnished, intricate density of his thought and the rugged, even gnarled lyricism of his lines. The ghosts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Avedon, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Melville, and a host of others stalk gravely through the steps of Peck’s Contradance, their spectral presences a ghostly counterpoint to the poet’s preternatural awareness of the buzzy, blooming confusion of the present moment: "Life is not a thing / that we have, it is being seeking employment."

Alan Halsey, Even if only out of

One of the 5 or 6 poets whose work I'll buy immediately on sight, no questions asked, without bothering to open the book or read the blurbs. Halsey's poems – and they come in such variety, from very straightforward, personal-voice addresses to the most recondite word salads – are like a dense portable anthology from a rich & complex literary canon that simultaneously overlaps with but is fundamentally shifted or twisted from the recognizable "canon."

my military

2011-11-11T14:47:00.003-05:00

In the Commonwealth, it's Remembrance Day; in France and Belgium, Armistice Day. For some of us, it's Nigel Tufnel Day, remembering the Spinal Tap guitarist whose amp famously "goes to 11." Here in the United States, it's Veterans Day.

I have a conflicted relationship with the military. My father's family had no military connections I'm aware of; my mother's elder brother Hollis (known the nieces & nephews as Bubba) had been in the Navy in the Second World War, serving on the destroyer Minneapolis, the "Minnie." I never heard him tell stories about it, but when he died, my aunt gave me his pea jacket ("Hollis Walker" stitched into its lining) and his copy of the official history of the ship's wartime operations. Hair-raising reading. The Minnie took a Japanese torpedo right in the bow at one point; there's one memorable photograph of the temporary repairs – a bulkhead of palm trunks lashed across the ship's front.

My father was drafted into the Army in the last year of that war, snatched out of high school before he could graduate. By the time he'd finished basic training, the War in Europe was over, & he had the relatively cushy service of serving as part of the occupying army in Austria. It must have been grand, I like to think, for an 18-year-old from Paducah, Kentucky – an all-expense-paid trip to the Land of Mozart & Klimt, where he could gawk at buildings, sketch, & take photographs to his heart's content.

The military was my father's ticket out of his poverty-stricken western Kentucky roots. When he got back from Europe, he went to college on the GI Bill: first as an art major, then a history major. When the money ran out, he enlisted again, finishing his degree in Manila; the University of the Philippines, I'm surprised to say, issues the most sumptuous diplomas I've ever seen. But he could never quite find a niche in society with his bent for the liberal arts. He took a few more years off, marrying my mother and pursuing graduate work first at Vanderbilt then at Duke, along the way serving a term in the Air Force. (The chronology of all this, by the way, is very hazy to me; one day I'll sit down with the papers and work it all out.) By the time I came along, he had once again enlisted, for the duration, in the Army, and was stationed in West Germany. That's how I managed to be born in Frankfurt; I like to imagine Adorno giving a lecture across town during my mother's labor.

So I grew up as a military brat, living (in two-year intervals) in Syracuse, NY (where he was attending a language institute), West Germany, Carmel, CA (another language institute), West Germany again, and finally a dreary stretch in San Angelo, TX, a hellish posting my father assumed was punishment for his decision not to re-enlist at the end of his next term. When he finally retired – still in his late 40s – we moved first to Murray, Kentucky (near his family, and right where my mother's family lived), where he worked on yet another liberal arts degree.

Growing up on military bases, I never reflected that I was living a strange fishbowl existence. Our world was the post, the commissary, the PX, the post movie theater; it extended to the other military bases within driving distance (my mother knew where all the best PXs in the BRD were located). Germany itself, the larger polity within which we were a foreign enclave, was a kind of vast blank, visited only on exotic occasion. I was always aware, however, that I lived in one of the most class-stratified societies possible. The Army was something like 17th-century England, with its rigid social distinctions between enlisted men (commoners), non-commissioned officers (the rising bourgeoisie), and officers (the gentry and nobility): the ranks simply did not mix, especially not socially. Even in school, the second- and third-graders were all fully aware of their fathers' rank, and where that placed them in relation to the other kids.

Dad was a liberal early and late, despite his professional involvement in the ultimate instrument of American imperial power. He found the war in Vietnam a monumental, tragic folly, though I'm sure he didn't tell his superiors so. He spent years on a mountaintop near the East German border, transcribing and translating Soviet military transmissions, but I don't think he took the threat of invasion nearly as seriously as the average American on the street did. He was grateful for what the Army had given him – an education, health care for himself and his family, the chance to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the original, the opportunity to visit the seats of the Western Culture in which he was so assiduously trying to school himself – but he had no patience with the reams of paperwork that characterized the smallest military decision, or with the labyrinths of entrenched bureaucracy that constituted the institution's heart's-blood.

There were pluses and minuses to a military upbringing: on the plus side came a certain cosmopolitanism, an absence of regionalism. I never really picked up a southern accent (tho my parents' accents were quite strong), because I always lived among people from all parts of the US; I never found it strange when someone's parents came from different countries, because half my friends had mothers from Korea, or Japan, or Germany. On the minus side was a painful lack of a sense of place, of belonging, side effect in part of moving every two years, tearing loose from whatever friends I'd made & starting all over. (Somehow, we managed to make that move, every time, over the Christmas holidays, so every other year I got to start at a new school mid-year. It was like the first scene of Madame Bovary, over and over again.)

When Dad finished that last degree, we moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, in large part to be near a military base. As a retiree, Dad would have lifelong access to military health care, to the PX, and to the commissary. Mom saw these things, in the days before ubiquitous dirt-cheap Wal-Marts, as prime selling points for an otherwise nondescript southern city. I did much of my growing up in Clarksville, then – on the north side, dominated by soldiers and military retirees.

Fort Campbell, the home of the 101st Airborne ("Screaming Eagles"), was in the late 1970s not a place to give one a positive impression of the military. In the wake of Vietnam, the Army had become a volunteer force – at some times, it seemed to be a repository for the sweepings of society. As I waited at the hospital for brutal (but free) dental care – I had my wisdom teeth cut out & extracted under local anaesthetic, the dentist removing every bloody fragment right before my horrified eyes – I would be surrounded by GIs who seemed unable to form a single grammatical sentence, who talked about nothing but partying, whose every third word was "fucking." The highway leading to the base was for miles and miles a non-stop carpet of pawnshops, bars, and strip clubs.

It never occurred to me for a moment to join the military after high school. Even if my father had had anything good to say about his own service, I'd seen enough of who was in there, & how things worked. Whatever I did, I knew, I wanted to be in some social niche in which there was room for eccentricity, for the intellectual & the aesthetic; and God knows I didn't see that space anywhere in the military. Let's be frank, as well: I was pretty damned sure I wouldn't be able to handle the discipline, or put up with the bullshit.

A bunch of my friends went into the military. For many of them, it was their only choice; they'd screwed up so badly in high school they couldn't get into college, or they needed to start earning money right away. Some of the brightest guys I knew in high school wound up enlisting, for one reason or another. I don't blame their choice; but I don't envy them either, or particularly admire them for it.

When Veterans Day comes around, when the flags get trotted out and the tear-jerking videos get played, I get all uncomfortable. I hate what the last administration did thru its lies to the 4000+ soldiers who died in Iraq, and to the uncounted thousands of others who've come home maimed & damaged, physically, mentally, & spiritually. I hate that this was done in my name, to "protect" me. And I hate the rhetoric of "service" and the high-flown cant of "sacrifice," which all too often is a tool to drag patriotic young people into a job in which they will never be adequately compensated for the risks they run on behalf of cowardly & calculating politicians. But on Veterans Day, I can't help recalling Ruskin's words, in Unto This Last, on the moral distinction between soldiers and merchants:

Philosophically, it does not, at first, sight, appear reasonable (many writers have endeavoured to prove it unreasonable) that a peaceable and rational person, whose trade is buying and selling, should be held in less honour than an unpeaceable and often irrational person, whose trade is slaying. Nevertheless, the consent of mankind has always, in spite of the philosophers, given precedence to the soldier.

And this is right.

For the soldier's trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being slain. This, without well knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for. A bravo's trade is slaying; but the world has never respected bravos more than merchants: the reason it honours the soldier is, because he holds his life at the service of the State. Reckless he may be – fond of pleasure or of adventure – all kinds of bye-motives and mean impulses may have determined the choice of his profession, and may affect (to all appearance exclusively) his daily conduct in it; but our estimate of him is based on this ultimate fact – of which we are well assured – that put him behind a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the world behind him, and only death and his duty in front of him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows that his choice may be put to him at any moment – and has beforehand taken his part – virtually takes such part continually – does, in reality, die daily.

spread

2011-11-10T00:30:00.002-05:00

So I'm slated to teach Our Fair Department's undergraduate "Intro to Literary Studies" course next year. It's got a bunch of formal requirements – introduce the students to the analysis of 3 different genres, expose them to 3 different schools of literary interpretation, etc. – but I keep thinking, what they really need is some basic study skills: Read the book. Read all of it. Read it as slowly as you need to. Write in your book. Make notes, outline chapters. Look up unfamiliar words. You know, all that shit you're supposed to pick up at least by grad school. Me, I've been turning over bales of Ruskin books & essays I read last summer, gisting articles into little abstracts, copying down useful quotations; stuff, ideally, I should have been doing as or immediately after I read 'em, when they were still fresh in my mind.

It's all tangled up with a bit of professional identity crisis, I must admit. Am I a critic?, I ask myself, looking over the pieces I've written for Parnassus & all the other belletristic reviews I've churned out over the years, or am I a scholar? For I do see those as rather different roles (not that they don't often overlap). Jerome McGann is a scholar who also does a fair bit of smart criticism, as was William Empson; Susan Sontag was mostly critic, but approached scholarhood in the way she worked up some of her essays; James Wood is nothing but critic.

And I've got this rather medieval, uncomfortably rigorous notion of what the scholar does (which someday I'll write up in a kind of list format): Read the book. Read all of it. Know what's in it, and what isn't. Read everything by the author at hand. Read who the author's read, and what his immediate contemporaries said about him, etc. (Followed of course by Know the important secondary texts on your author. Know all the secondary texts dealing with your immediate subject...)

I'm still deep in the process of trying to make myself a quasi-Victorian scholar-type, and it's not easy. The four courses on Victorian lit I took back in the day are gradually coming back to me, admittedly, but there's a tremendous amount of catch-up ball to be played here. Of course, anyone sensible would have tackled a more manageable figure than Ruskin. I'm maybe 3/5 thru the corpus, all 9 million words of it. And I've read a healthy stack of books on Ruskin. And around Ruskin. And about the Victorians.

But one thing's always leading to another. Arnold, at the moment. He's the key counter-Ruskin for much of JR's career. I've read bunches of the poems, most of the important essays, and Culture and Anarchy. But now I'm feeling the need to read more – to achieve a comfortable global knowledge of Arnold. And then there's Pater and Wilde, each of whom I'm deep into. Sigh – Morris and Rossetti still await, and after them no doubt there will be others.

The happy side of all this is that I've actually started writing, however tentatively. Maybe I'll have something ready for the centenary of the big man's birth – after all, it's 8 years away.

shameless self-promotion: torture garden

2011-11-08T21:26:00.005-05:00

About fourteen months ago, I rejoiced on this blog at reaching the halfway point of a long-term project, a series of short poems that shortly before I had decided would be called Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles. And then, six months later, I rejoiced again at finishing them. Now I'm rejoicing at finally pulling back the curtain and unveiling the redoubtable Zach Barocas's cover design for the finished book. The book is in the final stages of production and will be in print in a bit under two weeks. It's now available for pre-order from The Cultural Society's website.

I've already given out a couple of teasers for Torture Garden in the above links, and there's some descriptive prose on The Cultural Society website. Here's a bit more detail:

The hardcore “miniatures” of John Zorn’s “Naked City” ensemble – Zorn on alto, Bill Frisell on guitar, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on drums, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, and Yamatsuka Eye (sometimes) on vocals – as assembled in the Torture Garden collection (Shimmy Disc, 1989) provided a model for these pastorelles: short, tightly controlled, aggressive, free of all padding and discursive structure.

The form of the pastorelles is an “emaciated” sonnet: seven lines to the sonnet’s fourteen, five words to the sonnet’s ten iambs. The poems make great and entirely unsystematic use of found language, usually from whatever I was reading at the moment, though often from what I was (half) listening to: at least one derives from the simultaneously earnest, enraging, and inane discourse of a department meeting. There are a run of pastorelles “dedicated” to various people whose talks and readings I've attended, or with whose books I’ve been engaged: these dedications are not necessarily gestures of admiration or affection but acknowledgment of language appropriated.

The pastorelles’ titles are directly borrowed from those of the forty-two tracks of Naked City’s Torture Garden, but the poems are by no means direct adaptations of the musical pieces; rather, there is a continuously varying relationship between the titles, the musical tracks, and the poems. Not the “condition of music,” but the music of conditions.

What are you waiting for? These are dandy poems, if a bit lacking in etiquette, gentility, & a sense of what's appropriate around the kids. Order here!
***
I'd be remiss, of course, if I didn't give a shout out to Zach and The Cultural Society.

It was early in January 2002 – golly, almost a decade ago – when Peter O’Leary, whom I knew as a poet but mostly I guess as the executor of Ronald Johnson’s estate, asked me to join him and a few others – his brother Michael, Devin Johnston, Joel Bettridge, John Tipton, and my old friend Eric Selinger – to read Ronald Johnson’s newly released posthumous book The Shrubberies at the Chicago Public Library under the auspices of the Poetry Project. It was a grand event, capped by an absolutely sybaritic dinner at Tipton’s apartment and a more than pleasant informal “house reading” afterwards.

When I got back to the steam, I wove some details of the weekend into a poem, called (duh) “Chicago,” which I sent off to Peter & a few others. Peter, in turn, zipped it to a friend of his who had recently started a poetry website with the ponderous name “The Cultural Society.” And that friend, Zach Barocas, liked “Chicago” so much that he had it up and beautiful in a matter of a couple of weeks.

It’s been almost a decade since, and the Cultural Society has become central to my imagination of contemporary poetry. Zach has published a number of my poems, he’s done a rambly essay on poetics I wrote a long time ago, and which still oddly enough comports pretty well with the way I write & think about writing. More importantly, he published, & continues publishing, a whole community of new & established poets that I find continually enriching – Peter, Norman Finkelstein, Pam Rehm, Mike Heller, Joel Felix, Janet Holmes, Dan Beachy-Quick, Bob Archambeau, Sandra Simonds, Stacy Szymaszek, Bronwen Tate, etc. etc.

Exactly a month ago was the formal celebration of CultSoc’s (pronounced Kult-Sosh) 10th anniversary, & I must say that Zach definitely knows how to throw a party. A reading at Poet’s House in Manhattan – a group reading where, amazingly enough, nobody went way over their allotted time or lost themselves in showboating. Electric new poems from Norman F. and Mike H. A culminatory performance by Peter that practically had me throwing my shorts at the podium. I re-met poets I’d met before – Chris Glomski, Jon Curley; I spent time with poets I’d known for years and years.

It wasn’t just that the poems were great, and the audience receptive; it was a kind of vibratory sense of common purpose, of sheer community, that’s really so hard to come by in this world. The celebration was really a kind of personalized intensification of the community and ethos set up on the tight, spare, precise website. Zach does not do things large – he's more Charlie Watts than Neal Peart, more John Lee Hooker than John McLaughlin – but what he does he does with a clean, beautiful style, and he does right.

He's done right by Torture Garden, as he has with the other snazzy books & recordings available on the website there. Have a look, give a listen (video of some fine readings there, and links to some excellent music), stick around & buy a few things.

ruskin's powerpoint

2011-11-07T10:20:00.004-05:00

My odyssey thru the Library Edition of Ruskin continues. Yesterday I finished volume XIX, The Cestus of Aglaia and The Queen of the Air, with Other Papers and Lectures on Art and Literature, 1860-1870. The obvious course (which I'm taking) is to power on into volume XX (Lectures on Art and Aratra Pentelici, with Lectures and Notes on Greek Art and Mythology, 1870). But really one's confronted with a kind of triune fork in the road of Ruskin's career here, for from 1870 his activities become multiple, & it's no longer possible to maintain anything like strict chronological progression in collecting his work.

In 1870, Ruskin was appointed the first Slade Professor in Art at the University of Oxford, and for several years (until 1878, the date of his first major crack-up) one of his major activities would be be composing the lectures he delivers there. That's usually two series of six or seven lectures each year, which Ruskin took "infinite" pains with, & usually went back and revised for book publication; he published 9 books out of this first stint at the Oxford Professorship.

But at the same time, he was also working on other books and articles, which he published more or less concurrently with his lecture volumes (including no fewer than three travellers' guidebooks to various sites). And he was writing the series of monthly "Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain," Fors Clavigera, which is in some ways the acknowledged telos of my whole reading of Ruskin.

So three major activities at any given time: Oxford duties (which include, besides the lectures, establishing a drawing school and a major collection of specimen works for students); miscellaneous writing (including an incessant series of letters to the press, and a personal correspondence as copious as one would expect from a Victorian writer); and Fors. No wonder the guy broke under the strain.

Ruskin took lecturing very, very seriously. Over the past decade and a half, lectures had become one of his primary means of getting his ideas across to a wide audience, at a variety of venues. And the Victorians were good audiences: they were prepared to attend carefully to what our undergraduates would consider unconscionably long discourses; public lectures were transcribed by reporters and printed in newspapers with remarkable completeness and fidelity.

Ruskin's style of lecturing was memorable. He spoke from a written text – he once told an audience that he had planned to deliver his lecture extemporaneously, but that it was too much trouble to write out what he had to say and memorize it, so they would have to be content with his reading a text – but he would very often depart from his notes, following the thread of whatever idea caught his imagination at the moment. By all accounts he captivated his listeners entirely, tho some confessed themselves entirely unable to remember afterwards what he'd said.

But how, one wonders, does one deliver lectures on art and art history in the pre-PowerPoint, even pre-slide projector era? My own antipathy to PowerPoint runs pretty deep, and having to sit thru two PP presentations earlier this semester has only confirmed it. But I'm pretty willing to believe that it's made the tasks of lecturers in art and architecture far easier; I have just as bad memories of upside-down and reversed slides in my undergraduate art history classes.

Ruskin's own visual aids consisted it seems of lots of sketches and paintings, to which he would point during the lecture, & which would remain on display afterwards for interested students to examine. More useful no doubt were the enlargements of artworks and details of artworks (some of them 250cm X 100cm, which is pretty big), which he had assistants uncover & hold up at crucial moments in his lectures. There were still mishaps: at one point, a sketch from Tintoretto's "Paradise" was displayed upside down; the students laughed. "Ah, well," said the Professor, himself laughing; "what does it matter? for in Tintoret's 'Paradise' you have heaven all round you."

And then there's that moment when Ruskin seems to anticipate all the fancy effects that PP offers: He was bitching about the degradation of modernity, and beside him on an easel was (framed under glass) a Turner watercolor of Leicester.

"The old stone bridge is picturesque," he said, "isn't it? But of course you want something more 'imposing' nowadays. So you shall have it." And taking his paint-box and brush he rapidly sketched in on the glass what is known in modern specifications as "a handsome iron structure." "Then," he continued, "you will want, of course, some tall factory chimneys, and I will give them to you galore." Which he proceeded to do in like fashion. "The blue sky of heaven was pretty, but you cannot have everything, you know." And he painted clouds of black smoke over Turner's sky. "Your 'improvements,'" he went on, are marvellous 'triumphs of modern industry,' I know; but somehow they do not seem to produce nobler men and women, and no modern town is complete, you will admit, without a gaol and a lunatic asylum to crown it. So here they are for you." By which time not an inch of the Turner drawing was left visible under the "improvements" painted upon the glass. "But for my part," said Ruskin, taking his sponge, and with one pass of his hand wiping away those modern improvements against which he has inveighed in so many printed volumes – "for my part, I prefer the old."

languishing | original practice

2011-11-05T00:38:00.006-04:00

[The Staunton Blackfriars Playhouse]

I wonder if the blog hasn't been languishing lately. Certainly there hasn't been much spare time on my hands to write it, but I'm still unwilling to give it up...
***
Week before last – the week before Halloween, that is – we headed north to the wilds of Virginia, to Staunton (that STAN-ton), where we attended the biennial Blackfriars Conference at the American Shakespeare Center. Yes, there in a small college town, midway between nowhere and nowhere else (actually, a pleasant half-hour to Charlottesville, & a rather longer drive to Blacksburg), is a full-time professional Shakespeare troupe, performing in a picture-perfect reconstruction of the indoor theater that Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, used from 1609.

We had a welcome surprise in a snowstorm on Friday; those of you who live in Chicago, Ithaca, or other sane climes, will be puzzled by the pleasure Floridians take in these things. It was a bit odd, however, combining family vacation with conference-going. There was pleasure enough – snowmen, snowball fights, a trip to the apple orchard atop Carter Mountain near Monticello, a serious book-shopping venture into Charlottesville (okay, maybe that was pleasure for me). But there was also always the serious undercurrent of conference-going; am I missing something good by spending time with the kids? Who's talking to whom back there at the cash bar? Should we go to the banquet or order pizza at the hotel?

My own paper was part of a colloquy on performance practices, & doesn't really bear deep discussion. But I was struck thruout the discussions by a kind of base-line acceptance – and only occasional questioning – of the Theater's guiding principle: that of "original practices." Plays produced in the Blackfriars Playhouse (as you can see from the photo above) are performed with the lights on; in Shakespeare's day, there was no easy way to extinguish all the candles in the candelabra. Lucky audience members get to sit on stools on either side of the stage, as Jacobean dandies would have. Before the performance, and during the interval, the members of the acting troupe play music (unamplified) from the balcony (cf. the cover of Jethro Tull's Minstrel in the Gallery:)

The troupe is rather small, maybe 10 actors tops, and roles are doubled thruout the productions, just as they would have been in Shakespeare's day. (Odd to see the Ghost doubling as Osric, I must say...) The stage is undecorated; there are only minimal props, whisked out not by stagehands but by the actors themselves.

(The only two radical anachronisms in the productions: 1) female roles played by women – & I can definitely live with that; and 2) what's the use of dandyishly sitting on the side of the stage if you can't ostentatiously smoke?)

I can only say that we saw some first-rate theater. Excellent productions of The Tempest and Marlowe's Tamburlaine Part I, and the first live Hamlet I've ever seen that didn't feel radically tedious. This "original practices" stuff works, at least in a small theater that makes a kind of selling point of it.

On the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that some of the academics & theater types present at the conference – for this is a conference that seems to attract at least as many directors, playwrights, and actors as it does English-department-Shakespeare-types – were busily making a fetish out of original practices, much as some in the musical community – some the Early Music Revival types, with their emphasis on "period instruments" and "period performance" – have done. It made me think of Adorno's essay "Bach Defended Against His Devotees," which attacks (I take it) mid-century notions of "authentic" performance. "Even had Bach been in fact satisfied with the organs and harpsichords of the epoch, with their thin choruses and orchestras," Adorno writes, "this would in no way prove their adequacy for the intrinsic substance of his music."

The only adequate interpretation of the dynamic objectivity embedded in his work is one which realizes it. True interpretation is an x-ray of the work; its task is to illuminate in the sensuous phenomenon the totality of all the characteristics and interrelations which have been recognized through intensive study of the score.... Objectivity is not left over after the subject is subtracted. The musical score is never identical with the work; devotion to the text means the constant effort to grasp that which it hides. Without such a dialectic, devotion becomes betrayal; an interpretation which does not bother about the music's meaning on the assumption that it will reveal itself of its own accord will inevitably be false since it fails to see that the meaning is always constituting itself anew.

"Authentic" performance on "period" instruments, and "original practices" Shakespeare, can give us a kind of shock of defamiliarization, can make a familiar text new by making it old; they can teach us about the aesthetic experience of the period in which the text or score was produced. But they cannot, by themselves, "realize" the Bachean or Shakespearean work: that is part of the labor of interpretation, which involves going beyond the surface of the text, interpreting and realizing it through the deepest labor of analysis and loving synthesis.

Or to put it another way: Bach (Adorno implies) wanted a pianoforte badly; it just hadn't been invented yet. The inner structures of the works he wrote for keyboard transcend the keyboard technology of his own day. Just as, one might argue, Shakespeare's playscripts call out for real women to play the female roles; or maybe they call out for elaborate lighting and sophisticated sound effects; maybe they even want to be realized in video and digital formats.

But I'm a great fan of "period performance" early music; I'd rather hear Bach by the English Concert than in one of Bruckner's arrangements any day. And I'm glad that the American Shakespare Center is doing Shakespeare the old-fashioned way; clearly, their directors and players are at an entirely higher level of interpretation than 95% of the theater I've seen in the last decade (and yes, that includes a fair number of Broadway productions of "serious" plays); and they seem in no way fetishistically devoted to their "original practices," but rather use them as jumping-off points for fresh and exciting interpretation.
***
The unofficial motto of the Blackfriars Conference is from The Winter's Tale: "exit, pursued by a bear." Panel chairs keep a close eye on their watches. If a panelist goes over her or his allotted time, some dude in a bear suit stalks into the room and chases them out. I'm told it's quite embarrassing. I think something similar – perhaps with real bears – should be instituted at the MLA.

in process | Ruskinian erotica

2011-10-23T01:18:00.002-04:00

The 750 Words stairmaster has had good effects; for the past week & a half, I've turned out well over 750 words a day. Now whether those words are useful words is another matter; it's clear that this isn't the ideal tool for scholarly writing, with its constant recursiveness. When I write essays, papers, or books, at least two-thirds of the time I'm ostensibly writing I'm actually paging back thru what I've written before, revising and tinkering with it, or turning over books, looking for quotes or thinking about precisely what I'm meaning to say. That doesn't work well with 750 Words's ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes format, where you can't revise what you've already written, and indeed can't easily look at it while you're writing the next day's entry. Solution of course is to download my daily work into a Word file and tinker with it there; but then if I get carried away & start writing new stuff, it doesn't count towards the daily tally. Oh well. I'll work it out. At least I'm writing.

What I'm writing is, as I say, something else altogether. I began writing bits of the next scholarly book; then I ran out of things to say (for the moment) and spent a few days putting down autobiographical fragments (not that anybody will ever want to read that – I'm just laying in some stuff that I can read when my memory starts to go). At the moment, however, I'm more or less on fire, doing some big conceptual stuff paired with some close textual analysis. It feels good, whether or not it really is; I know it'll fit in the big jigsaw puzzle of the next book somewhere.
***
The letter carrier delivered a new biography of Effie Ruskin the other day, Suzanne Fagence Cooper's sublimely potboilerly-titled Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais. By my count, this is the sixth or seventh book I've accumulated on Ruskin's ill-fated marriage. My own brief take on the disastrous wedding night – or at least some of the speculation thereupon – is here. (Cooper has her own theory, which I won't spoil by revealing.

Unsurprisingly, while Ruskin is capable of incredibly sexy language – the so-called "purple" passages of the early books especially, which make word-lovers like me positively swoon – there isn't much in the way of actual erotica in his massive (9 million words, I read somewhere) corpus. But then, reading thru The Cestus of Aglaia (1865-6) the other day, I came upon (re-read, really) this often discussed passage, where Ruskin recalls

the image of an Italian child, lying, she also, upon a hill of sand, by Eridanus' side; a vision which has never quite left me since I saw it. A girl of ten or twelve, it might be; one of the children to whom there has never been anyother lesson taught than that of patience: – patience of famine and thirst; patience of heat and cold; patience of fierce word and sullen blow; patience of changeless fate and giftless time. She was lying with her arms thrown back over her head, all languid and lax, on an earth-heap by the river side (the softness of the dust being the only softness she had ever known), in the southern suburb of Turin, one golden afternoon in August, years ago. She had been at play, in her fashion, with other patient children, and had thrown herself down to rest, full in the sun, like a lizard. The sand was mixed with the draggled locks of her black hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an "ashes to ashes" kind of way; a few black rags about her loins, but her limbs nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled yet, – white, – marble-like – but, as wasted marble, thin with the scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white by the shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west. So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank towards grey Viso (who stood play in the south-west, and pyramidal as a tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains round her little dusty bed.

Par for the course in overall ickiness, I guess. Not merely is the erotic energy of his prose directed at a prepubescent girl (as his emotional energies were at the time directed at Rose La Touche, who was 9 when Ruskin met her, 16 or 17 at the time of this writing), but she, the incarnation for the nonce of "patience," will jump to serpentine life at her playmate's approach – "she rose with a single spring, like a snake" – & scream at her in Alecto's own shrill shriek. Ruskin, I fear, keeps pushing me towards what I've been resisting for years: a systematic reading of Freud.

stairmaster

2011-10-12T21:37:00.003-04:00

Like everyone else, I've been reading Jeff Nunokawa's "notes" – brief essays, really – on Facebook, & with much enjoyment. It's cool, so many years on, to see that someone I remember as one of the nicest people around Campus on the Hill remains as nice as ever. And such a good writer. One of the articles on him, dwelling much on how ridiculously in-shape the man is, quotes a student claiming that Jeff "does an hour on the StairMaster every day at a level that’s just ridiculous." Dunno, he certainly looks buff enough in the FB photos.

Me, I'm still struggling thru the early weeks of the 100 Pushups regimen; I'm a long way from looking like Fabio (or Jeff Nunokawa, for that matter), but making progress. More importantly, perhaps, Undine of Not of General Interest has put me onto what she calls her Stairmaster for writing: 750 Words, a stripped-down, no-frills website whose whole goal is to get you putting those goddamned words down in order. I've only been using it a few days, but it's been working wonders towards disciplining me – getting me to put down the books and write down my thoughts. Give it a shot; looks as tho it works as well for fiction writers as for academic scribblers.

too much?

2011-10-11T09:18:00.003-04:00

I'm in the process – have been for a year or so now, I guess – of extending/expanding my "scholarly base," of stretching out from being a modernist/20th-century person to having more than a nodding familiarity with Victorian literature & culture. This year alone I've probably read about 30 books this year in the field, bunches of articles, etc. I've done a couple of related conference papers now; I wrote a review of a new Ruskin book a few months ago.

So when do I start actually writing this big book? My own inclination is to keep reading until I know enough to do it right, but there's always something more to read. I suspect that if I wait until I feel totally ready to tackle the next thing, that I'll die of old age before I ever put fingers to keyboard.

Dan Beachy-Quick: Mulberry and This Nest, Swift Passerine

2011-10-04T11:11:00.004-04:00

Mulberry (Tupelo P, 2006) and This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo P, 2009), Dan Beachy-Quick

The silkworm, the larval form of Bombyx mori, feeds on mulberry leaves almost exclusively, transmuting them into the 1000 to 3000 feet of silken thread that forms its cocoon – and which later, boiled, unraveled, cleaned, woven, & dyed, make scarves tunics & Wall Street traders' shirts. In Dan Beachy-Quick's Mulberry, the worm's process becomes a figure for the poet's transmutation of his own reading & his experience from the wild disorderly to the woven texture of the poem. Lordy, you say, another poem about poem-making! Haven't the centuries of makars inflicted the tortuous accounts of their own compositional processes on us long enough?

But Mulberry, like Wordworth's Prelude, is only in part a poem about the formation of the poet's mind – or rather, the formation of the poet's mind, the movement of his restless sensibility as he devours texts & experience, is synechdoche for the formation of the human mind in general. Mulberry exemplifies how the poet takes in the outside – books, nature, the lived life – and transmutes it into intricately woven iridescence; but it also exemplifies the constant interchange of outside & inside & outside again that is the human life, however buried those processes may be.

Beachy-Quick's extraordinary lyricism was evident from his first book, North True South Bright (Alice James Books, 2003); if anything his ear has grown more delicate in Mulberry and This Nest, Swift Passerine. "Passerine" is a bird – the name derives from Latin passer, sparrow – a "perching" bird, a "songbird." Where Mulberry figures the poet as humble caterpillar, munching leaves and metamorphosing them into silk, This Nest – a far bolder, wide-ranging, book – melds the traditional figure of the poet as transient songbird with an eco-centric conception of the poet's task as the building of a variegated and beautiful – not to mention liveable – nest, a nest formed out of the bits & pieces of experience, of previous texts, of philosophies & traditional wisdoms.

I hear a great deal of Ronald Johnson in This Nest; at times, indeed, the book reads like a 21st-century version of Johnson's The Book of the Green Man (1967). Johnson & Beachy-Quick share many points of reference: Thoreau, William & Dorothy Wordsworth, the general milieu of British nature-romanticism. But the ambition of This Nest pushes well beyond the careful naturalism and (sometimes 2nd-hand) nature mysticism of Green Man: Beachy-Quick is out to weave an encompassing tapesterial picture of the sparrow-poet in nature, something more akin to the mind-blowing cosmological stew of Johnson's ARK (which Beachy-Quick indeed cites). This Nest enfolds not merely the naturalism and Naturphilosophie of Thoreau & the Wordsworths, but swatches of Martin Buber, bits of Heidegger, Emerson, Weil, Traherne, usw. All is a kind of beautiful winding-together of fragments, bound & woven with Beachy-Quick's own precise verbal music, to form a lyrical, musical dwelling-place.

Ovid's Echo & Narcissus, the disembodied voice & the self-enraptured observer, play constant counterpoint, a Wordsworth-like questioning of whether our enraptured staring into nature is anything more than a self-obsession. As Wordsworth & Johnson would answer, & as Beachy-Quick assents, we do indeed see ourselves when we look into nature – but we see ourselves precisely as part and parcel of the nature's interlinked processes. Yes, natura naturata, LZ would say (echoing his blessed Spinoza), but natura naturans at the same time.

[116, 117]

tangled

2011-09-30T00:21:00.002-04:00

Tangles of administrative stuff these days. Once upon a time – well, maybe until 5 or 6 years ago – because I am indeed a slow, slow learner* – I believed that somewhere up there, somewhere among the tenured faculty, somewhere in upper echelons of administration (& by implication, somewhere in the government, somewhere among the well-established poets), there were actual grown-ups: you know, people who knew what they were doing, who did it well, and who did their best to make the whole ungainly machine move forward & work smoothly for everyone involved.

I still believe in grown-ups in high places; but I've just realized that they're a hell of a lot scarcer than I once thought. I won't go into the details of my current irritations with Our Fair University; I'm sure irritations like them're shared by a great number of colleagues in higher education – probably the vast majority. Let's just say I've learned a few things about the difference between administrators & classroom instructors/researchers: or, for that matter, between those who do the actual day-to-day work in an organization – "labor" – & those who think of themselves as "management":

•The vast majority of administrator/managers are possessed with a remarkable absence of imagination (and hereafter "The vast majority" should be understood – not everybody, just most...)

•Administrator/managers are therefore highly rule-bound individuals; the substance of work that passes under their eyes is of less importance than whether or not it follows the minutiae of form

•Administrator/managers are highly territorial, & are constantly striving to define the boundaries of what they hold sway – oversight – over

•Administrator/managers are as well imperial: their territories are never quite broad enough, and need constant expansion; more and more of the everyday work of the labor force gets codified, formalized, & quantified

•Which implies, clearly enough, that administration/management are rather wonderfully pure examples of "instrumental reason" – and indeed, they understand no other kind of rationality

Colleagues at Our Fair University probably have sussed that I'm talking about The Graduate College, an administrative body whose purpose I don't understand – tho I do know that they seem to be able to hire highly-paid after highly-paid person, even as the academic departments keep getting the poor mouth from higher administration – but whose tentacular reach has been creeping into more and more of our everyday activities. I wish they'd go away, and let me and my colleagues do our jobs – which we do, on the whole rather well.

*And I'm not kidding about that; I really am a slow learner. It takes an ungodly number of times thru a book or a concept before I can get the hang of anything.

comfort zone

2011-09-20T14:56:00.002-04:00

So there's this dream I used to have: I'm at this concert, some band I'm totally into – Hüsker Dü, or Mekons, or Oysterband, whatever – and for some reason one of the band members singles me out, and hauls me up on stage. And they hand me a guitar – a nice one, a vintage Strat or an ES 295 – & invite me to play along. And I play along, really well: I seem to know the songs, & after a number or two they invite me to take a solo, & it's really hot – you know, Bill Frisell hot, or Marc Ribot hot. Somehow I can hear the music in my head & translate it to my fingers. You know, like a real musician.

Then there's this other dream: Same as the first, up thru the "And I play along" bit. But I don't play well – I play badly; I'm always a half-beat behind, I forget what key we're in, I'm lost on the bridges, I can't even – for god's sake – remember how to play an E-minor chord. You know, pretty much the way I play every day, but now in front of a whole bunch of people, & under the withering glare of musicians I idolize. I'm humiliated.

It's that latter dream I'm worried about playing out at the Shakespeare conference I'm off to next month. Right now I'm finishing up a paper on pomo British adaptations of The Tempest – Peter Greenaway, Michael Nyman – & pretty much soiling my pants worrying about how the real Shakespeare scholars are going to receive me.

Don't get me wrong: I know my Shakespeare pretty damned well, & I know The Tempest about as well as any of his plays. I've read it maybe 20-25 times, I've taught it a few times, I've read stacks of the criticism. But I've never written about it, much less presented in front of people who've made a vocation out of early modern drama. The range of imaginable and unimaginable gaffes I may be setting myself up to perpetrate is broader than I want to consider at the moment.

It's all very well for the B-school types and self-help gurus to talk about stepping outside of your "comfort zone" and so forth; all that's at stake there is money, or a date, or the chance of a raise. Here there's the potential for serious professional humiliation.

On the other hand, my apprehension here is probably just a subset of my larger professional self-image apprehension, as I find myself shifting from a focus on modernist/contemporary poetry to a large side-interest in Victorian literature & culture. This's happened before, I have to keep telling myself: When I wrote the LZ biography, & worried myself to death about how the real biographers were going to receive it. And that turned out okay – maybe this will as well.

off stride

2011-09-19T23:23:00.002-04:00

I'm off my stride, in all sorts of ways. Here we are four weeks into the semester, & I haven't really settled into my classes, nor have I settled into the rhythm of the school week. (This time around it's front-loaded; my long day is Monday, which means there's a kind of anticipatory nervousness through the whole weekend.) The girls are just settling into their own extracurricular activities, which means backing-&-forthing all round. Dance classes, acting classes, violin lessons, orchestra... Even on the weekend, the four of us pile into the car & drive up to West Palm Beach for art classes. (I'm learning some of the basics of oil painting I never took the trouble to learn back in the day – back, well, three decades ago.)

Plus, this whole business of department administration weighs heavily. It's not like it's a job that takes hours upon hours every day. Rather, it's a job where there are always a half-dozen emails to give attention to, & where there's always a deadline looming in the middle distance to revise some document or prepare for some change of affairs. Just enough to keep me nervous.

What's suffered? Well, my writing has suffered, for one thing. I still have a handful of book reviews owed various people (if you're checking in, editor-types, I apologize). I haven't set pen to paper on the biography book I hoped to crank out this summer; that will have to wait for another year, I suspect, at the very least. Right now, I'm desperately at work on a conference paper, for next month's Blackfriars Shakespeare do up in the Virginia hills. And after that some reviews get written. Poems happen – or bits of poems happen – in the interstices.

I am trying, however, as the above indicates (and as my latest little entry in the "poem-books" noting series indicates), to get back into the swing of blogging, if at shorter length than before perhaps. Bear with me.

Cole Swensen: Greensward

2011-09-19T01:48:00.002-04:00

Greensward, Cole Swensen (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)

A sumptuous, beautifully designed & illustrated volume with which I'll have to come to terms if I ever actually get around to writing my gardening poetry book. While Swensen's last collection, Ours, focused on the gardens of Versailles, their designer André de Nôtre, and the theory of 17th-century formal gardening, Greensward moves into the 18th century, to the new "English," "natural" gardens of Humphrey Repton and Lancelot "Capability" Brown. (I can think of worse nicknames than "Capability"...) It also moves from an exclusive focus on the interaction of the human being with the landscape to a consideration of the role animals play in landscape gardening – perfectly logically, as the English country estates for which Repton & Brown designed landscapes were working farms & game preserves, with large populations of sheep, cattle, & deer. Where Swensen breaks new & surprising ground is in her exploration of aesthetics & the non-human. An epigraph quotes Dr. Linda Kaplan: "Mainstream science has yet to be convinced that animals have an aesthetic sense." Swensen's poem begins with the observation that, yes, animals do enhance a landscape to its human observers; and proceeds to wonder whether a landscape's manufactured order & beauty might not be perceived as such by animals as well.

[115]

in print | cultural society

2011-09-12T01:00:00.004-04:00

A few recent publications, just for the aitch-ee-double-toothpicks of keeping the CV up to date:

•a review of Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, in BookForum

•"One Last Modernist: Guy Davenport," a big-ass, much sweat-&-tears career-overview essay on the man's poetry, translations, fiction, essays, and overall self, in the latest Parnassus: Poetry in Review

•an essay in Joe Francis Doerr's brand spanking new, excellent Salt Campanion to John Matthias: "One Briggflatts After Another: John Matthias and the Pocket Epic"

•two poems, "Flâneur" and "Captain Modernism" in the latest Notre Dame Review (the first time I've had poems in actual golly-ink-on-paper "print" in a while)

Biggish publication news in the offing; stay tuned.

In the meantime, by all means if you're in New York City on October 8, make plans to come round to the Cultural Society's 10th anniversary celebration, which will feature a fantastic group reading in the afternoon at Poet's House (Brooklyn Copeland, Jon Curley, Sally Delehant, Norman Finkelstein, Chris Glomski, Michael Heller, Eric Hoffman, Philip Jenks, Peter O’Leary, Chuck Stebelton, and Shannon Tharp), then a musical evening (David Grubbs, Drew O’Doherty, J. Robbins, and BELLS≥ [Robbins and BELLS≥ will both be joined by Gordon Withers on cello]) at Bruar Falls in Brooklyn.

It's hard to believe Zach Barocas has been running Cultural Society for a whole decade now, keeping up an amazing standard of clean & attractive web design and scrupulous poetry editing (except of course for the unguarded moments when he's published your humble blogger) that puts most online journals to shame. And his new band Bells≥ really is the bomb; worth a trip to the City just to catch them in concert.

study habits

2011-09-11T01:27:00.003-04:00

So I was bemoaning my lack of narrative memory to another academic friend, bitching about how I can't remember plots & characters from one year to the next. "Every time I teach a novel," I said, "I have to re-read it. And the first time I read it, just to get a handle on it, I end up jotting down lists of characters & their relationships to one another on the flyleaf, & in the back I even write chapter-by-chapter summaries."

"Oh," she said. "You're studying. Shame our students haven't learned to do that."

Perhaps the best bit of advice I got during grad school was from John Taggart, who said simply, "Keep a reading journal." It was good advice, tho I didn't pursue it in any systematic way. Of course, I mark my books pretty heavily, and often I gist good quotations and overall arguments into various notebooks. But not really systematically, which is what I suspect he meant.

Over this past year, as I've been trying to expand my scholarly base into the "dark backward & abysm" of the Victorian era (concerning which expansion I mean to blog sometime soon), I've knuckled down and started doing this seriously. The last few batch of scholarly books I've read, I've marked them as usual, but I've also taken a few minutes at the end of each chapter (or each few chapters) to type up a thumbnail summary of the arguments. It's amazing how much better I seem to retain the books when I've taken the trouble to do this, even when I don't consult the notes.

Maybe this is just one of those expedients one is forced to when one doesn't have the steel-trap memory one did at 25 or 30. (Maybe I'll start posting notes to myself as to where I've left my keys and wallet.*) But I suspect it's pretty good operating practice for scholars in general, as well as students. I blush at how long it's taken me to start developing good study habits.

*When I was last in Tennessee, I spent a melancholy time in my mother's house, tearing down some of the last evidences of her failing memory before she went into the assisted living facility – the little "operating notes" she'd posted to herself around the house: how to work the microwave, how to set the thermostat, how to operate the garage door.

John Davidson, for Labor Day (early)

2011-09-03T00:09:00.002-04:00

from "The Testament of a Man Forbid"

This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,
This hallowed bower and harvest of delight
Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,
Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,
Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones
Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood
Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed
With brains of madmen and the broken hearts
Of children. Understand it, you at least
Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night
With roots of luxury, a cancer struck
In every muscle: out of you it is
Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;
You are the hidden putrefying source
Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,
Of passionate loves and high imaginings;
You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet.
I say, uproot it; plough the land; and let
A summer-fallow sweeten all the World.

–John Davidson (1857-1909)

"Do I have to buy the book?"

2011-08-03T14:46:00.004-04:00

[Slide #1: The Turbot]

We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

[I remember, fondly, the bookstore in Washington, DC which had that last phrase printed on its shopping bags and bookmarks]

the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store.

–Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (Library Edition, Vol. XVIII, p. 85)

I re-read these lines today from my own copy of the Library Edition, which cost me many hours of shopping and a large number of dollars. I find that this is the latest of the Edition's 39 volumes of which Lancaster University's Ruskin Library and Research Centre has placed extraordinarily careful, clean, and readable PDF scans online. I could, I suppose, have downloaded these books more or less for free, just as this morning I downloaded texts by Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, and Swinburne, and last week I downloaded (courtesy of Google Books) a PDF of Allen Upwards The New Word.

I say "more or less for free," because nothing is got for nothing, after all: I paid for my computer, & I pay for internet access. Someone paid for those books, poems, & articles to be scanned or transcribed & uploaded to the internet; someone is paying the broadband bills for Jerry McGann's extraordinary Rossetti Archive, just as someone is paying the bills for Lancaster U's Ruskin treasures. But psychologically speaking, there's an immense difference between one's shelling out $65 for a first edition of Upward's New Word (or $10 for a print-on-demand paperback) and downloading the text for "free."

I have long ago realized that I'm far too old (chronologically, psychologically) to count myself among those for whom the experience of consuming texts is primarily a matter of interacting with a screen of some sort. That's okay: the transition from the physical page, which the futurists ten years ago were predicting would be complete sometime last decade, will probably take several generations. It's not something that worries me, or even occupies me much. But I am struck by the implications of Ruskin's economizing – the turbot and the book. (I don't often buy whole fish, but I know that I would think twice, hard, before spending on a book what we spent last night feeding the family at a mediocre restaurant.)

Suppose that the interface with the electronic text were improved so that it no longer irritated me; suppose that I could interact with it as I do with a "real" book – scribble in its margins with a stylus rather than a keyboard, circle and underline passages at will. Suppose that my students could do this, and we spent our class time crouching over Nooks & Kindles & iPads, rather than tatty, dog-eared books and internet printouts (yes, I insist) as we do now?

Perhaps the experience would be more or less the same. But one crucial element would have changed: the immediate investment in the book-object. It's been displaced. No longer does one have to go to the campus store (or BookSmart across the street, or for that matter Amazon or Half.com), search out the object, and pay for it. Instead, one clicks & it's downloaded – ideally, for free. But the investment has only been shifted, not obliterated. We're no longer aware of the economic networks that have produced the book, from the long-expired royalty payments to the now-dead author, to the labor expended on editing, to the scanning or transcribing and html coding. The payment for the book becomes a society-wide one, rather than a personal one – and as we've seen in its most extreme form with the Tea Party movement, in America at least we're liable to consider any social obligations to be arrant left-wing fantasies. (As Americans, we owe nothing but personally incurred debts.)

On the most basic level, I feel more investment in a book-object in which I have invested actual money. I feel obligated to read it, at the very least. Call me a coelacanth; or some fossilized turbot.

this fall's booklist

2011-07-24T23:52:00.002-04:00

Here's Dan Chaon, who teaches fiction writing at Oberlin:

Occasionally, I have students who want to be rock stars. They have started a band, and they are spending their weekends and off hours writing songs and practicing. Without fail, these kids know everything there is to know about new music. They are listening all the time—they can discourse on Bob Dylan as easily as they can talk about the new e.p. from a new band from Little Rock, Arkansas, or wherever, and they have a whole hard drive full of demos from obscure artists that they have downloaded from the internet.

I wish that my students who want to be fiction writers were similarly engaged. But when I ask them what they’ve read recently, they frequently only manage to cough up the most obvious, high profile examples. What if my rock star students had only heard of …um….The Beatles? We listened to them in my Rock Music Class in high school. And…. And Justin Timberlake? And, uh, yeah, there’s that one band, My Chemical Romance, I heard one of their songs once.

On the first day of my undergraduate poetry workshops, I usually hand out a info sheet for the students to fill out – name, e-mail, major, interests, etc. One of the question is who their favorite poets are. Often they name Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman; Shakespeare; Keats; there's inevitably more than a couple people for whom Poe is a telltale heartthrob. Only very occasionally does Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, or Mary Oliver show up. Now I know what you're thinking – it's obvious that Shakespeare & Keats & Dickinson are better than anyone in the last 150 years, so it's only fair that my well-read students should make them their favorite. But the fact of the matter, I suspect, is that they simply don't know any poets post-whatever-they-read-in-high-school.

My graduate students are clearly a different case, but while I know they've read more poetry, it's hard to tell precisely what they've read. When I did my own MFA back in the Dark Ages (the days of the Clone – er, Theory – Wars), one of the great challenges of the workshops was the fact that everyone seemed to be writing out of their own personal canon, their own set of inspirations & models. Now that's always the case to some extent, I'd stipulate: but what struck me again & again was the incommensurability of some of those canons. In grad school I wrote deeply under the influence of Michael Palmer, Edmond Jabès, Susan Howe, & LZ; how was I to judge the poems of someone whose tutelary deities were Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Sharon Olds, and Mary Oliver? What did that person make of mine?

There's no way to enforce an aesthetic uniformity upon an MFA program, especially when there's little aesthetic uniformity among its faculty. That's probably a good thing. But one thing I've been doing over the last decade, a practice fairly common in workshops these days, but unheard of back in the Dark Ages on Campus on the Hill, is to assign a selection of recent books that've grabbed me. Students present on them, we talk about them, we think about them as barometers of the state of the art (for better or worse), we mine them for strategies. So here's the booklist for this fall's graduate workshop:

Rae Armantrout, Money Shot
Caroline Bergvall, Meddle English
Martin Corless-Smith, English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul
Susan Howe, That This
Joseph Lease, Testify
Jena Osman, The Network
Lisa Robertson, R's Boat
Rosmarie Waldrop, Driven to Abstraction

catty editors, part 439

2011-07-22T22:16:00.004-04:00

[William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1854)]

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20
***
Always refreshing to hear what a critic really thinks of an artist. Casting about earlier today for a copy of Rossetti's poem "Jenny," I dug out (from the bottom of a really obscure stack of library sale acquisitions) a copy of Cecil Y. Lang's 1968 Riverside anthology, The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle. Lang I didn't know – tho it's obvious I should. He prepared highly-regarded editions of the letters of Swinburne, Tennyson, and Arnold. He held a named chair at the University of Virginia. According to his obituary (2003) in the Independent, he was "sometimes spoken of as the highest-paid English professor in the land."

The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle is a more than solid collection of poems by the Rossettis, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne, along with Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat (presumably included because of its "rescue" by Rossetti from the remainder stacks after having fallen into oblivion on its first publication). Lang also includes a gallery of early (mostly pencil) portraits of the poets and artists associated with the movement, and a section of (unfortunately) black & white reproductions of paintings. But thus far the best thing about the edition is Lang's delightfully cranky remark about the paintings he's chosen to represent:

And I am aware that as there are people who like folk dancing and "good" jazz there are people who like Holman Hunt. So I have done the best I could by him, but fastidiousness requires me to record that my own response is merely a discrimination among revulsions. The recent appearance on B.B.C. television of his "Light of the World," "in which the mouth of the picture spoke words advertising paraffin" (The Times, February 17, 1967, p. 2) perfectly expresses my own feeling.

opsimath's notes

2011-07-19T21:31:00.004-04:00

[Walter Pater]

Reading Walter Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry this morning, I came across the lovely word opsimathy, or late learning. (Guy Davenport, I am reminded by his essay "On Reading," found the word in Pater as well.) Pater quotes Winckelmann: "I am one of those the Greeks call opsimatheis – I have come into the world and into Italy too late."

I am feeling very much opsimatheis – the opsimath – these days, striving to acquaint myself with the Victorians at this late date in life. So much to read, and so much of it so rich and rewarding. Who would have thought an academic who began by writing on Louis Zukofsky & the fortunes of late 20th-century avant-garde poetry would be transfixed by George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, or riveted to John Ruskin's yearly review pamphlets of the Royal Academy exhibitions?

At times I feel like I'm going at it with diminished resources. However more well-read I am now than I was two decades ago, or whatever bits of grace my prose style may have accrued, I find it more difficult to summon the hour-upon-hour concentration of grad school days, & my memory is no longer the reliably sturdy storage-&-retrieval unit it once was.
***
Sometimes it still makes connections, if only serendipitously. This morning I was also reading William Hurrell Mallock. Those who follow contemporary poetry and culture know Mallock, if they know him at all, as the author of A Human Document, the 1892 novel from which Tom Phillips has been quarrying successive versions of his artwork A Humument. But I'm reading Mallock's The New Republic (1877), a satirical novel of ideas Mallock began during his Oxford days earlier in the decade.

It's a bit of a hoot. Mallock essentially throws together, in an English country house, a selection of immediately recognizable caricatures of leading intellectual and cultural figures of his day, and sets them talking to one another. There are versions of Ruskin, of Benjamin Jowett, of Thomas Huxley, of Arnold, and – best of all – of Walter Pater. Pater is a "pale creature, with great moustache... He is Mr. Rose, the pre-Raphaelite," explains one character; "He always speaks in an undertone, and his two topics are self-indulgence and art."

In one hilarious moment, Rose/Pater explains what "success in life" consists in, closely echoing but parodying the famous "decadent" Conclusion to the first edition of The Renaissance: it consists

'in the consciousness of exquisite living – in the making our own each highest thrill of joy that the moment offers us – be it some touch of colour on the sea or on the mountains, the early dew in the crimson shadows of a rose, the shining of a woman's limbs in clear water, or –'

Here unfortunately a sound of 'Sh' broke softly from several mouths.

The passage that most struck me, however, comes from Mr. Herbert, a clear stand-in for Ruskin, Mallock's own intellectual mentor:

in that in most of my opinions and feelings I am singular, is a fact fraught for me with the most ominous significance. yet, how could I – who think that health is more than wealth, and who hold it a more important thing to separate right from wrong than to identify men with monkeys – how could I hope to be anything but singular in a generation that deliberately, and with its eyes open, prefers a cotton-mill to a Titian?

Where, thought I, instantly sitting up straight, had I read that before? It was not singled out in John Lucas's introduction to the 1975 Leicester University Press photo-reprint of The New Republic that I was reading; nor was it in Denis Donohue's book on Pater, the pages of which I had been turning over. Then it struck me – Ruskin himself. In Ruskin's 1875 Academy Notes, as part of a withering attack on "The Deserted Garden" by his erstwhile friend John Everett Millais, whom Ruskin had championed in his early pre-Raphaelite days, and who had married Ruskin's ex-wife Effie in 1855, Ruskin writes,

But if you think that the four-petalled rose, the sprinkle of hips looking like ill-drawn heather, the sun-dial looking like an ill-drawn fountain, the dirty birch tree, and rest – whatever it is meant for – of the inarticulate brown scrabble, are not likely to efface in the eyes of future generations, the fame of Venice and Etruria, you have always the heroic consolation given you in the exclamation of the Spectator: "If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton-mill, give us the cotton-mill."

Ruskin refers to an August 1870 review in the Spectator of his Oxford Lectures on Art, and will quote the offending passage again in Fors Clavigera #7. I had read it, it turns out, at least twice.

So I now have a hard & fast annotation, if only written in the margin of my photo-reprint copy of The New Republic. I'm not concerned as to whether the editor of the only annotated edition of the novel (University of Florida P, 1950) caught that (a Google Books search leads me to suspect not), only pleased that the internal scholarly apparatus is still working, even at a reduced level.

The editor of that 1950 edition, by the way, is J. Max Patrick, who edited the Anchor edition of The Prose of John Milton on my shelf. He also seems to have done extensive work on Herrick and Bacon, in addition to his foray in Mallock-editing. There were days when polymaths – rather than opsimaths – walked the earth.

The Kindle canon

2011-07-17T22:58:00.003-04:00

I'm back – at least I'm back in Boca, which doesn't seem appreciably warmer than DC, where we spent the last week of our vacation. The girls are in camp this week & the next, which makes the fact that J. is in Prague (Prague!) for a Shakespeare conference a bit less galling. I am weary, & depressed looking at the stack of mail – bills, notices, letters from lawyers & life insurance companies – on the dining room table. But happy to be unpacking the various crates of books we mailed back from points north; coming home from a long vacation is always a bit like Christmas.
***
The Kindle canon, the people at Amazon would have you believe, is more or less coextensive with whatever's out there to be read. Right. That doesn't seem a point worth debunking; what I'm interested in is the implicit canon the device itself presents to its owner, in the form of the "sleep-mode" screensavers that pop up whenever you shut it off.

So far as I can tell, the Kindle is something of a hybrid between an active storage/search system and a passive display screen. It's never really "on," except when you have the wireless engaged and are downloading content. Instead, it just rearranges the electronic "ink" of its display (like an Etch-a-Sketch, as innumerable commenters explain). When you've finished reading & put the thing to sleep, the page you're reading disappears & is replaced with a "sleep" screen, a graphic that the people at Amazon have designed to give the device an air of "culture" – to give you, or the person peering over your shoulder in the subway, the sense that you're actually reading a book, rather than mouth-breathing your way thru Glenn Beck's latest or Sarah Palin's autobiography.

There are 23 of these screens, & the Kindle cycles thru them so far as I can tell in the same order every time. The first is the Kindle/Amazon "logo," as it were, a figure reading under a tree; the last pictures some archaic bit of printing equipment & gives an email address & website for comments on the device. Of the remaining 21 screens, 10 are what I think of as "cultural wallpaper" – antique architectural & zoological drawings, a page of the Book of Kells, portraits of St. Jerome (Dürer) and Erasmus (Holbein – see above). And the final 11 are pictures of writers, so signaled by their names captioned in chunky Kindle font. These writers are what I designate the "Kindle Canon."

In alphabetical order, they are:

Jane Austen
Charlotte Brontë
Agatha Christie
Emily Dickinson
Alexandre Dumas (père)
Ralph Ellison
John Steinbeck
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Mark Twain
Jules Verne
Virginia Woolf

(Since the Kindle doesn't caption Erasmus or St. Jerome, I'm betting they're assuming we won't be using the device to actually read those worthies.) A pretty anodyne list, you're thinking. Here's some breakdowns:

female writers: 6 | male writers: 5
American: 5 | English: 4 | French: 2
20th-century writers: 4 | 19th-century writers: 7
novelists: 10 | poet: 1

Alas poor Emily Dickinson! Not merely is she the only poet in the lot, but (despite what the Amazon website says) neither the Franklin nor the Johnson editions of her poems are actually available on the Kindle, leaving only the problematic earlier versions, and to top it all off she's presented in the goofily-retouched version of her sole portrait photograph, with ares of white ruffles and an incongruous Farah Fawcett-like sweeping hairdo.

So – keeping in mind that Amazon is doing this on the cheap – the images seem to all be public domain, while portraits of Stieg Larsson or Billy Collins are probably copyrighted – what does this selection say about what Kindle readers read? Or perhaps more accurately, what Amazon thinks Kindle readers want to think of themselves reading?

1) Kindlers read novels, rather than poetry, short stories, or nonfiction. They like big, extended narratives full of fascinating characters (Austen, Woolf) or in which lots of exciting stuff happens (Verne, Dumas, Christie); sometimes both (Ellison).

2) Kindlers are as likely (or a bit more likely) to be women as men.

3) Kindlers spend a lot of time with what they read in High School, or at least their reading tastes haven't noticeably progressed much beyond there (Steinbeck, Twain, Dickinson, Verne).

Now, I'm not one to talk. I've been using my Kindle over the past 2 1/2 weeks mostly to read Jules Verne, HG Wells, and (my highbrow moment) George Eliot. But as a Kindle reader (if not yet a confirmed Kindle reader), this list leaves me feeling more or less insulted. Golly, folks – can't you even show the imagination of Barnes & Noble, who've gotten tons of mileage out of those engraving-style caricatures of a rather more interesting gang of literati? Sure, all of the above suspects, but they throw in Joyce, George Eliot, Wilde, James Baldwin, Dante, etc. It's the same principle of assumed cultural capital, but at least it's not a continual middlebrow assault. When I turn the damned thing off and get that dreamy picture of John Steinbeck, I never want to turn it on again.

vacation reading ii

2011-07-03T00:33:00.003-04:00

What is this 300-gram lump of plastic good for? Certainly not serious reading, during which I find myself reaching repeatedly for the pen or pencil to underline, marginalize. It's good for free downloads of public-domain novels. Five read in the last week, all in a rush, basking in the sun or rattling on the subway – Jules Verne's Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues, The Mysterious Island, Wells's War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Books I'm not sure I've ever read before (Wells, probably, Verne, perhaps) but know every detail of, thanks to Classics Illustrated.

They say Verne was badly translated in the 19th century, which I can believe – I know franglais when I read it, & recognize a hasty, sloppy translation. But then again, porcine ears rarely produce haute couture handbags: how do you gracefully translate the vast, exhausting data-dumps of zoological, geological, botanical, chemical material he foists upon you? Centre of the Earth is Ruskin's geology without the lyricism; Twenty Thousand Leagues is Moby-Dick's ichthyology without the humor. At a pinch, if you were on a desert island The Mysterious Island could teach you how to puddle iron, mill flour, distill sulfuric acid, manufacture nitrogylcerin, and dress a bullet wound thru the chest.

Always one feels the pressure of sheer knowledge that Verne wants to convey: admittedly, to a young audience, teenaged readers who honestly hunger for basic facts – and who I suppose don't blink at the fact that his is a world entirely without women. The five castaways on the Mysterious Island, by the time the volcano blows their high-tech Swiss-Family-Robinson-civilization to bits, have all of their needs met in overplus by the end of their first or second year there; their robust homosociality seems entirely to obviate any needs of the "flesh" (tho the relationship of the sailor Pencroft to his ward Herbert seems quite "spoony" to a 21st century reader). In contrast, Wells's waif Weena (Time Machine) and the unseen but yearned-for "wife" of War seem to present a positively rounded, "progressive" picture of the human race.

vacation reading

2011-06-26T00:25:00.002-04:00

(If you can think of a more anodyne title for this post, by all means forward it my way.)

So we're a good deal into our summer vacation, at the moment squatting in some friends' apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and having spent a week on Fire Island. I didn't bring many books. I didn't want to look at anything resembling "work," to be frank. But I read a couple of excellent volumes of contemporary poetry (Devin King and a forthcoming Elizabeth Robinson, as well as Don Revell's forthcoming translations of Laforgue – all of which might be blogged sometime); I finished the Carcanet Selected Poems of Swinburne, some 13 years after buying it for 5000 lire in Florence, of all places; I took immense pleasure from Dickens's Hard Times.

On a visit to the one shop in our corner of the island where they sell actual books, I impulsively plunked down $5.99 for a Bantam Classics edition of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty & Utilitarianism. What the hell, I thought. I've always wanted to read these works, & here they are in a handy – if not "scholarly" edition. If I ever have cause to quote Mill, I can check him against the Penguin I have at home.

I've finished On Liberty – tho I must have read it sometime in the past, it all felt so familiar – and am a bit into Utilitarianism. Two things strike me: 1) Whatever the grammar nazis of our own day might say, JSM has no compunctions about using the pronoun "they" to refer to a singular antecedent, and 2) JSM got the term "utilitarianism" from some passage in John Galt's Annals of the Parish (1821) – one of my favorite romantic-era novels, a lovely, genial work that everybody should know.

Of course, there were a couple of irritants to this reading experience, as well. One, which I'll pass over entirely, is the fact that the volume sports an intensely banal, self-serving, & at times deeply misguided introduction by that prize jackass Alan Dershowitz, who writes as tho he's pleased that Bantam Books at least have finally admitted that he and John Stuart Mill are in the same intellectual league. The second came towards the end of On Liberty, in a passage in which Mill is enumerating dispositions that constitute "moral vices":

the love of domineering over others; the desire to engross more than one's share of advantages (the [greek] of the Greeks.

Huh? Happily, as I read this passage late one night in the chilly late-Spring air, the sound of the breakers in one ear and the buzz of the mosquitoes in the other, I could pluck up my smart phone and google the words of the passage as a whole. What Mill wrote, of course, was "(the pleonexia of the Greeks)" (tho Mill used Greek characters for my italics).

Proofreading, at least for "classic" texts, seems to be a long-lost business, an obligation more honored in the [greek]* than in the [greek]**.

*theoria
**praxis
***
What I didn't bring along was my copy of Middlemarch, which I'm now finishing up on the Kindle that the girls gave me for Father's Day. Let's not get into an argument over whether I should have gotten a Nook, or a Slate, or Ba'al help us an iPad. I wanted something minimal; I wanted something easy; I got a Kindle. First impressions:

•Yes, it's easy, and the reading experience is just fine.

•It's clearly designed, and will probably be used by me, for reading novels and "light" nonfiction. It seems fairly hopeless for poetry (line breaks, long lines, etc.), and certainly serious scholarship is out of the question.

•Yes, one can load it with PDFs – but with mixed results. I'm reading one friend's massive ms-in-progress, and a student's MFA thesis, and they're working out just fine. Some of the scholarly articles I've loaded on it read well; others (double-columned PMLA things, for instance), are a pain in the arse. The bootlegged PDF of LZ's "A" that was all over the internets year before last is pretty unreadable. That's okay; I seem to have a copy or two of that book around the house. I anticipate its being pretty useful when it comes to carrying bundles of papers on the road, tho. We've been requiring job candidates to submit their materials in PDF form lately, & I recall the last time I chaired a search & had to haul a dozen candidates' files across the country to the MLA conference in my briefcase. Being able to load all that on a Kindle would certainly relieve me of that backache.

Ultimately, I suspected I'll mostly use this slate-gray wonder by loading it up with big public-domain Victorian novels. The scans aren't great, but they're quite okay. I've only caught a couple of "Balstrode"s for "Bulstrode" in the 100 pages or so of Middlemarch, and I'm quite able to shrug off the clearly non-Eliotian paragraph breaks that dot the text. Okay, so the chapter epigraphs often get altered from lineated verse to prose, but I can live with that. In short, it's not going to relieve much shelf-space at home, but it'll make travel reading – and beach reading, for that matter – a good deal easier.

Nelle Walker Scroggins, 1927-2011

2011-06-15T00:50:00.003-04:00

Even in some outlandishly manipulated Florida outdoor environment – dig the lights strung around the palm trees – my mother is able to maintain a wry detachment. I am in this place, whatever this place is, but I am not of it.

My father died in early 1998, after suffering for several years from a cancer so rare there really haven't been enough studies to indicate what a useful treatment – beyond good old-fashioned surgical removal – might be. (At Bethesda Naval Hospital, they offered to make him a guinea pig for a chemotherapy they were developing. Have you tried this on his cancer?, I asked. Well, no, they admitted. Is there any reason you think it might work? Not really...) His death was drawn-out, painful. It was hard to be there.

What killed my mother – Alzheimer's – was rather more garden-variety, the sort of thing that will eventually touch everyone you know, at some remove or another: your parent may have it, your partner may have it, your best friend may have it, you may have it yourself – someone you know will have it. Susan's mother, around whom she's woven the haunting trails of her Dementia Blog, has just died from its effects.

The hardest part of the past three weeks has been the constant effort to remember my mother as she was before the disease took her away: not killed her, but sapped her short- and then long-term memory, stripped away the markers of her personality. In some ways, I've been mourning my mother for over a year now, as she rapidly slipped away into the final stages of her illness.

What I found most heartening at the funeral ceremony was not the religious trimmings, nor the canned a capella hymns, nor even the poems my daughters wrote for the occasion. It was when first my cousin T--- and then the minister read poems my mother had written: a poem she'd written in high school on the demise of the old family farm, the replacement of the icebox by a "new Frigidaire," the banjo and fiddle by a "newfangled radio"; a shout-out to the "angels of mercy" who worked at her assisted living facility; a poem about an army wife awaiting her husband's return from the First Gulf War. She loved to write poems, I remind myself. She loved language itself, sharp-edged phrases, slightly smutty verbalisms she'd only share with some of the friends in her Ladies' Bible Class.

My mother's closest sister, like her a lifelong school teacher, is also suffering from dementia. She sits there and does the multiplication tables aloud, my cousin tells me. She sings church songs – every single verse – and she corrects the nurses' grammar. Mom wouldn't correct anyone's grammar – to their face; but she wouldn't hesitate to tell me or my father if someone didn't know the difference between "lie" and "lay." Once a particularly gruff and opinionated in-law of mine volunteered to her, apropos of nothing much in the conversation, Well, I'm an atheist myself. She said nothing at the time. But later: So he thinks he's smarter than God?

That's how I'm trying to remember my mother.

Day's. Best. News. (really)

2011-06-09T00:20:00.004-04:00

[Professor Scroggins, preparing to begin his lecture]

The scab dropped off today. Which means I don't have skin cancer. Probably.

No, seriously – this is the sort of thing I obsess about. As I am – let's say – follically challenged, the tippy-top of my head is a particularly sensitive and vulnerable region. At some point this Spring I dinged myself hard on something (probably a bookshelf), and took ages for the little wound to scab over satisfactorily. Didn't help that I tend to rub the top of my head absently while reading, or that I prematurely de-scabbed myself several times thru overenthusiastic post-shower towelling.

But by May, I was beginning to worry that this thing was never going away, googling "scabs that won't go away" and "scalp melanoma" & other dire things. Didn't help that on a flight back from Tennessee a bit less than two weeks ago I whacked myself mightily on the overhead baggage compartment when standing up to deplane, so mightily that I found myself pressing a bloody napkin to my pate as I hauled down my suitcase.

Skin cancer is of course an occupational hazard in South Florida, particularly for us less well-furred types. One bald colleague went insouciantly about his business quite hatless for the first decade I was here, only to abruptly get the baseball cap religion one summer, I suspect after a scary visit to the dermatologist. Me, I'm not the baseball cap type, but I have taken to piratical bandanas, quaint middle- and far-eastern embroidered caps, and an obligatory spray of sunscreen on my head before venturing out. (At our last visit to Orlando & Universal's Harry Potter wonderland, the only thing that restrained me from buying a Dumbledore tassled cap was my worry that it was just a trifle too tight. Otherwise, I'd wear it in a minute.)

But today, just as I was gingerly fingering the thing & contemplating an appointment with the dermatologist, I realized that the scab had actually come off in my fingers, leaving nothing behind but healthy pinkish newly-healed skin. This has got to be a good omen of some sort.

Victorian copiousness

2011-06-08T14:01:00.001-04:00

We buried my mother two weeks ago today. It’s not something I’m really prepared to write about, but it does I hope go some way towards explaining the silence of the blog over the past few weeks.

So I’ve been back in the steam of South Florida for about a week and a half now, surrounded by a sift of books on – what else? – Victorian literature and culture. The one I’ve gotten most intimate with of late is Jerome Buckley’s third edition revision & expansion of Benjamin Woods’s Poetry of the Victorian Period (Scott, Foresman, 1965). My own copy of this intimidating red doorstopper indicates that I bought it two & a half decades ago for Alison Sulloway’s class on Victorian Poetry. I’m bemused that she thought we needed such a comprehensive text, as her syllabus (still folded into the book in all its purple-ditto’d glory) indicates that we only read Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and Hopkins. But I’m grateful that she assigned it.

This is an anthology from the days when “men” were “men” and anthologies were anthologies indeed. Buckley tells us in the intro that the editors’ intention was to present the “dozen or fifteen” leading poets as thoroughly as possible: that means the reader gets what for a contemporary anthologist, constantly confronted by page limits and price barriers, is an incomprehensibly large amount of text: 165 large-format, double-columned pages (averaging out around 100 lines a page) of Tennyson (that’s every major poem – all of Maud and In Memoriam, about a quarter of Idylls of the King); 200 pages of Browning, 70 of Arnold, 80 of Swinburne, etc. (Women poets are sadly, but not entirely, underrepresented, which is the greatest shortcoming of this relic of another era. All of “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” but none of Aurora Leigh, for instance.)

Yes, I’ve been on an anthology kick lately, as I mentioned some weeks ago. I realized a while back that the clock had definitely run out on my emulating Pound’s ambition (to know more about poetry by the age of 30 than “any man living”). But I thought to myself, maybe if I trim that ambition a bit – perhaps by 50 (and I still have a few years before then) I can know the canon of English poetry as well as any of my peers?

Now a long time back I realized (see multiple blog posts, by me and practically anyone) that it’s impossible to keep up with contemporary poetry. Anyone who claims he or she “knows” what’s out there is bluffing at best; there’s just too much, and the territory hasn’t been mapped at all adequately. It’s a rare month that I don’t pull down a few books from my “unread” shelf and discover poets whose works excites the heck out of me. (For the record: the latest run of exciting discoveries has included Camille Martin, Jill Magi, and Rachel Zolf.) But I’m always dogged by the sense that I don’t know enough about pre-20th-century poetry.

So I began by reading straight thru Christopher Ricks’s Oxford Book of English Verse, and then (more topically) John Dixon Hunt’s Oxford Book of Garden Verse. Now I’m reading, two poems at a sitting, Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. Why the Buckley/Woods Poetry of the Victorian Period? Well, as I plunge deeper into Ruskin, I grow more and more conscious of my own ignorance of the period as a whole. Sure, I’ve read a handful of Victorian novels, and took a couple of courses on Victorian poetry along the way – and suspect I know the period about as well as most scholars of 20th-c. American poetry – but I want to get into it more deeply, more thoroughly.

Tennyson, whom I’ve been living with for the past week, was for a long time a byword for Victorian otioseness & sententiousness. Yup, there’s plenty of that. But I’m reminded, rereading him in bulk, that the guy was also possessed of a fantastic lyrical ear, certainly the best of the generation after Keats. There’s no gainsaying the psychological drama of Maud, certainly, and I’m definitely down with those who see In Memoriam as a kind of model for all manner of twentieth-century experiments in the long personal poem. (I wouldn’t recommend reading it after a recent bereavement, however.) When Tennyson is good, he’s very good indeed. The problem, of course, is extracting those moments of shiny lyricism or exquisitely turned psychological insight from the great masses of water-treading verse in which they’re often embedded.

The Victorians wrote a lot. They probably wrote too much. Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose books I have been turning over (to little profit & frequent irritation) remarks in an essay on Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father):

There cannot have been too many writers like Anthony Trollope, who kept a schedule and a watch in front of him to make sure that he turned out his 250 words every quarter of an hour for a minimum of three hours. But the sense of writing as a regular occupation, not beholden to inspiration, was and still is typical among English intellectuals. Stephen himself was no more productive than many others; he averaged three or four 8000-word articles a week (each at one sitting, it is, incredibly, reported), apart from incidental writing tasks. This was the sportsmanlike way of writing: no fuss, no anguish, the game played at the appointed time, so many minutes to the period, so many periods to the event.

I like that – “a regular occupation, not beholden to inspiration.”

manuscript dating, with special reference to LZ

2011-05-13T23:46:00.004-04:00

So I happened on one of those "identify this quotation" sites, where the quotation in question was Albert Einstein's "Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler." Now of course LZ-heads all across the nation immediately say "A"-12! And yes, the quotation is there on page 143 of every edition:

Everything should be as simple as it can be,
Says Einstein,
But not simpler.

The quotation site had ferreted this out,* indeed it was their primary source for the quotation – in this form (Einstein had said similar things, or things in more or less the same form, but we don't seem to have a record of him saying precisely this).

*Don't go there just yet – you'll spoil the suspense of my own pseudo-scholarly narrative.

Aha, thought I. The quotation can't be found in "Anton Reiser's" Albert Einstein: A Biographical Portrait, the celeb biography LZ translated back in 1930 (work he thought so little of he requested his name be removed from the book as translator). But somehow over the past two decades of doing LZ, I had stumbled upon a contemporaneous formulation (contemporaneous that is to the composition of "A"-12, 1950-51) which LZ almost certainly had read. The composer Roger Sessions, writing in the New York Times (LZ's habitual paper), in a piece entitled "How a 'Difficult' Composer Gets That Way" (January 8, 1950): "I also remember a remark of Albert Einstein, which certainly applies to music. He said, in effect, that everything should be as simple as it can be but not simpler!" (Note: Sessions doesn't claim he's quoting AE verbatim, just "in effect." LZ, on the other hand, translates it into a direct quotation.)

I tried to work this little bit of "sourcing" into my LZ publications for years, & never managed to find the right place for it. I figured it would be my little jewel, my one trouvé. But when I saw the author of the Quote Investigator blog on the trail, I emailed him forthwith with my find, and he promptly incorporated it into his piece.

But that's only where the story gets interesting (interesting, that is, if you're a painfully anal-obsessive textual-critic-type). That author, in turn, emailed me back: the quotation also appears – I'd forgotten – in Prepositions, at the end of Part II of "William Carlos Williams" (page 51): a section dated 1948. Lots of thoughts ran thru my head, first of all that perhaps LZ had told the quotation to Sessions, who then used it in his NYT piece. But there's no record of LZ ever meeting Sessions. And I couldn't find the quotation in any of the letters LZ wrote before 1950. So what gives with this "1948"?

Here's what gives: "William Carlos Williams" actually consists of three widely separated essays LZ put together into a single piece for the 1967 publication of Prepositions: Part I, "A Citation," was written for The Nation in 1958; Part III is a 1928 review of WCW Voyage to Pagany, which was published in 1931 in Hound & Horn as a "postscript" to LZ's big Henry Adams essay. And here's the complicated textual history of Part II:

1) It's first published as "Poetry in a Modern Age" in Poetry magazine 76.3 (June 1950), as a review of Vivienne Koch's William Carlos Williams. There are 2 manuscripts and a typescript extant, the middle one dated 19 March 1950.

2) A shorter version is published in Winter 1962 in The Massachusetts Review as "An Old Note on William Carlos Williams," with a date at the end saying "1948." And this version is identical to ––

3) Part II of Prepositions's "William Carlos Williams," which is also dated 1948.

Marcella Booth's scrupulous Catalogue of the LZ Manuscript Collection (1975) lists the manuscript/typescript materials of (1) and (2) as two separate items, dating (1) to 1950 and (2) to 1948, sensibly concluding that LZ incorporated "all the material" in (2) into (1).

Well, it might be sensible to conclude that, but that's not how LZ worked. Time & again, he would reprint a previously printed piece in an abbreviated form: you see it spectacularly in "An Objective," which gives us the high points of all three of the "Objectivist" essays in a single concentrated pill. The magazine publication of his Henry Adams thesis is considerably shorter than the full-length thing at Columbia. So it makes no sense that he would write a short piece on WCW in 1948 – without telling WCW about it – there's no epistolary evidence of his writing it at the time – then pump that up to make a review of Vivienne Koch's book (a book about which he & WCW have significant correspondence).

Here's what happened: LZ wrote a review of Koch in early 1950, making use of the Einstein "quotation" he'd read in the Times, along with a bunch of other things that were obsessing him, & that would similarly appear in "A"-12. A decade later, when a Mass Review editor hit him up for something for a "gathering" for WCW, he sent a new typescript of the piece, cut down by about a third (removing most of the references to Koch's book), and dated the thing – erroneously, it turns out – 1948. And that's the date that stuck when he came to compile Prepositions a few years later.

Don't ask me how much time I spent on this today; it's embarrassing. But I'm heady with the sense of having ironed out a real live error, the sort of thing that gets the textual critic-biographer's pulse racing.

crap...

2011-05-13T15:52:00.003-04:00

Well, for a while this morning Blogger was talking about how they were in the process of restoring the posts that had been for some reason taken down; but now I'm not finding that particular page, & other folks seem to have lost posts as well, for good, so I guess I'll just have to write off that singularly rambly & inconsequential set of musings on the chronological orders of Ruskin's Library Edition, the pleasures of Vol. XIII, and why I like reading the catalogues of art exhibits. Sigh. Anybody want to hear about the pleasures of textual scholarship & establishing manuscript dates?
***
Later: Well, look at that. My faith in humanity is restored. But I'm gonna write about establishing manuscript dates anyway.

ruskin: turner

2011-05-11T20:41:00.000-04:00

One of the more disconcerting aspects of reading thru the Library Edition of Ruskin – as yes, I am still doing – is the complicated balancing act editors Wedderburn & Cook have done between a chronological & a thematic, or work-based, arrangement. They've tried to arrange his works in roughly chronological order, but have also kept his multi-volume works (Modern Painters, Stones of Venice) together. Since Ruskin took an ungodly long time to finish the five volumes of Modern Painters, writing a bunch of stuff in between, it's been a complicated dance reading thru his works in more or less the order he wrote them.

I began at the beginning – Juvenilia, Volume I – then on to the Poems (Vol. II) and the first 2 volumes of MP (III & IV). At which point Ruskin shifted attention to architecture & Venice, and I shifted forward to Seven Lamps of Architecture (Vol. VIII), the 3 volumes of Stones of Venice (IX, X, & XI), and the lectures that more or less go along with Stones (Vol. XII). Then he returned to Modern Painters, for two further volumes (Vol. V & VI).

So I finished Modern Painters 4 a number of weeks ago, a mediation mostly on mountain geology – or so it seems in retrospect – with a few thoughts on Turner along the way. And I'm all ready to launch into the final volume of the work, when I realize I need to trawl ahead across my shelves to Library Edition Vol. XIII, which is comprised more or less of miscellaneous writings on Turner, most of them produced as a byproduct of Ruskin's being named one of the executors of Turner's will, & spending time cataloguing & sorting Turner's bequest of his paintings, drawing, & sketches to the nation. Modern Painters 4 was finished in 1856; Ruskin didn't publish Modern Painters 5 until 1860. And between those dates, he published enough material to fill four more volumes of the Library Edition (XIII – XVI). So I may or may not complete my long haul thru MP by the end of this year. We'll see.

At any rate, Vol. XIII is thus far rather interesting. The introduction is frankly fascinating, treating as it does Ruskin's work on the Turner bequest, the immense sift of sketches and drawings – thousands upon thousands – left behind in Turner's studio and dwelling. (The Library Edition has the most meaty introductions of any scholarly edition I've ever met; they're really a running biography of Ruskin, & were indeed packaged as such by ET Cook after the LE was finished.) The first real "work" in the volume is The Harbours of England, which amounts to descriptive copy Ruskin wrote for a series of 12 reproductions of Turner seascapes.

It all made me realize how little I really know about Turner (tho I went to the fantastic Turner exhibition year before last at the Metropolitan Museum, & like everyone else was blown away), so I pulled down & read the only Turner book handy – Graham Reynolds's Turner in the "World of Art" (now Thames & Hudson, my own copy OUP) series. A quick & satisfying read, tho the color reproductions in this copy are execrable. There are a few moments of nice prose:

After [Fingal's Cave] remained unsold for thirteen years, C.R. Leslie chose it for James Lenox, whose first reaction was disappointment at its indistinctness. When Turner heard this he made the famous reply: 'You should tell him that indistinctness is my forte.' [My new favorite quotation of the moment]

Yet more private were the sketchbooks in which Turner made compositions of couples in bed, and other Priapic subjects. It is one of the pleasanter ironies of history that Ruskin, who was not conspicuous for matrimonial success, was obliged to review these frankly lustful scenes amidst all the drawings in the Turner Bequest. He inscribed one sketchbook of this kind with the words, 'They are kept as evidence of failure of mind only.'

***
Paging thru the rest of Library Edition XIII & sampling what amounts to Ruskin's catalogue copy, however, makes me realize how much I enjoy reading art catalogues in general. So I've turned a quarter of my attention to Jane Ferrington's excellent 1980 Wyndham Lewis, a catalogue of a massive Manchester City Galleries exhibition. It makes me want to get out my paints and canvases.

Is it any wonder I never get anything significant done? Well, I did review Marjorie Perloff's latest here, and have just read proofs for a couple of things due out soonest. Word on the street has it that the new Parnassus is out with my essay on Guy Davenport, but I haven't gotten my copies yet.

overload

2011-04-25T01:46:00.002-04:00

Steve Burt laments, on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, that there's just too much happening in the wide world of poesy, that he can't keep up anymore, what with the distractions of a job, a family, a real life, etc. Once upon a time, when we were 25, we could feel reasonably au courant with poetry – in my case, I read Poetics Journal & Temblor & Acts and got all the new books from The Figures and Roof & browsed thru Poetry magazine and a bunch of the big-circulation journals every issue, & hung out with some cool people who told me things to read. And I felt reasonably up on things.

But now it's all different. As Steve puts it,

Every week, every day, I get email and Facebook notices and for that matter word of mouth about the latest debate or commentary or controversy or metapoetic metaconversation (sometimes it’s even attached to actual poems) on one of three dozen fine websites and active blogs and web-only or web-mostly mostly-poetry magazines...

Man do I sympathize. With the expansion of the internet as the primary medium of poetry, & of the endless chatter of poetry-promotion & poetry-discussion – of pobiz, in short – it feels like there's been an exponential explosion of poetic activity out there, so much being written & published & written about that no-one, but no-one, is able to grasp more than a tiny fraction of it. Ron Silliman, in various blog-posts, has celebrated the explosion of poetic activity; lots of curmudgeonly types have grumbled that the poetic world's going to hell in a handbasket, now that everybody's gotten into the game (paging Dr. Pope – an outbreak of Duncitis...).

My own sense is that something real is indeed happening, if not in terms of the proportion of the body politic writing poetry or maybe the raw numbers of poets active, but certainly in terms of the increased availability of poetry & the discourse surrounding it. There's clearly more out there to be read. But perhaps more importantly, the internet, & such devices as a poet-heavy Facebook friends list, work to give one the momentary illusion that if one had the time & energy, one could somehow get a handle on it all. One could, like Milton, read all the books that matter.

But that's never really been the case, at least not in our lifetimes. Every year, I discover poets who by rights I ought to have been reading back in the late '80s. When I'm reduced to madras shorts and a white patent leather belt (the local octagenarian uniform), I hope to be discovering poets of the 2000s & 2010s I'd somehow missed. And that's part of the process of one's reading life, I keep saying to myself, trying to muster a zen-like equanimity about my own absymal out-of-it-ness. The internet wants me to believe that I can have it all, right now. But the state of not being able to have it all, of having to pick and choose & have things picked & chosen for one, is in the end the human condition. Or at least my human condition.
***
On t'other hand, the irrepressible gadfly Kenneth Goldsmith would taunt us – or at least taunts Steve B. – with the prospect of a veritable tsunami of recycled, reframed, & regurgitated preexisting texts, repackaged & put on display by a new generation of "language hoarders" who have no interest in outmoded ideas of "originality" or "expression." "This ain’t E-poetry or Net Art: this is all about a basic change in the ways in which we use language," Kenny G. tells us with glee: "We will never write the same way again."

Don't get me wrong: I'm fascinated by projects like those of KG, or Vanessa Place, or Craig Dworkin, etc. I've screened "Sucking on Words," the Goldsmith documentary, for a half-dozen poetry classes, & have seen the best minds of my last undergraduate generation promptly set to work cannibalizing their Facebook feeds and text messages to reframe them as poetry. It's a little too early, however, to put to rest a several-millennia-long habit of making poems out of the air, stringing words together in combinations that strike one as new. The internet will probably have as deep an impact on human verbal sensibilities as the printing press or the codex did, but I suspect one impact it won't have is to wipe out the human tendency towards verbal creation, in favor of varieties of repackaging preexisting word-strings.

And anyway, it's too early to tell, innit? Part of me sees Kenny G's flood-tide of digital verbiage as a kind of cottage industry version of what late capitalism is already doing with language; part of me strives desperately to see some kind of subversive potential in the new conceptualism. But my hunch is that it's always going to be in coexistence with more or less old-fashioned compositional impulses.
***
My own gesture towards temporarily reefing sails in the face of the hurricane of poetry – as I think I've mentioned – has been, for the better part of the dire "National Poetry Month," instead of reading as I usually do a dozen or so newish slim volumes of contemporary verse, to read straight thru Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse. Not the best anthology around, but by no means a bad one, & at the moment the handiest. Just finished it this morning; more on that later.

home stretch

2011-04-20T00:36:00.002-04:00

There's only about a week & a half of classes left; my bag is full of papers to grade, however, & there are a thousand little administrative things hovering over my head, so I'm trying not even to think in terms of lights at ends of tunnels.
***
I fear I'm not doing the Aeneid justice; it deserves at least a week's more attention than I'm able to give it right now, and as we wind our way thru the second half of the poem, I'm feeling more & more daunted by the complexity and beauty of Virgil's narrative design & historical vision. A few years back my acquaintance the classicist David Wray, at the University of Chicago, team-taught a course on the Aeneid in translation – various translations, from Gavin Douglas thru Dryden down to the present – with Robert Von Hallberg. Now that must have been an epic course.
***
We spent last week in the graduate seminar sparring over James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault. This week we'll do more sparring, & then venture into Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. I have my problems with Greenblatt's book: it's at once too conventional – so much more the standard speculative Shax life than one would have expected from a scholar who led a revolution in early modern studies; it could, one can't help feeling, have been written anytime in the last half century – and too "out there." It brings to a fine pitch, however, the central issue of specifically literary biography: how does one articulate, negotiate, theorize the relationship between life & works? Greenblatt's answer is that we work out the governing obsessions of Shakespeare's writings, then we locate them in what little we know of his life – at times, we invent whole tracts of his life for which we have no evidence, in order to account for something that dominates the writing.

Okay. But what's the payoff? Why pursue this exercise? Why not just fall back on a New Critical stance, and reject biographical connections entirely? Greenblatt's implicit argument is that Shakespeare's work shows the playwright to be a transcendent genius (I won't argue with him there), and that we naturally want to know more about the life-experience of such a guy. I don't think I'd argue with him there, either, tho it's also clear to me that the sort of knowledge displayed in Will in the World – even the best-attested stuff – doesn't really add anything to our reading of the Shax corpus.

But what then is the justification for a biography of a less than transcendently gifted author? If a writerly life issues only in handful of pretty good works, is there a specifically literary reason for pursuing (writing or reading) the biography of such an also-ran?

I fear I'm cutting the conceptual points a bit too close here. For the most part, we read biography, even literary biography, for reasons that have little to do with literary commentary, criticism, or even appreciation. We read a life of Whittier or Longfellow not to get insights into their poetry, but because they were interesting people, and we're naturally inclined to want to learn about the lives of interesting people. (How banal, how bourgeois. How hopelessly pre-theoretical.)

I wonder if there are 300 people in the world who would buy a biography of Ronald Johnson?

the seductions of lecturing

2011-04-17T01:33:00.005-04:00

I went to listen to this spring's visiting writer Thursday night. Even tho I was simmering with resentment – the department's reading series has been scheduled right opposite my graduate seminar, so I've lost several hours of class time over the course of the semester – I found myself enjoying the performance. Very much, in fact. He was a fiction writer; he had dashingly long silver hair, dressed sharply with just the right touch of eccentricity (a bow tie, no less), "worked" the audience like a seasoned entertainer. Much laughter; quiet breath-holding at all the right moments. Everyone left, I think, with the sense that they'd gotten their money's worth, or at least that they hadn't wasted their hour.

Of course, it was all a matter of the performative – which is quite appropriate in the case of a public reading, which is more than anything else a performance. There are few things more dispiriting than a poorly delivered reading of poetry; recondite or "difficult" poetry, especially, needs to be delivered with a certain aggressive élan, I think – if you can't "get" work without living with it on the page before you, reading it repeatedly and thoughtfully, what's the point of having it read to you in a lifeless manner?

I think I'm a pretty decent performer of my own poetry, and a pretty good performer of others'. But how does this translate to the classroom? Lately, I've been thinking about the seductions of the lecture. I've had good lecturers as an undergraduate; when I was a grad student at University on the Hill, I was a TA for a professor who'd begun life as a child preacher, & was a truly spellbinding lecturer – there were audible gasps across the 200-seat auditorium sometimes when he read an affecting passage from Faulkner.

But the papers his students turned in – the ones I had to grade – were for the most part lousy. The kids were amazed, & entertained, but I wasn't at all sure they were learning. Yesterday I came across this lovely statement of teaching philosophy by my old professor Tom Gardner (click on "Minds in the Act of Finding" on the right), & was reminded of the excitement of his classes, where he would patiently and precisely draw points out of us in conversation, showing us time and again that we knew more than we thought we did, making us, thru a careful Socratic prodding, connect the dots in ways that we wouldn't have thought to.

That kind of teaching is terrifically hard, especially when you're dealing with undergrads like many of the ones who sat in classes with me in Blacksburg all those years ago, or who sit in my classes now at Our Fair University – kids who're tired from working full-time jobs, kids who're underprepared for a given class, kids who don't really have the academic background they need for an upper-division course, kids who simply don't want to be there. (I won't even go into "media-saturated," "attention-deficit-plagued," etc.). I don't mean to put down my students – they're for the most part great; but sometimes it's awfully easy to fall into the performer mode, even the entertainer mode. I start out typing up some talking/discussion points; I end up writing a week's worth of lectures.

Talking goes over well; the students laugh at the jokes. They don't fall asleep, for the most part. I get good evaluations; better evaluations, I sometimes think, than if I'd forced them to think & talk their way thru the class. But for every lecture I deliver in the classroom, I end up feeling just a little bit queasy: I've short-changed them on some level, & I've short-changed the texts I'm teaching.

Resolution for the Fall semester: no more than a half-hour's prepared talking per class period. They may find me duller at first, & I'm sure I'll find it a good deal more work, but we'll both get more out of it in the long run.

Hegel's 'do

2011-04-14T10:19:00.005-04:00

We have no portraits of Hegel in his first Jena years, only a silhouette showing him (in Terry Pinkard's words) "sporting the very fashionable 'Titus' haircut (probably best known as Napoleon’s haircut), a style identified with 'modernity' (and sometimes with the Revolution), which he was to keep all his life." I try to imagine this, as I only know Hegel's 'do from later portraits, in which his forelocks are notably thinning:

How about:
Yeah, that works.

progress report

2011-04-10T22:15:00.004-04:00

Well, I'm sure you don't remember this post from about 5 months ago, in which I mused on harnessing my OCD for something useful – no, nothing as ambitious as actually writing something, but the more mundane task of trying to shed a few pounds.

There's a grand old tradition of portly scholars & poets. I think of the portly Wallace Stevens, the grandly massive Amy Lowell & Gertrude Stein. I think of Cornell's own Robert Kaske, one of the grand old men of medieval studies, a veritable pyramid of flesh and Gandalfian curtains of hair & beard. And then I think of the rueful Ben Jonson, in his "My Picture Left in Scotland" –

Oh, but my conscious fears,
That fly my thoughts between,
Tell me that she hath seen
My hundreds of gray hairs,
Told seven and forty years,
Read so much waist, as she cannot embrace
My mountain belly and my rock face,
As all these, through her eyes, have stopt her ears.

Yep, I've got those "hundreds of gray hairs" (& lots of simply missing hair), & while I've never caught up with Jonson's "twenty stone within two pound" (more or less 280 lbs!), I've gotten more & more conscious of my own "mountain belly" over the years.

So five months ago I decided to go full-on & tackle the problem. Strategy #1: the standing lectern (homemade division):I've been working standing up for maybe 3-4 hours a day, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, lifting a set of dumbbells as I read now & again. I have no idea whether standing up really burns calories, as lots of websites tell me it does; I know it makes my back feel better.

I've been taking the stairs rather than the elevator; I've been getting out on my bike; I've been parking further away from the entrance.

Most of all, I've stopped eating the savory, salty things that have been my between-meals companions for so many years. It hasn't been easy, of course: but it helps not to buy the things in the first place. When I'm dying for some oral gratification, I'll heat up a Punjabi-style papadam in the toaster oven – almost no oil to the thing, very few calories, & enough potent spices (go asafoetida!) to satisfy my urges for a good long while.

So what's the result? Well, since that post back in October, I seem to have shed somewhere between 20 and 25 pounds. I'm still no sylph, but I'm on my way to something more closely approximating a normal human shape.

NB: Weight loss blogging is perhaps the most irritating genre on the internets, I know. But golly, I'm pleased with this, & gotta share somehow.

NB2: Neither shedding a stone & a half nor a standup lectern makes grading papers any easier.

anthologizing ii

2011-04-08T11:33:00.003-04:00

So Ron S. really seems to have shuttered the shop, at least as a venue for actually writing about poetry. Not sure how I feel about it; like everybody else, for a while I was checking his blog every day, hoping for that fleeting "bump" by being linked, following (with some distaste) the snarky flame wars in his comments box. Kenny Goldsmith has a harshly worded but on the whole fair assessment of the passing of the Age of the Sillimanian Blogosphere here.
***
I realized the other day, as I reopened Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse – some 25 -30 poems a day, for a bit over a week now – that I was doing something for National Poetry Month, as silly an event as that is. Am I cynical? Maybe, but somehow it seems better for the soul to spend the month reading poems rather than churning them out.

I'm at the mid-17th-century now. I've found myself reminded of a great number of poems I'd entirely forgotten, & have been introduced to more than a few I hadn't read before. Connections get made: I'm reminded of how much LZ's short lyrics owe to the Cavalier poets – far more, in some ways, than they owe to WC Williams or anyone in his immediate vicinity. I'm amused by how Ricks seems to set his anthology up as a background guide for high modernism: while the only bit of The Waste Land anthologized is the lyric "Death by Water" (part IV), we're given the passage from Webster's White Devil quoted in "The Burial of the Dead" ("But keepe the wolfe far thence..."); no Pound, of course, but we do have Waller's "Go Lovely Rose" (cf. the "Envoi" to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley); and while there's no Lennon/McCartney, we have the lyric from Dekker's Patient Grissell that became "Golden Slumbers."

And I'm reminded that Bishop King's "Exequy" is really one of the loveliest, saddest poems of all:

My last Good-night! Thou wilt not wake
Till I Thy Fate shall overtake:
Till age, or grief, or sicknes must
Marry my Body to that Dust
It so much loves; and fill the roome
My heart keepes empty in Thy Tomb.
Stay for mee there; I will not faile
To meet Thee in that hollow Vale.

anthologizing

2011-04-02T22:34:00.002-04:00

"Well, nobody actually reads anthologies – you teach out of them. You find the one that fits your own pedagogical predispositions most closely, then you supplement it with online texts & handouts & so forth. But you can't be thinking of reading the things."

That's my inner behavior-censor, calling me down the other day when I took down Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Poetry (1999) & started reading straight thru it – started at page 1, "Sumer is icumen in" (anonymous) & now in the middle of Sir Walter Ralegh (1554(?)-1618). I hope to finish (page 662, Seamus Heaney's "The Pitchfork") sometime in the next couple of months.

I guess, strangely enough, I'm feeling a bit burned out on contemporary poetry. I've read quite a bit lately – indeed, I've been on something of a bender reading slim volumes of contemporary verse for maybe a decade or so, between two and four a week on average. It's not that I don't admire much of what I'm reading – some of it is stupendous – but I'm feeling the need to reconnect with the "tradition," to work my way back thru the whole historical development of poetry in English. I'm guessing I've probably read 85% of what Ricks anthologizes in the Oxford Book, at least up thru the beginning of the 20th century (where our tastes pretty radically diverge). But much of it I read decades ago, back in my own college & grad school days, where as Samuel Johnson says I "read hard" – very hard. I want to get the feel of 17th- & 18th-century poetry back in my head; I want to revisit some of the minor Victorians.

Ricks is a solid place to begin. His taste is staunchly canonical, so there aren't many "major" poems that fall thru the cracks entirely, and there are a good number of "minor" figures who make it into his net. And I've always found the Oxford Books of X Verse, as a series, to be rather wonderfully readable – pleasant typography, very little unnecessary academic apparatus. Of course, anthologizing is never a neutral activity: without commenting on the way the entire post- or late-modernist tradition gets passed over in Ricks's choice, I'm struck by how much of the poetry in the first stretch of the book emphasizes mutability, decay, the imminence of death. Perhaps that's what poets from the 13th thru the late 15th century were obsessed with. Or maybe it's Ricks's own preoccupation; after all, he was in his mid-sixties when compiling this collection.

I do like the idea of having an anthology going at any given moment. After this one, I suspect I'll tackle either John Dixon Hunt's Oxford Book of Garden Verse or Alastair Fowler's Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse. Or maybe one or more of the nifty collections of contemporary poetry hanging around the shelves.

officiating/interim

2011-03-29T01:30:00.004-04:00

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, tho I haven't been in this space for a while. Much has been going on, some of it not so good – bad, heart-rending even – and some of it just plain busyness. Some work has gotten done, & other things have been left undone.

I sense Culture Industry may be at a crossroads. That is, my always-divided attention may finally have stretched to the breaking point, so that something has to give. Or this may just be another hiatus. No, I'm not migrating full-time to Twitter. After a bit of dabbling in that medium, I realize that I'm simply not all that interested in coming up with 140-character pithinesses. Even the sometimes joyous give-&-take of Facebook has seemed kind of spastic lately, a poor substitute for sitting down and talking to someone face to (non-virtual) face, or for thinking one's way thru a problem on paper or screen.

And Ba'al help me, I've become official. That is, after 15 years of avoiding administrative posts like the plague, I've accepted a position of responsibility in my department, one of those jobs that looks nice on the resume & gives one an illusory sense of power & dumps a dozen new emails in one's lap every morning. Is it kosher for the Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Our Fair University to maintain a blog that badmouths eminences in the academy & the government? That muses awkwardly on literary & cultural issues? Heaven knows I've been embarrassed enough times by grad students quoting or paraphrasing something I'd offhandedly tossed off in this space, & a couple of times I've intemperately given away the talking points for an entire seminar half a week beforehand.

Even the conversation on the blogosphere, as lively as it remains, has for the moment lost its luster. Perhaps it's time to hunker down, sift thru the papers that need sifting thru, & issue an occasional communique. So consider this a brief wave from the bunker.
***
Update 3/30: Reading this, what looks like Ron Silliman's farewell the blogging platform, actually nudges me in the direction of wanting to write more in this space.

reading notes: pound, hulme

2011-03-10T23:57:00.002-05:00

I have just now finished Richard Sieburth's newish (2010) edition of Pound's New Selected Poems and Translations (New Directions), &, like Elohim thru that first stretch of Genesis, I pronounce it good. Very good indeed. From a pedagogical point of view, this is now the standard Pound text: all of the significant shorter poems, great lashings of Cantos, & excellent explanatory notes. Sieburth includes a fascinating appendix detailing the history of earlier Pound selections, including the crunky old Selected Poems (New Directions 1949, & reprinted zillions of times afterward).

There are two further appendices: TS Eliot's original introduction to the 1928 Faber Selected Poems, and John Berryman's rejected introduction to the New Directions 1949 volume (later published in Partisan Review). It's the Berryman that's the real surprise for me here. I confess to not knowing Berryman's criticism at all except by reputation – and we all know how reliable reputation can be. But this piece is chock-full of nutty goodness, critical insights falling like dew. Here's my favorite: In discussing the "distance" with which Pound treats his subject, Berryman singles out among its causes Pound's

unfailing, encyclopedic mastery of tone – a mastery that compensates for a comparative weakness of syntax. (By instinct, I parenthesize, Pound has always minimized the importance of syntax, and this instict perhaps accounts for his inveterate dislike of Milton, a dislike that has had broad consequences for three decades of the twentieth century; not only did Milton seem to him, perhaps, anti-romantic and anti-realistic, undetailed, and anti-conversational, but Milton is the supreme English master of syntax.)

Could this be phrased any better?
***
On a lighter note, I've just finished Alun R. Jones's The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (Victor Gollanz/Beacon, 1960), a book which proves that even fifty years ago an English academic (U of Hull) could publish, with a well-regarded pair of publishing houses, a perfectly ill-written book. But there's this grand titbit, part of a chapter enticingly titled "Hulme and Women":

Hulme, sitting at a table in the Café Royal talking to his friends, suddenly looked at his watch and strode from the building with the remark, "I've a pressing engagement in five minutes' time." In twenty minutes, he had returned wiping his brow and complaining that the steel staircase of the emergency exit at the Piccadilly Circus Tube Station was the most uncomfortable place in which he had ever copulated.

the death of literary history

2011-03-09T01:02:00.003-05:00

Just arrived in the mail today, a book that might well serve as doorstop: Helen Carr's The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and Imagism. It's an enormous tome, almost 1000 beautifully bound and printed pages. Of course I haven't really started reading it yet – I've dipped around in it, read the first few pages, examined its notes and list of works frequently cited. And it looks very good indeed – the sort of book with which one might while away a couple of obsessive reading weeks.

I heard about this book from David Need while I was in Louisville a couple of weeks back, hanging out with the poets and critics. He was enthusiastic. I was, on the other hand, surprised. Why hadn't I heard of this book, this comprehensively detailed, loving history of the men & women of 1914? It had been reviewed in the Guardian, in the Independent, in the London Review of Books (that last by none other than Ange Mlinko). The Verse Revolutionaries was published in 2009, the year before last, & I'd never heard of the book's existence, much less seen a copy.

Here's why: it's published by Jonathan Cape, a fine English press (founded 1919, now alas a part of Random House) with some significant association with LZ and the avant-garde. And it has yet to find an American publisher. My own copy came by way of one of those Amazon "marketplace" sellers, not thru the regular bookselling channels. By all accounts, this book is a fantasticaly detailed group biography, something like a definitive literary history of the Imagist movement from that moment in 1912 when Ezra Pound wrote "H. D. Imagiste" at the foot of one of Hilda Doolittle's poems, to its bifurcation into an Amy Lowell-dominated brand-name, on the one hand, and Pound's & Wyndham Lewis's torqued-up "Vorticism" on the other. And it has yet to find an American publisher.

I'm inclined to mourn the death of literary history as a genre in the US these days. Literary criticism is more or less alive, and literary theory flourishes as always. Even basic literary scholarship is getting done, to standards that would have pleased Fredson Bowers or Ernst Curtius. But there seems to be less and less of old-fashioned, intelligent literary history, attempts to make global sense of the social and personal evolution of the literary field. David Perkins's History of Modern Poetry, maybe the most ambitious attempt in the field in the last few decades is a set of loosely strung together potted biographies. Even the works which advertise themselves as "literary history" tend to end up as more or less interconnected essays – cf. the otherwise fine work by Frank Lentricchia and Robert von Hallberg on 20th century poetry in the Cambridge History of American Literature.

Well, that does it – if Helen Carr can't get her book on the Imagists published in the US, then I'm definitely not going to attempt a 750-page history of the Objectivists, or the chatty, anecdote-filled-but-seeded-with-keen-insights definitive history of post-war experimental poetry. Sorry, folks. It's back to Ruskin, Modern Painters volume 4.

finis

2011-03-07T21:44:00.004-05:00

It seems like yesterday, though it was actually half a year ago, that I rejoiced in this here blog-space at reaching the halfway point of Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles. At the time I'd been working on this 42-poem sequence for a couple of years. Well, I seem to have picked up steam over the last few months, & earlier this evening I drafted the last of them. So the sequence, at least in draft form, is complete, from #1, "Blood Is Thin," to #42, "Gob of Spit." I've been contemplating some prose around the project:
***
I began with a vast admiration for the music produced by John Zorn's Naked City ensemble – for the record, Zorn on sax, Bill Frisell on guitar, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on drums, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, & Yamatsuka Eye (sometimes) on vocals. The band, like so many of Zorn's projects, was the unholy marriage of beloved genres – in this case noir film music, jazz, surf music, and hardcore thrash.

On one of my stays in Austin, Texas to research the LZ biography, I picked up a copy of the band's double-CD set Black Box. One disk was the half-hour, endlessly deferred volcanic noise ejaculation Leng Tch'e; the other was Torture Garden, a collection of 42 hardcore "miniatures," brief explosions of tightly controlled noise, genre-zagging bursts none of which clocked in over 1.18 (one of which is a mere 11 seconds). I listened to Torture Garden over & over, & more & more it struck me that these pieces appealed to me as models for poems: short, tightly controlled, aggressive, free of all padding & discursive structure.

The form at which I arrived for these "pastorelles" was what I think of as an "emaciated" sonnet – 7 lines to the sonnet's 14. The 5-words line is obviously borrowed from LZ's late work, "A"-21, "A"-22 & -23, and 80 Flowers. The poems make great & entirely unsystematic use of found language, usually from whatever I was reading at the moment, tho often from what I was (half) listening to: at least one derives from the simultaneously earnest, enraging, & inane discourse of a department meeting, & there are a run of pastorelles "dedicated" to various people whose talks & readings I've attended – not necessarily as gestures of admiration or affection (tho I'd stipulate that I do admire & like most of them) but because I've stolen their language.

The pastorelles are not meant in any measure to mime or reproduce the sea of interfering & overlapping discourse in which we swim, nor to provide some shorthand rendition of contemporary attention-deficit-disorder. They are as carefully composed as I could compose them. I did not want mere noise, but controlled noise.
***
Here's a recent example:

37. Obeah Man (for Peter O'Leary)

Stand up a brave attempt
construing possession and commentary random
meeting stand up in Gaza
holographic paradigm to scatter construe
intermediary mouthpiece imperative prisms skins
shamelesssly faunted the aria the
apse the ribcage fitful broken.

Strikes me these 42 nuggets would make a dandy chapbook, no?

break

2011-03-04T14:11:00.003-05:00

So yes, I'm now officially on Spring Break. Which, for those of you who get their impressions of what a university professor does from Fox News or other organs of the right-wing propaganda machine, does not involve cocktails and brandy snifters, much movie-watching on the Barcalounger, and lots of beach time, but rather involves frantic catching up with all of the job- and career-related responsibilities which the teaching week doesn't seem to afford enough hours to manage.

I'm resisting the impulse to do what a couple of far- and near-flung colleagues have done lately – that is, to chronicle hour-by-hour what a university teacher does, and how a 40-hour week is a kind of joke with us: you can see them doing it here and here. But I've begun today by drafting most of a book review; it'll be done by tonight, & e-mailed off. This weekend I'll do revisions on a major essay, & with luck get that off by Sunday night. Over the week proper I'll read the books for and begin working on three more book reviews, I'll go in to campus (argh!) and read the files for this semester's applicants to our graduate programs, and I'll give a whole bunch of hours' attention to a major overhaul of a college-wide graduate program. That means a lot of number-crunching, collating of documents, and from-the-ground-up proposal writing. And of course I'll be reading ahead for my classes – the second half of the Odyssey, some Virginia Woolf essays, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. (Okay, I admit it, that last bit doesn't really seem like work, but rather something I should be paying to State of Florida to be allowed to do...)
***
After a longish chat with some graduate students at the pub, I got to thinking about what the academy, & perhaps pobiz in general, has a tendency to do to some perceptions of literature. Some background first: I've been thinking about writing for quite a long time in a larger sociological context, in terms of fields of production, cultural capital, & all that Bourdieuvian jazz. On the page, it all seems very academic, but when you immerse yourself in the poetry blogosphere, and especially in the webs of the poetic corners of Facebook (where I get maybe 8 or 10 invitations to readings and announcements of new books – please buy me! please buy me!) every week, the degree to which poetry is written in the context of a literary marketplace becomes very clear indeed. And one begins to think that this stuff is what really matters.

And then my Sitemeter showed that this blog had gotten a substantial "bump" last week. A big bump even bigger than the usual "Silliman Bump," when Ron links you on his blog & your traffic goes thru the roof. It turns out that one of my posts – on John Ruskin and Victorian pubic hair, of all things – had been linked on Facebook by a Steampunk site, Parliament & Wake. Yes, a good steampunk site, an interesting steampunk site, but by no means the largest or most popular steampunk site. (Remind me sometime to post my steampunk thoughts, prompted by my observation of steampunkers [steampunkies? steampunkistas?] as among the more well-represented subcultures at the Renaissance Fair a couple weeks ago.) & I thought to myself: my word; if Parliament & Wake has more linking power than Ron Silliman (by far the most visited poetry blog around), then poetry really has become a small subculture within our larger culture as a whole. (Quick stats from FB: Lorine Niedecker fans: 511; LZ fans: 420; Jack Spicer fans: 581; Billy Collins fans: 5345; Sonic Youth fans: 400,000; Beyoncé fans: 16,700,000.)

What then keeps me with poetry, I thought in a rare moment of introspection? It can't be the meager cultural capital (and wages) I'm drawing at the university. Have I lost sight, for a moment at least, of the power & force of poetry at its best?

So part of what I aim to do over this break, in between juggling the plates of my official responsibilities, is to refresh myself with some concentrated poetry reading. Last night I read – or rather, read & looked at – Susan Howe's Bollingen-winning That This. Today I've spent some time with Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts, and in a few days I'm looking forward to diving into Carolyn Bergvall's Meddle English. The sun is shining, & I'm ready to get back into the swim.

Macaulay's Boswell's Johnson

2011-03-02T00:06:00.006-05:00

Any biographer will tell you that the real bummer about reviews of biographies is that reviewers almost never pay attention to the book at hand – the care you've lavished on research, on interpretation, on careful & thoughtful structuring; instead, they spent their time talking about the subject of the biography. That's certainly true of The Poem of a Life: of the four most prominent reviews the thing got, I'd estimate there were maybe two paragraphs total which paid more attention to the book I'd written than to LZ's life & career. Two reviewers said I'd done a nifty job; another said that I'd been thorough & careful, but still hadn't got to the quintessential LZ; and one (may he rot in hell), thoroughly despising LZ from the get-go, dismissed my own endless labors as a dull slog.

It's true that Thomas Babington Macaulay's review of John Croker's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, in The Edinburgh Review in 1831, spends more time on Dr. J than it does on either Boswell or Croker, his editor. But then again, Macaulay's got lots of time – the review spreads out over 25 closely spaced pages in my printout. Those were the days, when both reviewers and readers of reviews had serious stamina.

Cut to the chase: this is one of the best bad reviews I've ever read. Macaulay, a staunch Whig, has some serious bones to pick with the Tory Croker, who'd apparently bested him in Parliamentary debate. The first long stretch of the review is an absolutely withering dismissal of Croker's edition: its annotations are rife with factual errors; Croker is a dunce when it comes to translating schoolboy Latin; and Croker, when writing his notes, doesn't recognize the difference between a point that needs elucidating and something everyone finds obvious. Croker's notes

remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries; "How beautiful!" "Cursed prosy!" "I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all." "I think Pelham is a sad dandy."

More crucially, Croker's edition of Boswell is the first of the "complete" Boswells: he has supplemented the original volumes of the Life not merely with the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (which was after all something of a dry run for the biography as a whole, & to which Boswell refers his readers in the text of the Life), but with long passages from other contemporary biographies of Johnson – Sir John Hawkins's, Hester Piozzi's (Mrs. Thrale). And this Macaulay simply can't abide:

An editor might as well publish Thucydides with extracts from Diodorus interspersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius the History and Annals of Tacitus.

The final long stretch, in which Macaulay looks back at Johnson's writings from a half-century's distance, is very interesting indeed (if it exemplifies the reviewer's trap I mentioned earlier, focusing on the subject rather than the book itself). Macaulay is the beginning of the tradition of regarding the figure of Johnson, as embodied in Boswell's Life, as far more interesting & important than Johnson's own writings. But his dismissal isn't by any means offhanded, but is based on a close and canny knowledge of Johnson's works, and the very real limitations of those works. Johnson, it would seem, is in the final analysis simply better suited to be a 19th-century Englishman in his conversation (recorded so assiduously by Boswell) than in his writings, which are fenced in by all sorts of 18th-century conventions. Macaulay is particularly good on Johnson's criticism; his judgments

are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding. The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits, he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him.

The middle section of Macaulay's review, his assessment of Boswell and Boswell's book, is justly famous (& was terrifically influential for many decades, until the discovery of Boswell's vast archive of papers & the reconstruction of his really quite systematic working methods). The short version: Boswell was a boob, a toad-eater, a sycophant, a hero-worshipper who had almost no self-understanding or proper self-regard; therefore (with the strong assistance of his retentive memory and obsessive note-taking) he was the perfect biographer, and his book has never been matched in its genre.

Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all.

I think I'm most fascinated, however, by a long passage towards the middle of the review in which Macaulay delves into the literary sociology of Johnson's career. In his account, Johnson came of age at a moment when the patronage economy of literature was in sharp decline, and there was as yet no substantial, dependable literary market economy in place: the moment of "Grub Street," in short. It's all better now, Macaulay assures us: now a truly talented writer is assured of gaining a decent living among the publishing houses of 1831. But Johnson entered the literary marketplace at a particularly tenuous moment, and everything about him – his insistence that no one except a "blockhead" ever wrote except for money, his slovenly habits, his rapacious appetite at table – were shaped by that early experience of living hand to mouth.

Like Richard Holmes in his luminous Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, Macaulay sees the impecunious poet Richard Savage as Johnson's ur-influence: or as the cautionary tale that would loom over his writing life. Savage spent his brief life trying to make ends meet by high means and low; and he found himself caught between the decline of the patronage economy – which he courted, with mixed success – and the rise of the market economy – which he as well entered, with similarly mixed success. Johnson had to choose between the two, and in the end, he cast his lot with the marketplace, as is most famously marked in his letter to Lord Chesterfield, when the nobleman (who'd ignored Johnson's earlier overtures for support) posed himself as a patron for the just-finished Dictionary:

Seven years, my lord, have now past since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. . . . Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.

The Dictionary defines "patron" as "One who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery."

back

2011-02-28T00:12:00.003-05:00

A miscellany tonight, as all too often. A week or two ago, enthralled with the density and productive rhythm of Johnson's Rambler essays – he turned those things out at the rate of 2 a week for about 2 solid years, you know – I floated the idea of retooling Culture Industry into a series of Rambler-like essay-lets. Well, that's not happening anytime soon, I fear. After all, writing Ramblers was Johnson's full-time job at the time; he didn't have to prepare talking points on the Odyssey and Carlyle and Macaulay, or do the cooking, or feebly attempt to pitch in on the raising of the kids.

More importantly, there's a kind of wonderful observational (& for that matter moral) intensity to Johnson's essays that I find myself having trouble mustering. It's true, at the best of times I'm terribly scattered, my mind and sensibility on a dozen different texts, things, issues. And my habitual, engrained diffidence makes it difficult for me to issue pronouncements in the Johnsonian manner, or even to try patiently explaining things – things always seem, in the next layer of analysis, far more complex than my explanation would indicate.
***
Perhaps the most uncomfortable series of moments at the otherwise fabulous Louisville conference this weekend were those numerous times when folks asked me "What's your next project?" & I found myself answering, "well, I'd like to write brief book A, or maybe brief book B, and somewhere down the line is big book C." And where does the paper you just gave fit in with A, B, or C? Er -- nowhere, actually; it's just something that's been obsessing me for a while. I'm sure Jonathan Mayhew would have pointed things to say about directing one's energies, but keeping on task has never been my strong point.

At any rate, the conference was a great time, as conferences tend to be – yes, there were some excellent panels, including in-depth treatments of Michael Heller & Lorenzo Thomas, and a fine reading by Rae Armantrout, but as usual the selling point of these gatherings is the chance to get together with one's academic friends whom one only sees at conferences. "Get together" in the sense of "going out to excellent exotic restaurants and going out on extended drinking binges." The sort of thing, I guess, that my undergraduates do every weekend – or at least the binging part.

2011-02-20T17:25:00.002-05:00

Hey, would whoever shared the Ruskin & Pubic Hair link on Facebook let me know who they are? Just out of curiosity...

advice for booksellers

2011-02-19T21:44:00.003-05:00

I cannot live without books.
–Thomas Jefferson

We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it!
–John Ruskin

When I moved to south Florida from the DC area, it didn't take me long to realize that one thing I would be missing, constantly, would be decent bookshops. Sure, we have the ordinary Barnes & Nobles and Borders (fewer, it seems!). And there are a sprinkling of alright independents (not nearly as many as you'd think). But the vast desert of asphalt and concrete that stretches from south Miami to the north end of Palm Beach County, that houses well over five million people, has fewer decent second-hand bookstores than any major metropolitan area I've ever visited. When I moved here a decade & a half ago, there were maybe six or eight; now there are three or four. At the end of this month, there will be one fewer.

I discovered what was then the best of the pack, a shop in Ft. Lauderdale owned & operated by R--- H---, soon after moving here. I was delighted by his deep collections in modernist poetry, in art criticism, in British history, in – surprisingly – Marxist theory. His books were modestly priced and decently arranged. There was a kind of quiet comfort to the shop – three stories of labyrinthine shelves – that made browsing for hours a positive pleasure. I gathered eventually that R--- H--- had inherited the business, and much of his stock, from his father; and alas, it did not grow – when I bought all his books on David Jones, they weren't replaced with other, as delicious titles. But there was always something there for me to not resist buying.

Several years ago, R--- H--- decided to get out of the brick-&-mortal retail business, to retire upstairs to a single floor of his shop where he could concentrate on high-end internet sales & appraisal work. I understand he's doing just fine. The shop proper was taken over by a woman who'd been his assistant for some years & by a new face, an overtanned Canadian refugee who manned the cash register; the store was redubbed – imaginatively indeed – "The Book Shop." What followed was a half-decade slide into mediocrity. The always elastic organization of the place became positively anarchic. The pricing went mad – who wants to buy a Verso remainder, easily found on the internet at half cover price, at two dollars off? The place began to cater to the despicable south Florida "home decor" market. One overheard conversation:

Home Decorator: So how much do I have now?

Overtanned Canadienne: You've chosen $12000 or so. I think that's something like forty shelf-feet worth. Would you like this nicely-bound set of 19th-century medical encyclopedias?

HD: Ooh, that's nice. But no, we've filled the cases.

OC: How about these (holds up a mint boxed set of Emily Dickinson's letters)? Or these (ditto Joyce's letters)?

Me (silently): AAARRRRGGGGHHHH!

At the end of this month, however "The Book Shop" is going out of business. I made a valedictory visit this morning, picking up a handful of things at half price – the Library of America's 20th-c. poetry anthology, some Laura (Riding) Jackson, Isaiah Berlin, Chantal Mouffe, etc. I can't say I'm sorry to see it go, given that every visit there in the past few years has been such a painful experience. Worst perhaps was the afternoon (maybe just a "bad day" for the OC) when a young man came up to the register with a stack of books & asked if he could negotiate down the price of one of them.

Young Man: If you don't mind me saying so, I think a lot of your prices are way too high.

Overtanned Canadienne: Where are you gonna do better?

YM: Well, on the internet; I mean, if I want a particular book, I'll always go online – when I come into a brick-&-mortar shop, I want to be surprised by something I didn't know I wanted, at a price I can afford. Times are changing for used bookstores.

OC: Don't tell me how to run my business!

YM: I'm not telling you how to run your business, I just thought –

OC: Get out of my shop! Right now! I don't ever want to see you here again!

Me (silently): Ouch.

I'm not losing any sleep over The Book Shop's demise. I too will go online for particular titles, & when I want to browse aimlessly, we have here in Boca Raton one of the finest second-hand shops in the southeastern US, the always-expanding Bookwise.

But for the overtanned Canadienne, if ever she decides to go back into bookselling, a few tips from someone who's probably spent more free time browsing in bookstores than she's spent reading books:

•Please don't talk so loudly. I know loud voices are par for the course down here, since it seems half the population grew up in Long Island or New Jersey, but nobody wants to hear you rant over your cell phone about your last bad date, the problems you're having with your tax lawyer, or whatever. Especially when the acoustics of your shop are such that you can be heard loud and clear in every corner.

•Try to figure out some semi-logical, semi-coherent pricing structure. Half cover price is a good place to start, tho of course you can make exceptions for books which are rare or scarce or only available at astronomical prices. But I'm not about to pay 75% of cover price for a remainder I get at a fraction of that from the Labyrinth catalogue. (Yes, your customers do get catalogues...)

•Don't talk trash about your previous customers – yesterday's, last week's, or the guy who just walked out the door – in front of people who are currently browsing. This should be logical, I think – no-one wants to speculate on what you'll be saying about him or her a hour from now.

•Try to learn something about books yourself. When I hear you chat incessantly about movies, Broadway shows, and television, & your only reference to actual reading material involves the authors of the more popular stretches of the Oprah Book Club, I'm unlikely to have much faith in your skills at buying, pricing, & sorting what you might get in.

•Addendum to above: Ex library books with stamps, perspex sleeves, etc. are, for collection purposes, worthless. Don't try to convince me otherwise by pricing them sky-high and marking them "rare." Sorry – these are "reading copies." Mid-century Soviet editions of Marx, Lenin, etc. are by no means scarce, so stop pricing them like the Holy Grail. Cheap reprints of big art books are not comparable in value to their trade publisher first editions.

•And above all else, keep your goddamned bichon out of the shop. The canonical animal for a second-hand bookshop is a cat. Period. Two cats, tops. Nobody wants a hyper, yippy little animal underfoot (even if he is "cute"), especially one who wants to have sexual congress with customers' legs. I suppose many of us have fantasies about sexual encounters in used bookshops – but I'm pretty sure not many of them involve toy dogs.

One rumor has it that R--- H--- may be reassuming the helm of this foundering vessel. Who knows? In the meantime, requiescat in pacem, Book Shop.

my writing life

2011-02-19T01:25:00.003-05:00

First things first: when it comes to writing tips, from the very basic hints as to how to get started up to how to organize one's work on a major book-length project, there's still no blog out there I've encountered to compare with Jonathan Mayhew's Stupid Motivational Tricks. However, if you're looking for something just a skoshe more basic, I've just stumbled on – well, Jonathan pointed me there – a über-clearly written and extremely sensible newish blog, Get a Life, PhD. This one strikes me as especially useful for grad student types; I wish it had been around when I was in that particular purgatory.
***
I'm taking a deep breath right now – not that I really have time to – before tackling the next round of writing projects. (Well, before I tackle them I've got a stack of Iliad tests to mark, & a conference paper to lick into shape, so I'm not exactly lounging in the sun...) Those should be relatively easy: a set of four successive book reviews, all of books that I'm interested in & keen to write on. Indeed, I've already finished one of the books & have started drafting a 1st paragraph of the review, so I feel for once that I'm ahead of the game.

This has been in some ways a very busy year for writing, but gratifying in surprising ways. That is, about 18 months ago, I started getting solicited for book chapters. Lots of book chapters: four, in fact, all of them in the sort of highly prestigious projects that I would have killed to be in ten or 15 years ago. On top of that, I was committed to writing a big career-retrospective essay on Guy Davenport for Parnassus, whose editor essentially told me to take as much space as I wanted to – yes, a dangerous thing to tell a writer. The book chapters ranged between 6 thousand and 9 thousand words – between twenty-odd and thirty pages apiece, & needed to be highly polished, smart, and all that.

I took a leaf from Mayhew's book, & decided to keep pretty close records of my writing progress in tackling each of these. And now that the last of them has been sent off, here's what I've noted:

•The Davenport essay, the longest of them (some 40-odd pages) took me precisely 15 working days; the others took between 10 and 17 working days. More or less, that is, three working weeks for each essay.

•I revise pretty continually as I work, so that when I come to the final sentence of a piece, what leads up to it has usually been worked over several times. When I begin the day's writing, I usually go back over what I've already written and make changes before I begin new sentences. And when I finish an essay, I typically spend a single writing session on final revisions – but no more than that. (That's what editors are for, after all.)

•I do my citations in as close to final form as I write; if I'm writing in MLA style, I start building the Works Cited with my first quotation, if some variant of Chicago, I start making footnotes as soon as I quote something. That way, I entirely avoid the pit I've seen colleagues (mostly in grad school, but once in a while in academic positions) fall into of spending half a day or more at the end of their writing cycle running down the sources of their quotations.

Now here's the surprising & gratifying part. In case you haven't figured it out, I feel a great kinship with Samuel Johnson, who notes that he wrote his Lives of the Poets "in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste." But I don't have Johnson's serene self-confidence in my own abilities, and to be perfectly honest, I didn't feel entirely "up" to any of these assignments – one in particular felt like it was pressing the limits of my knowledge. And I felt more than a little uneasy about the pace at which I dispatched these pieces.

But mirabile dictu, once the essays went one after another into the mail (well, the e-mail) and I'd done my best to repress the memory of the "dilatory haste" with which I'd written them, the editors' responses started coming back – and they were all astonishingly positive. Believe it or not. Time and again, I'd open an e-mail expecting to read Sir, we have read your essay, and it will not do, and I'd find a note saying Golly, thanks! this is great, this is just what we wanted!

I must be doing something right. I'm not quite sure precisely what, but something. So forgive the momentary laurel-resting and gloating; after all, right now I'm foreseeing five new shiny publications over the next year (well, six, since there was another essay out there before this batch). Now to write some poems.

reference two-step; open letter

2011-02-09T00:12:00.004-05:00

I too dislike them – endnotes, that is, with continual flipping back & forth between where you're reading & the back of the book. I always end up with two bookmarks, one where I'm at & the other where the reference notes are. I always thank my lucky stars when the designer is awake enough to put a running header on the notes page listing the pages to which the notes refer (eg, "Notes to pages 43-57").

Me, I've always dreamed of publishing a book annotated like The Pound Era, or one of Geoffrey Hill's critical works: full references in the back, but keyed by page number & phrase, so there are no irritating superscripts whatsoever in the actual text. But how does this work in biography? I was reading in some book t'other day, & the author made the very astute point that when one's reading a "noteless" biography – even when it has its references in the back keyed by phrase – one is far more likely to pass over a bit of sleight of hand, of evidentiary fudging. Well. That makes sense. And come to think of it, as I read Richard Altick's sprightly Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America, I'm pretty continually irritated by the extra work his phrase-keyed reference entail. Could we all just go back to notes at the foot of the page?
***
Open Letter to the editors, in re/ Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (U Alabama P, 2010)

Dear Guys:

I've had your collection for a while now, but am only now reading it page-by-page from front to back. And enjoying it immensely, by the way. It's an endlessly rich & provocative collection. I'm sure I'll hit some slow bits, but I'm a long way in & it's been all excitement so far. A few thoughts:

1) I've been thru the business of editing a collection of "essays by various hands" before, and I know it's pretty much like herding cats – keeping folks to deadlines, trying to get everybody's files in the same format, etc. But there's got to be some kind of uniformity here. I don't mean that everyone needs to be using MLA style or Chicago style, or whatever. But everybody needs to cite their sources somewhere. There're essays in here that are scrupulously endnoted with full bibliographical citations; great. There's one with a lengthy and stimulating "essay on sources"; excellent. But there's a bunch of them with wee parenthetical page number citations – eg, (Bernstein 23) – or even abbreviation citations – eg, (T 47) – that entirely lack lists of works cited. What gives? Did all the lists of works cited get lost in a hard drive meltdown or something? Or just get lost?

2) Somebody's got to proofread more carefully. You can't depend on the folks at the Press to do that any more, you know. I haven't gone thru a stretch of two pages yet without hitting a typo or two, and that's too many – it's just plain distracting. I know, I know, some of them are pretty minor; but it's embarrassing to hit "Zukofsksy," especially a few pages before you hit "Zukovsky" – and with a whole run of the name being spelled correctly in between.

3) And speaking of getting names right – and Bob Archambeau is the only person who gets to spell LZ's name with a "v," & even he gets bitch-slapped backchannel when he does it – the title of Norman Finkelstein's long poem is Track, not "Tracks." (That one three times, in short succession.)

I like this book a lot; I'm learning from it, & enjoying it. But man it's sometimes hard not to be distracted & irritated by flyspecks like these. (I ought to know; I can't look at one of my own books without wincing.) Was it Aby Warburg or Mies van der Rohe who said "God is in the details"?

But anyway, Congratulations!

survived

2011-02-07T01:02:00.002-05:00

I've survived the weekend. It began, horrifically, with the girls' school carnival, 2 hours of trudging around in the sun (not awfully hot, probably high 70s or so, but the humidity's back up) and seeing how much cotton candy & pizza Daphne could inhale without going into some kind of carb-sugar shock. Then back to Casa Scroggins & the full-scale run-up to the girls' birthday party. Yes, they were born the same day – February 1 – but I think this might be the first time we've actually had a single party for both of them at once. I've almost managed to repress the memories of yesterday afternoon (I've vague recollections of kids shrieking happily, and many things being strewn about the yard), but I won't go into it now.

Today their grandmother took them off our hands, so we had a rare weekend afternoon to ourselves. Much of which we burned by going to a giant book sale at the local public library, which seems to be making space for new computers & cafés and who knows what? massage parlors? by selling off much of their collection of books. Sigh. At any rate, I picked up a nice copy of David Macaulay's wonderful Cathedral, a older kids' picture book of how they actually constructed cathedrals back in the middle ages, with wryly clear text and beautifully expressive and detailed line drawings. Oh, and a bunch of other stuff, including some Joyce criticism and heaven help us, an old Fulcrum edition of Bunting's Collected Poems. This makes by my count the sixth collected Bunting on my shelves (Fulcrum, Oxford, Moyer Bell, Oxford again, Bloodaxe, New Directions).
***
Yes, the New Directions editions of the complete LZ poetry are now out & available. My copies turned up last week in the mail, in one of those old-fashioned mailers padded with grey cat's-hair lint that inevitably sifts onto the floor and your pants and shirt when you open the thing, & that falls out from between the pages for years to come. But that's okay. My report? They're just fine. Photo-reprints, to be sure. "A" is pretty much the same as the old California & Hopkins "A", with a new very informative introduction by Barry Ahearn and a handful of typographical errors corrected. ANEW: Complete Shorter Poetry is the Hopkins Complete Short Poetry under a different title, and (again) with some key typos fixed. I'm glad to have them, tho I have multiple copies of the texts, & have had all the typos marked for years. (I'm not about to give up my disintegrating 70s-era paperback of "A", with its palimpsest of a quarter-century's boneheaded annotations.)

But the real nice touch here is that the two volumes are now uniform: the trim size of "A" has been enlarged a bit (a good thing), and that of ANEW has been sized down a bit. And they even look nice, in their beige-&-black starkness, beside the yellow, blue, & red volumes of the Wesleyan prose works. High time, methinks, for someone to get ND to do a slim volume of Arise, arise.
***
Bill Sherman quotes Jack Clarke in re/ my last post on biography to the effect that the biographer ought to take a stance of "love" towards her or his subject. Not sure I agree – but at the very least there has to be a certain deep-seated sympathy. That's what renders Humphrey Carpenter's life of Pound such a deadly doorstop, the fact that while Carpenter's got all the facts marshalled he clearly doesn't give a shit about his subject, doesn't much care for the poetry, indeed probably has gotten to the point of hating him. Tom Clark's life of Olson is similarly disappointing, vitiated by Clark's gradual recognition that Olson wasn't perfect, which somehow drives Clark into a fury of showing precisely what a jerk Olson was.

In splendid contrast is a book I'm rereading at the moment, Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, an exploration of the relationship of Samuel Johnson & the poet Richard Savage, an engaging ne'er-do-well who prompted Johnson's first great full-length work, the Life of Savage (1744). Savage was more than a bit of a jerk, blackmailing the woman he claimed was his mother, killing a man in a tavern brawl, & spending his way quite expeditiously thru whatever monies his friends & patrons handed him. But he & Johnson had been very close indeed in the years when Johnson was a newly-arrived Grub Street aspirant, & Johnson is very firmly on his subject's side in his little book, which Holmes reads as a paradigm for "romantic" biography – biography which involves more than dispassionate recounting of a life-story, but an actual identification between biographer and subject.

Holmes is brilliant at unraveling evidence, especially in regards to the bar-fight for which Savage was condemned to hang. (He got a last-minute royal pardon, thanks to some highly-placed friends.) Here's what the court records say; here's the testimony; here's the three or four different ways in which it might be read by a scrupulous biographer. And here's how Johnson chooses to present it in his biography of Savage – an interpretation which amounts, in the end, to a whitewashing of Savage, and a high-handed playing down of the most sordid episode of his deceased friend's life. Alas, it's one of those few places where Johnson's "love" for his subect – or his identification with him – gets the better of his staunch insistence on "truth."
***
I hope everyone had a good AWP. And I'm tired of hearing about it on Facebook. Indeed, I'm on the point of unfriending a bunch of poet-types, or maybe just adjusting my "news feed" settings, I'm so bloody tired of being the object of people trying to sell me their books. I know, I know – all the hip kids know that "social networking" is the next wave in marketing, that (as J. tells me incessantly) if you don't blow your own horn no-one will blow it for you, and that the marketing gurus tell us that repetition is the key to effective advertising. But gimme a break, okay?

books beneath contempt

2011-02-02T20:50:00.003-05:00

The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.

Success and miscarriage have the same effects in all conditions. The prosperous are feared, hated and flattered; and the unfortunate avoided, pitied and despised. No sooner is a book published than the writer may judge of the opinion of the world. If his acquaintance press round him in publick places, or salute him from the other side of the street; if invitations to dinner come thick upon him, and those with whom he dines keep him to supper; if the ladies turn to him when his coat is plain, and the footmen serve him with attention and alacrity; he may be sure that his work has been praised by some leader of literary fashions.

–Samuel Johnson, Idler 102 (1760)

The last of the big Amazon Marketplace order – practically a dozen books on biography & biographical theory, bringing my collection in the field to probably the best in south Florida – arrived today. There have been some excellent things coming in the last few days: Hermione Lee's volume in the OUP "very short introductions" series (if I'd known this book existed, it would have certainly been on the syllabus for this semester's seminar); Richard Altick's classic, straightforward, but very intelligent literary history, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America; intelligent collections of essays by various hands; André Maurois's airily lyrical Aspects of Biography; and David Ellis's Literary Lives, which promises to be one of the more thoroughly & smartly theorized takes on the genre.

A shame that the last arrival would leave such a bad taste in my mouth. I'd read Carl Rollyson's A Higher Form of Cannibalism?: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography 4 years ago, & thought it a ghastly, slapdash book. Now the letter carrier has delivered his latest, Biography: A User's Guide (Ivan R. Dee, 2008). I'm glad it was dirt-cheap – tho probably expensive at the price. The book's in the form of an eccentric encyclopedia, which could, in the hands of a writer like Julian Barnes or Richard Holmes, be stimulating & provocative. Instead one gets the sense that Rollyson has swept all of his off-handed musings of the past few years into a manuscript. In the midst of a pedestrian discussion of Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – maybe the single most penetrating meta-biographical study of recent years – he comes to the lovely conclusion that Malcolm's animus against much Plath biography – and the genre in general – can be traced to "her obviously romantic attachment to Ted Hughes, her Heathcliff, who has been done dirty by a legion of biographers."

Maybe it's a sign of general Spenglerian cultural decline that Rollyson's major competitor in the field of "books about biography for general audiences" is Nigel Hamilton, author of the dreary but beautifully designed couple Biography: A Brief History and How to Do Biography: A Primer, both inexplicably published by Harvard UP. To get an idea of how classy Hamilton's own sensibility is, reflect that the 2001 augmented reissue of his massive "official" life of Field Marshall Montgomery got retitled – yes – "The Full Monty."

The biography seminar is headed into the vast shoals of Johnson & Boswell. On the home front, I'm rereading Ray Monk's Wittgenstein (with even more admiration than the first time around), and tackling the various essays he's published on philosophical biography over the past few years. Smart guy. And Robert Richardson's William James, a splendid book indeed. Once again, my own book on biography begins to take shape in my head – I only hope I don't head off my own writing impulses by bogging myself down in too much preparatory reading, as I did last time around.

not burning to put pen to paper

2011-01-29T01:26:00.003-05:00

The letter carrier & the UPS person have been dropping off a steady stream of books over the past few days. I finally decided to get serious about this book of biography I've been brooding over for the past four years, so I went carefully thru the "works cited" list of Ray Monk's latest brilliant article on biography (Monk is the author of a formidably good biography of Wittgenstein, then a not-so-well-reviewed life of Bertrand Russell, & now he seems to be writing the definitive book on philosophical biography; I can't wait), jotted down every book that seemed significant, and went to the Amazon Marketplace and ordered the lot. I suspect I've perhaps doubled my (already significant) collection of books on biography – but that doesn't mean an awful lot, I'm afraid: the corpus of this critical discussion probably occupies less than a shelf and a half – maybe half the space of my Ruskin set.
***
A strange, nostalgic feeling lately: working on a largish essay, I found myself painfully blocked. Now I don't believe in writer's block, or at least I've never suffered it significantly. But I found it very difficult to tackle this thing as a Word document. I tried all the old tricks – changed the font, messed with the spacing, etc – but it still remained dumb and obdurate and there, unwilling to be changed or added to. So I printed out the thing and sat down with my books, a yellow legal pad, and a pen, & suddenly found myself writing again.

I've been a late adopter of the direct-to-keyboard writing style. When I was an undergraduate, I would think a bit about a paper assignment the week before it was due; two nights before, I would sit down in the smoking lounge of my dorm with a spiral notebook and write the thing, then I'd go to bed; the night before it was due, I'd type my manuscript (on a typewriter), editing as I went. Then I'd turn it in and await my A, which was usually forthcoming. (Less than A's were for when I got lazy in thinking or analysis – never, to my recollection, for grammar or structure: I always seemed to be able to hear how a sentence or an argument ought to sound.) It was my professor Tom Gardner who put me onto the legal pad – something very attractive about that yellow paper, I always thought when I'd visit him in his office & see his latest article emerging.

And that was my MO for years & years. My guess is that 75 - 80% of The Poem of a Life was drafted on yellow legal pads, footnotes crowded into the left margin. (You wanna see? I still have a two-inch block of yellow drafts stacked somewhere in my closet.)* I'd revise, sometimes heavily, on the keyboard, tho I preferred to mark up printouts and key in revisions. Writing by hand was an extra step, I told myself, and it gave me an ugly pen-rest callous on my middle finger, but it made me write slower than I could type, which meant I was thinking harder as I wrote; and perforce it made me revise at least once, between manuscript and word processing document.

But even as I was finishing that book, I was weaning myself from the legal pad, forcing myself to compose directly to keyboard. Most of the prose I've written since then has been directly keyed in**; and you know, I don't think my writing has suffered from it. I think my adherence for so long to handwriting was in some sense simple superstition or habit, which I've managed finally to break.

But getting back to the legal pad & the pen – a fountain pen, always, so I can savor that really very sexy sensation of the nib moving across the field of the paper, leaving its gleaming trails – has been fun in a way that I think transcends nostalgia. I don't feel like I'm making a call on a rotary dial phone, slumming in some kind of pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-cool-techno-kid wildlife preserve. I feel rather like I've shifted gears for a while; still getting there, just maybe a little more (salubriously?) slowly.

*I believe the SF writer Neal Stephenson, who writes books larger than Boswell, writes this way – fountain pen drafts, marked-up printouts.
** Try as I might, I simply can't compose poetry on a keyboard, either a typewriter or a computer. I kinda envy those who can. Call me coelocanth.

academic genealogies

2011-01-10T11:12:00.004-05:00

[Robert von Hallberg, eminent retiree]

The lastest Chicago Review is out, & as usual it's both a beautiful artifact and a fascinating read. Poetry by among others Rae Armantrout, Nathaniel Mackey, John Latta, & Kate Greenstreet; a review of Donald Revell's latest; and a lively mini-essay by Eirik Steinhoff on Marlowe's Ovid, beginning with perhaps the funniest description of sexual dysfunction in English poetry.

The heart of the issue, however, is a stack of essays in honor of Robert von Hallberg's retirement, by folks who were at one time or another his grad students. An impressive bunch: some excellent poets (Devin Johnston, Elizabeth Arnold, Peter O'Leary) and some critics whose work I prize very highly, among them Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Keith Tuma. Just the roll call of names makes clear that von Hallberg has left a valuable teaching legacy.

Of course, I've always valued von Hallberg's criticism. While I've differed with him on the evaluation of particular poets, he writes with a grace, clarity, and persuasiveness rarely found in academic criticism these days. Perhaps that's part of the legacy of doing one's PhD at Stanford, where the ferociously lucid Yvor Winters and Donald Davie held sway.

The whole shebang got me thinking about the business of teaching genealogies. The music director at the church I used to attend way back when (well, we called him the "song leader," in a gesture of ferocious iconoclastic Puritan leveling), once let slip that he was a 4th or 5th or some degree teaching descendant of Beethoven's – that is, his piano teacher's piano teacher's piano teacher's (etc.) piano teacher had taken piano lessons from Ludwig van himself. Was there some mysterious mojo that got passed down thru all those generations? And does it work the same way in the academy?

I guess I'm a teaching descendant of von Hallberg myself: my undergraduate mentor, Tom Gardner, did his dissertation at Madison under Lynn Keller, who studied with von Hallberg at Chicago. But it's a grand game – one of my own dissertation committee members worked with John Hollander & Geoffrey Hartman, who no doubt studied with some of the grand old men of their time. Indeed, my dissertation director was one of the last graduate students to work with Perry Miller, the great scholar of Puritanism and early American literature.

I'm afraid precious little of that mojo has come down to me. Or at least during graduate school. I'm afraid my greatest academic influences still remain those of my undergrad years: Tom's hard thinking about poems (was that the second-generation von Hallberg influence?) and Alison Sulloway's ferocious but always encouraging copy editing (she graded with four different colors of pen) of my papers – not to mention her relentless emphasis on the historical and cultural contexts of whatever we were reading.

Update: No, turns out it wasn't 2nd-generation von Hallberg, by way of Tom Gardner, who actually worked not under Lynn Keller but L. S. Dembo – the man who, I've argued elsewhere, had a huge hand in solidifying the "Objectivists" as the quartet LZ-Oppen-Rakosi-Reznikoff. Not sure whether that counts as intellectual "influence" or something more weirdly proleptic.

the sorrows of bibliophilia

2011-01-09T00:32:00.002-05:00

That time of year is upon us: the semester begins next week, & I'm as usual trembling in my boots (well, sandals) at the prospect. I'm teaching a reprise of the biography seminar I did a couple of years back; that should be fun, at least for me if not for the students. And an undergraduate epic course, which has me I confess a bit nervous – but then again I'll just quote, over & over again, whichever scholar it was who said that Homer can't be interpreted, only analyzed. Yeah, that sounds good.
***
I came back from the holidays in New York – the blizzard was spectacular, & watching the city dig itself out afterwards was great fun – with only a couple dozen books in my luggage (well, actually UPS'd back in a box), a rather conservative number for a more or less inveterate book-buyer. And found about as many waiting for me in cartons at home, things I'd ordered & the payoff for a couple of manuscripts I read last Fall. So I spent some time deliciously unpacking (cf. the Benjamin essay), actually reading a couple of things. (Maybe I'll blog them...) And then came the inevitable question: Where the hell will I shelve these things?

Mind you, it's not like there isn't shelf space in my study. I have three walls that are pretty much nothing but shelves, a huge 7-shelf case by the door, and a walk-in closet that's been crammed with Door Store portables. And the hall closet outside the study has been converted into a three-sided shelving area long since. The problem is that even if I filled up every fugitive half-shelf and 2-inch space in the house, I'd still have a few hundred books without homes. I began by making a stack next to the outside door of things that I was using. That's grown to 4 or 5 stacks (2 to 3-foot stacks, mind you), and I've entirely forgotten what's at the bottom of them.

Now I don't particularly mind disorder. (Any of my students can testify to that.) But book-stacking has gotten out of hand when I can't find something I need. And that's begun to happen all too often.

Our Fair University may have bailed me out, at least for the short run. Over the break, they've moved the department into a new building. No, I'm not particularly keen on the new office; it's okay, but my view – which in the old one was magnificent – sucks: a parking lot. At least I can watch my car, I guess. Initially I was terrifically worried about bookshelf space. In my old office, in addition to a bunch of built-ins and a bigge-asse freestanding case, I'd brought in three of those fold-outs and a couple of nice Ukrainian-made things. I had shelvage to spare, and tended to use the office for home study overflow. Well, needless to say the new office is well-equipped in everything but shelf space. For some reason, they've given us enough file space for a good sized small business, but enough bookshelves for – well, an accounting professor.

But I've somehow managed to cram most of my ancillary shelves in (tho I'm pretty sure I'm violating the fire code in one or two ways), and after several days of unpacking & sorting, I'm beginning to think everything's going to find a home. Indeed, I'm beginning to suspect that I might actually have some extra space here, even. Which means that something from home gets to go to school, & free up space around the study. Right now, I'm thinking it's the Beckett collection. You see, I hate to break up substantial collections – this one is around 100 volumes. Half of it's at home, in the hall closet; but when the French department's Beckett scholar retired last year & offered me her Beckett books, was I going to say no? They're in the office right now, & I think my Beckett books at home might be happier in their company.

Anyway, I've spent a number of hours over the past few days pitchforking thru the study, throwing out stacks & stacks of papers & trying to achieve a bit of order. One side-effect has been that I've moved my desk over by a half-foot, and fitted another wee bookcase on one side. So maybe, with the combined effects of the new office & this new bookcase, I'll be okay for another six months or so.

Chaucer's Clerk, I seem to recall, would've been happy with "Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed."

year's end iii

2010-12-31T11:32:00.005-05:00

We arrived back from NYC last night, after a purgatorial trip – endless security lines at LaGuardia with our two small children, numerous carryons, two violins, etc., an overcrowded airplane sitting on the tarmac for ages, and to top it all off the car we'd reserved to carry us home from the airport simply didn't show up. But we're back, weary & unpacking.

And the year's almost over. Not a bad year, on the whole. Much work accomplished, many books read & thought about. I was tempted to list them all, but it's a long, long list this time around. Instead, in the spirit of last year's round-up, a selection of a few of the things that arrested me the most this past year. Some of these I've blogged, others I've alluded to; a couple I've actually taught. As is obvious, I'm totally hopeless at "keeping up" with what's just come out, & indeed spend a good deal of my reading time going back over things I've read ages ago.

As to fiction, it's been rather thin on the ground this year, & for some reason seems to tend towards fantasy & science fiction; I'm embarassed to be reading some of these for the first time. So sue me:

Kindred Octavia E. Butler
Babel-17 Samuel R. Delany
A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. LeGuin
The Scar China Miéville

There were many good biographies on my desk this year, but three stand out, Clausen's for its density & thoughtfulness (you certainly wouldn't go to it for chronological facts), Delblanco's for its lovely prose, and Campbell/Corn's for its general easy comprehensiveness:

Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius Detlev Claussen
Melville: His World and Work Andrew Delbanco
John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns

Not a great deal of criticism & philosophy this time around, which just goes to support my growing suspicion that I don't belong in the academy; some picking up of things written ages ago (Rosenberg, Empson) that still remain green; the real delightful discovery the Finlay letters:

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Diogenes Laertius
Guy Debord Anselm Jappe
The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius John D. Rosenberg
A Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making Ian Hamilton Finlay
Milton’s God William Empson
The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age E. P. Thompson
The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin George P. Landow

And then there's poetry. This listlet represents maybe 1/7 of what I read this year, & I know I've overlooked things I value. But here's some of the things that set me afire, & that you ought to read too:

Blade Pitch Control Unit Sean Bonney
Luminous Epinoia, Peter O'Leary
Three-Toed Gull: Selected Poems Jesper Svenbro
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer Jack Spicer
Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 Norma Cole
Complete Twentieth Century Blues Robert Sheppard
If Not Metamorphic Brenda Iijima
Swallows Martin Corless-Smith
Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip Lisa Robertson
Looking Up Zach Barocas
Mirth Linda Russo
Pen Chants or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences Lissa Wolsak
Sub Songs J. H. Prynne
How to Do Things with Tears Allen Grossman
Continental Harmony Michael Gizzi
New Depths of Deadpan Michael Gizzi

Those two last are from one of the poets we lost this year; and I had no idea, until I'd read these two wry, deliciously funny collections, what a loss Gizzi was.

year's end ii

2010-12-19T23:15:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow P. & I leave for the northeast, & we'll be there almost thru the end of the year, so I don't imagine I'll be doing any significant blogging (huh? you snort – when'd'you ever do any significant blogging, Scroggins?) between now & then. I leave with my head abuzz with theories of Romanticism, & with a whole bunch of contemporary poetry echoing in my ears. Over the last few days, I've read chapbooks by Alan Halsey & Joe Donahue, books by Lissa Wolsak, Dan Featherston, William Bronk, and Prageeta Sharma; I've re-read Geoffrey Hill's Oraclau | Oracles, hoping to be set afire this time around – hasn't happened yet; there's a delicate music there, & a good deal of familiar Hillian significant grumbling, but I've yet to catch the scent of the spiritual agonistics that so energize Scenes from Comus or The Triumph of Love. Probably I should give it time – I've found that Hill, like lots of other poets, needs some time to "sink in."

I returned the page proofs for the big Parnassus piece yesterday, & I suppose am taking a deep breath before tackling the big essay I've (foolishly?) promised to turn it at the beginning of February. The "finishing touches" on the other two pieces floating in submitted & accepted limbo will have to wait for their editors' gentle or not-so-gentle prodding.

This is not the first time I've felt that I'd prefer to be spending the holiday at home; but I'm not terribly broken up to be traveling, either. Most of the dither of packing & printing out maps & reservations & boarding passes has been taken care of, & I'm actually looking forward to giving my cold-weather gear its annual workout. So for all of those out there journeying this season, I wish you safe & pleasant travels. And no, I'm not going to MLA – hahahahahahahaha!

more romanticism...

2010-12-17T21:29:00.004-05:00

I love a post like that last one, or at least the reactions to it – here, read this, read the other... It's like having a real, you know, community, people to talk to & get ideas from, brains to pick, and so forth.

Kent's comment bears pretty directly on one source of my recent Romanticism interest – I've been dipping into Simon Jarvis's Wordsworth's Philosophic Song, a product very much of that Cambridge nexus. (Prynne's own Field Notes, a longish essay on "The Solitary Reaper," is on the shelf waiting to be read.) I'm not ready to full-on tackle Jarvis's book quite yet, but his discussion of the critical issues surrounding Wordsworth got me thinking about my own deficiencies in the Romanticism department. So I've been looking at Abrams's Mirror & the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism (which I seem to have read much of at some point, as I'm finding quotations that I pillaged for some of the poems in Anarchy), leafing thru some of the essays in Stuart Curran's Cambridge Companion to English Romanticism, & reading pretty closely in Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution.

Aside from Bob A's enthusiastic endorsement of Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre's Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, I'm struck by how many recommendations are of biographies, single or group. (I'm also struck by how many biographies of these chaps I've already read – Holme's 2 volumes of STC [his Shelley, a wedding gift of all things, sits on the shelf waiting to be read], Ackroyd's Blake, Gill's Wordsworth, Gittings's Keats. Thanks to you, Norman, I picked up a copy of Hay's Young Romantics last night.) That is, while many of us in this conversation are scholars of one stripe or another, I think we tend to primarily identify as poets, & find a kind of immediate access thru biography, rather than thru more austerely critical works – at least I didn't hear anyone recommending Paul de Man. Would it be self-interested of me to say that I find this investment in the biographical to be a very heartening thing?

The Cambridge "school" & Wordsworth – now that's an interesting conjunction that bears thinking about on a kind of meta-critical level. We – at least we alt-poets in the US – tend I think to regard Wordsworth as the most canonical of the canonical, a sort of zero-degree of institutional verse, utterly impervious to the sorts of recovery operations carried out so successfully on Whitman, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, even Shelley (I recall one memorable MLA talk on PBS by Michael Palmer some years back). He simply can't, that is, be recuperated for the avant-garde. He has no place in the lineage of the modernist revolution, except as a baseline to be reacted against.

But what if one were to read Wordsworth, as I think Prynne & Jarvis do, as a magnificent, deeply subtle, & deeply strange poet; and furthermore, to read one's own work, not as a reaction against a canonical "mainstream," but as the simple furtherance of tendencies already present within a poet like Wordsworth? (A version of what Bunting is doing – thanks, Bill – ie placing his own work within a tradition in which Wordsworth is a magisterial exemplar.) I suspect that something like this is at play in Prynne's & Jarvis's critical work on WW (including the Chicago Review essay Kent cites, which I haven't read but have heard, at least if it's the same talk he gave at U Chicago a few years back).

In the end, it's hard to resist quoting J. K. Stephen's Wordsworth sonnet (the source, I suspect, of all of Pound's dismissals of WW as a "bleating sheep"):

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times--good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

my romanticism problem

2010-12-16T13:46:00.002-05:00

I am not, alas, a romantic, in any sense of the word. I have some friends who are true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool romantics (like Eric) in the "passionate love" manner; and I have some who are deeply versed in Romantic poetry; I even have some (like Norman) who are both. But I've always been a rather tight-assed product of my Protestant upbringing, shrinking away from the loss of self-control involved in passion, & wincing a bit at its expression in poetry. While I deeply admire the music of their verse, I've always found something a bit, well, embarrassing about Keats & Shelley.

At any rate, the semester's over; I don't leave town for holiday travels until Monday, so rather than tackling the beginnings of the next big essay that's due in oh, 6 weeks' time, for some reason I've been thinking about Romanticism – & how little I know about the whole period, the whole movement. I posted a squib to that effect on my Facebook page, & lo & behold a number of friends have chimed in with a whole year's worth of weighty reading.

My education in Romanticism has been spotty. As an undergraduate at Beloved Alma Mater, I must have taken a survey course that covered the Romantics, but I don't remember a moment of it. And I was feeling the lack when I came up to grad school at Campus on the Hill. CotH's PhD program, however, was not the best place to fill in holes in one's undergrad education. The grand old men of Wordsworth studies could still be seen walking the halls (MH Abrams would have coffee every morning with Archie Ammons downstairs, & I was even a TA for one Stephen Parrish's undergrad courses – Victorian novel, I think), but they generally weren't teaching graduate seminars anymore. So I enrolled in a "Romantic Poetry" seminar with Professor Fearsome DeManean, & found myself largely at sea for 14 weeks, reading poems I hadn't read before – enjoying them, for the most part – & then every week sitting stupidly around the seminar table as my fearsomely theory-savvy colleagues argued the fine points of (mostly) Paul De Man, with very occasional reference to Keats, Wordsworth, or Shelley.

I already had a well-developed taste for Blake, & somehow managed to develop a taste for Wordsworth as well. I put stacks of Byron on my comprehensives lists, and dutifully read them (with nothing less than constant enjoyment). And since then I've read around a great deal – most of Keats's poetry and letters, lots and lots of Coleridge, bits and pieces of Shelley. I worked up Keats in general for a "lifelong learning" lecture series I did a few years back, & had the great satisfaction of reducing a roomful of elderly women to tears with a pathos-ridden performance of "Ode to a Nightingale." I've taught Lyrical Ballads several times, & know The Prelude pretty darned well.

It's a matter of improving what Jonathan Mayhew calls one's "scholarly base." Now, I know I'll never be a scholar of Romanticism (tho I wouldn't mind teaching an undergraduate course on Romantic poetry someday), so the "scholary" isn't quite applicable; but as so often, I've gotten the urge to know more, to fill out or round off the vast blank or roughly sketched areas in my own mental map of what everything means. (I got a similar urge in re/ Marx & the Frankfurt School about a decade ago, Milton sometime before that, Hegel about five years ago, Victorian thought at the same time – all ongoing projects.)

It feels oddly like a counter-productive impulse, so far as one's academic career goes. The classic model is that you establish yourself in one limited sub-discipline, then branch out in subsequent work to adjacent or occasionally more distant fields. I don't know any model, offhand, for this kind of intellectual back-filling. Maybe I'm trying to retool myself as a classic "generalist" – a term I deeply distrust, & which is of course the kiss of death in academia these days. Or maybe I'm just trying to get myself to where I can take more pleasure in Keats & Shelley.

year's end

2010-12-11T21:11:00.008-05:00

No, it's not Santa Claus, but Geoffrey Hill, as pictured in this Oxford Today feature on his entry as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Not much in the way of news here, but some nice stanzas from a work in progress.

I'm feeling the usual semester's-end weariness; the last grades were turned in this morning after a frantic few days of grading & number-teasing, & now I face the horrors of our department's moving to a new building over the holiday break. My office is probably 60% packed; another day's cursing and throwing books in the general direction of cartons should do it. But whether the new office has enough space for the old office's books, now that's another issue altogether.

To celebrate the end of semester, and to take my mind off of Milton final exams, I went thru a splurge of poetry-reading over the last few days. Quite a number of books, in fact, in no particular order. First, a run of Keith Waldrop chapbooks from all over the last 40 years:

•my nodebook for december (Burning Deck, 1971)
•Intervals (Awede, 1981)
•Water Marks (Underwhich, 1987)
•Two-Part Invention (Meeting Eyes Bindery/Poetry New York, 1999)

I've always been fond of Waldrop's work, which has struck me as falling usually into the category of the spare and precise, a sort of post-Objectivist work that I associate with Cid Corman (most prolifically); but KW is inevitably a far more careful and thoughtful craftsperson – and his work has a muted sense of humor that I enjoy immensely.

Then Phyllis Rosenzweig's more substantial (page-wise) chapbook Reasonable Accomodation (Potes & Poets, 1998). I knew PR glancingly when I was a lurker on the fringes of the DC scene a couple of decades ago, but had never really read her work. It's quite good: disjunctive on the order of much Language writing, name-dropping in the best New York School manner (tho the names dropped are usually of DC folks I know), & showing a sometimes surprising sense of closure – ie the poems actually end, rather than simply trail off.

Kenneth Fearing's Selected Poems (Library of America, 2004) isn't as good as its editor Robert Polito would like you to believe. That is, Fearing really isn't the great American hard-boiled poet, the fellow who actually marries the grittiness of James Cain to the social conscience of Muriel Rukeyser. Rather, he's a kind of lefty Whitman which a strong dash of second-hand surrealism. A congenial combination, to be sure, but the catalogues & the socio-political hectoring get old after awhile.

Donald Wellman's A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010) is a welcome new piece from a poet who's more than content to work in the footsteps of Pound and Olson – a "late modernist," that it. Wellman's deep in the culture of contemporary and historical Spain here, drawing from the works of medieval thru contemporary Spanish poets and writers, musing over the ruins both concrete and metaphysical of the Third Reich's "Fortress Europe."

Two from Laura Sims, Practice, Restraint (Fence, 2005) and Stranger (Fence, 2009), exemplify contemporary "elliptical" poetry in its purest form. I'm enraptured by the spareness of Sims's writing, and she has a wonderful lyric ear. I wonder, however, whether the poems' very evanescence won't have them floating off the page entirely at some point. (Even as I write that, I find myself admitting that Stranger, an extended elegy to Sims's mother, has a kind of emotional gravitas that keep the wee stanzas pretty well anchored indeed.)

The great discovery, however, is Linda Russo's Mirth (Chax, 2007). Of all of these books, Mirth is the one I most wish I'd written – and the one I find myself most admitting is beyond my abilities. A first section of excellent, cutting political poems – then extended fantasias on Ovid (among others) exploring, in a theoretically sophisticated & often deeply funny manner, what it means to be a politically engaged female poet in what alas is still too often a man's man's man's world. By the time you're thru with Mirth, however, you've forgotten that the dour Mr Hill is arbiter of poetry & morals at Oxford, & are enthusiastically following Russo into the twenty-first century.

[105-114]

Peter O'Leary: Luminous Epinoia

2010-12-02T22:42:00.013-05:00

[Peter O'Leary, February 2008]

We were talking at the pub last night about the sensation of reaching a certain age – a certain point at one's life – where one can see the overall "curve" of the careers of one's culture-heroes – musicians, writers, etc. As usual, I took it as an opportunity to lament impending senility etc. But truth to tell, I don't feel particularly old, or even particularly middle-aged. In some senses, I feel that my poetry has only within the past 5 years or so emerged into what I think of as a "mature" voice; & suspect that a decade from now I might dismiss what I'm writing right now as juvenilia.

I'm comfortable watching poets a few years older than me, folks like my friend Norman Finkelstein, emerge from being pretty damned good poets to being really breathtaking, big poets – poets I'd mention in the same breath as the great poets of the 1920s or 1930s generation – as Norman's done with his last two books, Scribe (blogged here) and Inside the Ghost Factory.

It's a little more unsettling – but simultaneously exhilarating – when I see one of my coevals breaking forth into something like "major" status. I've known Peter O'Leary for something over a decade. I suspect we hooked up by means of Ronald Johnson's work: I've been writing on Johnson as long as I can remember, and Peter, after corresponding with him for several years, was named Johnson's literary executor upon his death in 1998. (Since then he's lovingly shepherded thru the press a number of Johnson projects: The Shrubberies, To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems, and a reissue of Radi Os.

I've followed O'Leary's poetry, both in his first two full-length collections, Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001) and Depth Theology (2006), his chapbooks, and his periodical appearances. I was even, I'm proud to say, a press reviewer for his excellent critical study Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness. But nothing has prepared me for the impact of his brand new collection from the Cultural Society, Luminous Epinoia.

I haven't even tried to reproduce the cover, as I've yet to see a photo that does justice to this book's visual presentation. It's a Quemadura (Jeff Clark) design, but bears no resemblance to Quemadura's typical combination of slurred visuals and hard-edged, sans-serif lettering. Instead, the book's a jacketless hardcover in blinding silver, etched white repeated designs (snakes, crosses, & stars) surrounding a Gothic "L. E." (The insides, equally scrumptuous, are more recognizably Quemaduran: sans-serif running heads, Gothic epigraphs.) It's a book to be immediately struck by – but the real beauties are inside.

I'll admit that I fall back on comparisons when my critical/descriptive skills falter. What's this book like? Well, imagine a poet whose worldview, and whose visionary tendencies, are akin to those of Dante (in the Paradiso) or Henry Vaughan; whose vocabulary is as ornate (tho nowhere near as pretentious) as Edward Dahlberg's; and whose sense of form, of diction, and of general poetic movement is near kin to Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson, and Nathaniel Mackey. Throw in a generous dash of Freud (& even Jung), an outraged political sensibility, & a kind of deep, radiant, tender humanitas, & you have something like Peter O'Leary.

Not being a believer, I do not write religious poetry. But I do appreciate religious poetry (if I didn't, let's face it, this past semester teaching Milton would have been more than unpleasant), and so far as Christian poetry goes I find a clear distinction between Protestant and Roman Catholic poetics. Milton is the great Protestant poet; Geoffrey Hill is the best Protestant poet writing now. Dante is of course the preëminent Roman Catholic poet. (Oddly enough, I read Hopkins, despite his holy orders, as more Protestant than Catholic in his poetics.) Raised as I was in fundamentalist, text-based Protestantism, I relish the wrestle with the law's letter, with the philosophical paradoxes of faith; but I find myself more often than not left cold by the literary manifestations of ecstatic, mystical religious states.

Or rather, I find it hard to mix the religious & the aesthetic. I love visiting ornate churches & cathedrals; but I find myself bulldoggishly resistant to the "beauties" of the service or the mass. I am as low church as low church can be.

But O'Leary's work moves me, and moves me deeply – so deeply I'm puzzled. He is, yes, a Roman Catholic poet, one whose work is redolent of incense and wine, is shot thru with the light of both stained glass windows and the sun; his poems are almost a series of icons, dense with human detail but alight with hammered gold. Like his mentor Johnson, he relishes science's untangling of the physical and chemical bases of our existence – and he finds in them powerful metaphors for the relationship of God to humanity, even – at some head-spinning moments – explanations of that relationship.

These poems are more personal in many ways than O'Leary's earlier books, including a longish "Spiritual Autobiography" towards the end. It is something of a Vita Nuova crossed with The Interpretation of Dreams, embedded within the Paradiso of exploration and praise that is the book as a whole. Luminous Epinoia may be one of the stranger titles you're likely to encounter – roughly speaking, it refers to one's creativity, conceived I take it as an emanation or a reflection of the divine creativity – but it shouldn't put off even faithless readers (like this one). It's a terrific, rich, mysterious & moving book. I'm almost moved to devotion; but alas, am quite certainly moved to envy.

[104]

the fénéon book

2010-12-02T10:13:00.002-05:00

A couple years back, my most delicious internet reading was the blog Faits Divers de la Poésie Américaine et Brittanique, a series of for the most part brutally funny satirical squibs directed at the poetry "scene" in general, & emanating from the anonymous fénéon collective. Hoo boy did the fénéon folks stir up ire on all sides of American poetry (except perhaps for the trade-press-entrenched hyper-establishment, which doesn't really traffic in internet communication). Eventually, after pissing off just about everyone who is anyone in alt-poetry, the blog's contents disappeared.

I won't go into the history of the "collective," which is laid out in loving detail in "Anonyme"'s introduction to the recently released Works and Days of the fénéon collective (Skanky Possum/Effing Press) (hard to come by at the moment, but you might look here). Suffice it to say they take their name from the art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon, and are inspired by his Nouvelles in trois lignes, cryptic and anonymous squibs which appeared in the Paris Newspaper Le Matin in 1906. Fénéon's "novels" are capsulized and crystallized social commentary:

A dozen hawkers who had been announcing news of a nonexistent anarchist bombing at the Madeleine have been arrested.

Reverend Andrieux, of Roannes, near Aurillac, whom a pitiless husband perforated Wednesday with two rifle shots, died last night.

Too poor to raise him, Triquet, of Théligny, Sarthe, smothered his son, aged 1 month.

The 232 "faits divers" of the "fénéon collective" are rather more loquacious, and focus their commentary on the angst- and ambition-riddled microcosm of contemporary poetry. The humor is for the most part broad. We encounter the perpetually needy denizens of MFA programs:

The MFA students of Iowa are on strike! Marching towards the Capitol, post-avant and School of Quietude as one, they brandished cans of Spam, the only aliment they can afford.

In the midst of economic crisis, things proceeded as normal at the AWP: bailouts, bonus packages, back-room deals, aimless loitering of the unemployed.

Conceptual poetry makes an appearance:

"Ouch!" cried the cunning oyster-eater, M. Goldsmith. "A pearl!" Someone at the next table bought it for 100 francs. It had cost 10 centimes at the dime store.

Time and time again, poets whose surnames assiduous followers of the "scene" will recognize collide head-on in the street.

The collective's primary targets are on the one hand the tired rhetoric of outsiderhood among post-avant poets –

Assistant Professor M. Devaney, of Penn, read a paper at the MLA, attacking Official Verse Culture. Now that it is printed in the Writer's Chronicle and collected in a prize-winning anthology from Wesleyan, the Literary Industry has been dealt another penetrating blow by the avant-garde.

– and on the other the failure of real world political engagement among poets who are otherwise assiduous at trumpeting their own heartfelt political beliefs:

Let's protest the war, poets, said M. Hamill! 15,000 did. Messrs. Bernstein, Silliman, and Watten gave speeches, protesting the poets who protested. Irony.

Well, Guernica's come and go... As Gaza burned, Mlle Dark, the self-appointed U.S. poetry medium of Badiou, devoted her blog to a personal "Top-40 Countdown" of pop music hits in 2008.

Yes, and as Gaza burned, the avant with 2,000,000 hits, former editor of the Socialist Review, devoted his blog today to an anecdotal homage for the '70s sitcom hit, Starsky and Hutch.

This sort of thing will certainly not do (as Samuel Johnson might say). The fénéon collective's squibs are nasty, mean-spirited, and not at all constructive. They are also for the most part wickedly funny & often very pointed indeed. The very anger they aroused on their first publication is an index of how close to the bone some of their satire strikes.

There is something here for everyone to be offended by, and likewise there is something to solace every resentment. My own favorite:

There is no god even for drunkards. The pugilist-poet M. Kleinzahler, of St. Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, has left this world.

the damned 100 books thing

2010-11-28T11:55:00.002-05:00

So the "BBC 100 books" meme is going around Facebook again. You've seen it -- it's a list of 100 books, chosen by some arcane process, of which the BBC has found most people have read only 6. And you're supposed to go thru the list, marking the ones you've read, & tagging your friends.

Problem is, of course, that the BBC apparently had no such intention in compiling their original list (which can be found here). That list is a reader-voted list of 100 most popular novels. Somewhere along the line, someone monkeyed around with that list, making a bit more highbrow (maladroitly – they added both Shakespeare's Complete Works and Hamlet, separately). It's in that latter form that it's getting passed around as a test of one's literacy. (For a straightforward comparison of the two lists, & their sources, see this blog post.)

What does the phenomenon say about contemporary reading habits, & habits of thought more generally? Well, first & most obviously: when people think about "books" they've read, they think novels. The BBC was explicit about their list being novels; whoever altered the list to "books" didn't really think it necessary to do more than throw in a couple of Shakespeares – after all, the important reads are still novels. Where're the biographies, the books of history, the nonfiction things that squat atop the bestseller lists for ages?

Secondly, most people apparently haven't read a whole lot since high school, and what they've read rarely goes beyond the front displays of Barnes & Noble (or Waterstone's). The vast majority of the books here fall into roughly three categories: classic children's books (and young people's books – Little Women, The Secret Garden); things that are assigned in secondary school (To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath); and books that have been atop the bestseller lists (Harry Potter, Captain Corelli's Mandolin). There's also a fair number of "classics," especially in the later "altered" list – what I would call "warhorse" classics, books that everyone's heard of & agrees are suitably serious (Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy).

But most interestingly, everyone still wants to feel themselves somehow "well read" – that they've somehow kept ahead of the curve of their peers, those poor schmucks who've only read 6 books from this list. Frankly, I imagine anyone who reads much at all – anyone, that is, who isn't part of that 95% of the American public who never reads a book* – has probably read at least 15 or 20 of these. But I'm not sure there isn't a category mistake taking place here: can we really call the warm bath of looking back over Winnie the Pooh (#7) or Black Beauty (#58) reading in the same sense that working one's way through Ulysses (#78) or Gormenghast (#84) is reading?

*I just made that statistic up.

most bizarre sentence in a "scholarly" book, episode 237

2010-11-27T01:48:00.002-05:00

From K. W. Gransden's Virgil: The Aeneid (Landmarks of Western Literature) (Cambridge UP, 1990).

We all know about Eclogue 4, right? You remember, the one which addresses the Consul Pollio, prophesying the birth of a man child who will bring back the golden age associated with Saturn? The one Virgil wrote in 40 BCE, and in which no-one has any real idea what he's talking about? The one that got taken up by Christian commentators as a prophecy of Christ's birth, & had a great deal to do with Virgil's being enshrined as a "Christian poet" avant la lettre?

Gransden writes, gravely: "It must be emphasized that there is no evidence, and little likelihood, that Virgil was referring in this poem to Christ."

The mind boggles. What precisely would constitute "evidence" that Virgil, writing in 40 BCE, was "referring to" Christ (born ca. 7-3 BCE)? What would make it more or less "likely"?

2010-11-26T01:02:00.004-05:00

Addendum to the below (& perhaps a mortal blow for my potential use of Sarah Ruden's version of the Aeneid in next semester's class): These sentences that open her introduction:

I am in awe of scholars who can expertly debate Vergil's political purpose and attitude; I find him difficult just to read. In part, I blame the half-finished state of his epic: only twelve out of the projected twenty-four books exist, and many lines are two- or three-word fragments.

First off, it's bad to start out your intro with an "aw-shucks-Miz-Scarlett-ah'm-just-a-translator-&-don't-know-nothin'-'bout-scholarship"; it may establish your poetic bona fides, but it gives no comfort to those who hope to find in your translation a firm grasp not merely of the Latin language but of the poem as a whole, which has been thought about by scholars – sometimes very fruitfully indeed – for some two millennia now.

But where in the Sam Hill did she get that business about only 12 of 24 books being finished?? Of course, there are indeed around 60 partial lines in the poem. That's explained by Virgil's method of composition: he'd write a prose draft, then versify in blocks; when he got stuck, he'd leave a half-line, which he called tibicines (props), to support the overall structure until he could raise the final columnes (pillars). Virgil had worked on the epic for some 10 years when he died in 19BCE, & he was projecting another three years' work to "finish" it – polish it up, remove inconsistencies like those you find thruout Homer, and finish up those half-lines. But by no means could he have been intending another 12 books.

I'm no classicist, tho I did my stint of Virgil back in high school Latin (books I thru VI, if I remember rightly). But I've got a stack of classicists' books scattered around the house & the office, & nowhere can I find a projected 24-book length to the Aeneid. K. W. Grandsen, in his little Cambridge UP guide (where I also picked up the snazzy factoids about the tibicines & columnes), puts it most forcefully: "It should however be emphasized that the poem, though unrevised, is in no sense incomplete or unfinished (as Spenser's Faerie Queene is unfinished)."

Please, somebody who knows more about this than I do – who's plugged into the most recent Virgil scholarship – prove me wrong. Otherwise I'm going to to irrevocably lose faith in the whole academic publishing industry – or at least in the Yale UP copy editor who let that sentence get onto the first page of this highly-promoted translation.
***
The Thanksgiving celebration, by the way, was lovely. Not least for the fact that we were invited to some dear friends' house, where the food was delicious and the alcohol flowed freely, & I didn't have to cook anything more than a bowl of Gujerati string beans.

my Vergil problem

2010-11-25T10:12:00.004-05:00

This holiday morning I'm brooding over book orders. Yes, I turned them in weeks ago, but it's probably not too late for revisions.

Here's the deal: After dithering around over Homer translations, I finally settled for Fagles (Penguin), who seems solid enough, & whose texts are accompanied by really excellent extended introductions & notes by Bernard Knox. The Aeneid proved something more of a challenge. I like C. Day Lewis's version, find Fitzgerald's rather bland, & have a fondness for Frederick Ahl's recent Oxford, even though I recognize it makes a hash of Vergil's elegant concision. But I finally succumbed to the publicity materials – wow, they even sent me an e-mail! – and ordered Sarah Ruden's new translation from Yale UP. Academic friends, admit you've done this before yourselves – ordered a book for a class without actually having a copy in hand; please, admit it, so I don't feel like such a jackass. (I did, however, download their PDF of Book I, and liked it very much.)

At any rate, my desk copy arrived yesterday, and I'm having buyer's – or rather, assigner's – remorse. On two counts: First, the translation itself. Ruden is good, there's no getting around it. She translates Vergil's (and for some reason I'm very fond of that old-fashioned Latinate spelling) hexameters into terse iambic pentameter, & there's a kind of electric telegraphy to her lines that make the poem more fast-moving & active than any other Aeneid I've encountered:

The trumpets gave a harsh blare. Turnus raised
The war sign from the tower of Laurentum,
And whipped his horses up, and clashed his weapons.
Instantly all of Latium joined in frenzy
And panic. Its young men grew cruel and savage. (VIII)

But her decision to translate not merely in pentameter – ten-or-eleven-syllable lines – but line-for-line, an equal number of English lines to hexameter Latin lines, is simply mad. Latin is notoriously more compressed than English. (Her own example, from the Twelve Tables, "Si in ius vocat, ito," can be translated no more succinctly than "If a man is summoned to court, he must go" – 5 Latin words into 10 English.) And the hexameter is simply longer than the English pentameter. So her Vergil is of necessity a bare-bones, almost telegraphic version: all sorts of detail, all manner of adjectival richness, have gone by the board.

At times, this reads like Vergil as rendered by Beckett, or by LZ. That's not at all a bad thing – as I say, I admire her version very much; but is it the first Vergil for my junior-level undergrads, almost none of whom have any Latin, many of whom are encountering classical literature for the first time, to read? In some ways, Ruden's ideal reader is someone who already knows the Aeneid fairly well, and who can thereby appreciate this stripped-down version.

And there are a couple of weird moments in Ruden's all-too-brief introduction, as when she comments on enjambments:

I have reproduced enjambments wherever I could, but Anglo-American poetic taste in this connection is fairly stringent. Though making exceptions for emergencies, I took as a ready reminder of what is allowed two lines of A. E. Housman's that I particularly like: "It looked like a toad, and it looked so because / A toad was the actual object is was."

This does not, I fear, given me much faith in Ruden's sense of the poetic line. What about Milton's "sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another"; what about the stunning and expressive enjambments in Spring and All? Why pretend there is some unitary "Anglo-American poetic taste" regarding line breaks (exemplified in a formally retrograde English poet of a 100 years ago), and ignore not merely the whole modernist moment but the wonderfully cunning line breaks of Paradise Lost?

My second moment of doubt is more academic: Yale/Ruden gives us the (English) text of the Aeneid; they give us a brief and unhelpful introduction that focuses mainly on her method as translator (no background about Vergil himself, no situating of the poem within the epic tradition, no historical context); and they give us a glossary of proper names, itself strikingly minimal. What Yale/Ruden don't give the undergraduate reader: explanatory notes, so that one can make sense, say, of the parade of Roman history in VI; any clear sense of Vergil's poetic, how it's related to yet distinct from Homeric epic; maps, so one can figure out the geography of Aeneas' wanderings.

All of this is provided in Ahl, and in spades. Indeed, his Oxford edition has one the best apparatuses I've encountered recently in a scholarly press edition of a translated work. His lengthy introduction (by Elaine Fantham) is a wonder of information, interpretation, & commentary; his notes are lavish and pertinent; there's a bibliography, and a chronology of Vergil, and three very useful maps.

But Ruden, from the point of view of sheer poetry, is by far the superior text. Ahl is accurate but wordy; his own hexameters end up padding the Latin, even as her pentameters end up abbreviating it. Is this a distinction, however, that my students are going to appreciate? Do cultural & historical context – & general understanding – trump poetic elegance on my syllabus, or vice-versa? (Keeping in mind, however, that both versions are after all translations...)

So over the holiday weekend, along with the essay I'm close to finishing revising, I'm stuck with a dilemma: Should I howl "stop press" to the bookstores, and have them substitute Ahl for Ruden at the last minute? (Well, it's not quite the last minute – we won't read the Aeneid till sometime in late March, so there's plenty of time.) Or do I soldier on with Ruden, hoping to supplement all the things missing in her version thru classroom lectures, handouts, and online resources? I suppose I'll decide by the end of the weekend, but thoughts and suggestions would be more than welcome.

(Let me anticipate the first comment: Mandelbaum! Taken under advisement. And the second: Fagles! But Fagles is right out – they've already had enough of his voice after reading the Iliad & the Odyssey both.)

farewells

2010-11-16T10:01:00.002-05:00

Two of my favorite academic-type blogs have shut down: Michael Bérubé's (again, perhaps this time for good?), and Dr. No's painfully funny and irreverent Acadamnit. I followed MB pretty religiously for a while, probably several years back, but altogether missed his first shut-down & subsequent resurrection. Dr. No – kudos to him for keeping his anonymity intact over 2 years, a couple generations in blog-time – I'd discovered only recently; I'll miss him voicing, with remarkable panache & profanity, grouses I feel almost every week in my own professional life.

Of course, the blog-form is dead. We all know that. As dead as the Atari and the 8-track tape. But while I've thought about shutting Culture Industry down on a number of occasions, I'm pretty dead-set on keeping this thing running.

I write on three occasions (aside from the once-in-a-while event announcement or simply check-in to show I'm still more ore less alive):

1) When I'm reading something & want to "notice" it. That was the idea behind "100 poem-books." I still read, & I still notice, tho I've been so busy I've been keeping my notices to myself & to my notebooks lately. I suspect I'll get back to doing more of that sooner or later.

2) When I've been actually thinking, & want to work thru something in prose. That doesn't happen very often, because I am an incredibly slow learner & actually have very few coherent ideas. And this past few months have been pretty short on thinking, in large part due to the new school the girls are in, whose schedule has just totally fracked my work routine.

3) When I'm trying to avoid actual writing. (Like right now, for instance.) But blog-writing isn't entirely not-writing: it's a way of semi-productively filling intellectual time. I think of Samuel Johnson on smoking:

Smoking has gone out. To be sure, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account, why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet, or so.

Of course, I smoke too, so I have a plethora of means of preserving my mind from total vacuity.

At any rate, I'm going to set the "Freedom" program for a few hours of "real" writing now; my newfound regimen of aesthetic asceticism (thus far, an outstanding success) hasn't yet extended to relinquishing my online connections without an external crutch. And I'll be back soon.

disorder

2010-11-15T10:04:00.002-05:00

Guy Davenport once told me he figured he received at least one book a day – review copies, authors' gifts, etc. I began to feel that way last week, as the postal carrier dropped packages almost every day of the week – things I'd ordered, presentation copies, desk copies for courses, and so forth. It's all good, but heaven help me there really isn't any shelf space anymore.

Once upon a time I had two squat bookshelves in the living area devoted to unread and mostly unsorted books. Three years ago I added a long three-shelfer to my study to take up the overflow, and to shelve books I was working with at the moment. That got retired last year & replaced with a seven-foot-tall job – which is now full as a tick (as Mom used to say), & is even double-shelved (ie books in front of other books). Not to mention that it's surrounded by stacks of books on the floor.

I blame inheritance: First, a few years back I got a biggish carton of books from my Alma Mater, books that had belonged to my first academic mentor of beloved memory, a Hopkins & Austen scholar who passed away some years back. It means the world to me to read Hopkins in her densely marked copies, but my own library has never quite properly absorbed the books. Then an in-law retired from teaching at CUNY and invited me to take whatever I wanted from her library of film studied and anthropology; then my Beckett colleague at Our Fair University retired & before flying to Paris, told me to take what I wanted of thirty years of Beckett criticism; then my bookseller friend pressed upon me (oh & I was unwilling, you bet) the overflow of his enormous Ruskin & Romanticism collection. You get the picture. There have been vast intakes of books over the past years, & the shelving simply hasn't kept up.

I don't mind having too many books. But things just might have gotten out of hand when I spent more time looking for books than I do reading them.

(Worse may loom ahead: our department is moving into a new building at the end of this month, & no-one quite seems to know precisely how much shelf space the new offices will have. My office has been, time out of mind, the overflow valve for the house, the place where I shelve fiction, religion, criticism that I don't need to consult often. What, I wake up asking myself in a lather of cold sweat, if I have to bring a couple hundred books home?)

scattered?

2010-11-14T01:34:00.002-05:00

In an idle moment today – after I finished The Philosophy of History, and between books 7 & 8 of Paradise Lost – I sat down to think about what I've been teaching over these past decades. I thought about that because I'm reading David Harvey's Companion to Marx's Capital, the print version of his excellent CUNY lectures (which can be downloaded here), and he remarks that he's been teaching the book every year for several decades now; which made me think of David Kastan's introduction to his edition of Paradise Lost, where he remarks that in his 14 years at Dartmouth he taught the poem on an annual basis. How satisfying it must be to dig so deeply into any single text, thought I.

Anyway, it turns out I've taught almost a hundred courses since I began this lifelong trudge; that's including my stint as a TA in grad school, my several years of frantic adjuncting, and my mostly happy years at Our Fair University. What immediately struck me was that when I left aside courses one might call "service" – freshman composition, intro to the major, etc. – I've done remarkably few things directly in my field. That is, if my field is modernism and postmodernism, poetry in particular – and I think it is, right? – probably a quarter of the classes I've taught have been more or less directly in that. Probably a fifth of the classes I've taught have been American lit courses of one description or another, & I've obviously slanted my syllabi in those classes to make them more "modernist" whenever possible (& I know I've taught a good deal more poetry than some of my colleagues – who teach a good deal more drama than I do, & so forth). I've done Bible as Lit maybe a half-dozen times, and a half-dozen sections of Milton and Shakespeare. And then "boutique" courses – graduate seminars on Joyce and Beckett, theory of biography, other things that have caught my fancy.

But given my publication record, I've really taught relatively few classes flat-out directed at modernist or contemporary poetry. Instead, I find with some interest, over a quarter of all the courses I've taught have been creative writing workshops. Oh my. Very interesting indeed, for someone who pretty much stumbled into my own MFA program, never thinking that the CW industry would end up paying a substantial portion of my bills.

If I were somewhere else – CUNY or Princeton, say – I'd not merely have a lighter teaching load, but I'd be able to craft what I taught far more closely to my research agenda. I imagine Marjorie Perloff or Stephen Greenblatt teach (or taught, since Marjorie's retired) pretty much what they damned well please, and the texts they go over in class feed directly into what they happen to be writing. There's a lot to be said for that, both from a scholarly and a pedagogical standpoint. But there's something also to be said for a place like Our Fair University where a modernist scholar like me gets to acquaint himself rather intimately with Milton, or to harness his otherwise useless fundamentalist upbringing to a literary reading of the Bible. It's made me a far broader reader & thinker, I think, than I would have been otherwise. Broader, but perhaps also shallower?

Or maybe it's just made me scattered.

scattered reading

2010-11-13T01:00:00.003-05:00

The "brown bag" lunchtime talk advertised in the last post got talked today. It went over pretty well, I thought – at least, talking thru it did the sort of "cultural work" that I wanted to get done: it clarified to me where I needed to go with the piece, where the holes were. And it was kind of fun.

Briefly, I was talking about antinomian – really, 17th-century revolutionary – texts in a particular Mekons song, situating them in the contexts of various post-punk bands' hat-tips to the English Revolution, Christopher Hill's Marxist historiography of the period, & the Situationists – which as yet don't quite fit. But I should get this a good deal tighter & smarter before I deliver it in a formal context.

I realized, as I talked, that I was doing what I continually flog Christopher Ricks for doing in his Bob Dylan writings – discussing lyrics almost in a vacuum, wholly apart from their song context. But it's damned hard to write about music, especially when you know as little about it as I do. I mean, I know how chord progressions work, I can play my way thru most relatively simple rock songs, but I don't read music at all; and my knowledge of the "canon" of punk, or of country, or really of any given subset of music, is pretty pitifully thin. When I discuss music, I do my damnedest to stay away from the kind of impressionistic description that bedevils much of music criticism; but on the other hand, I don't yet have the vocabulary to describe the sounds I'm hearing without evoking comparisons. (A problem that also afflicts my writing about poetry – poet X "sounds like" poet Y etc.)

Indeed, as I was reminded the other night at the pub, when I listened to a very bright student of mine lament his education, how little he'd read in college, the things he wished he'd learned, I don't know as much as I'd like to about anything. And my reading, which has lately gotten more & more scattered, isn't really helping. I know this & that about a vast variety of things, but there are only a couple of things that I know a lot about: I guess I know LZ pretty well, & modern poetry in general. But I'd like to know the Romantics better; I want to finally get to grips with Hegel, from beginning to end; I want to get a firm grasp of what Badiou is up to; one of these days I want to read Lucan's Pharsalia, and Tasso, and Camoëns, and Ariosto.

But life is short – only so many hours in day, only so many pages one can riffle thru. For the record, right now I'm reading

•Hegel's Philosophy of History (a long-term project, one winding down now)
•Christopher Hill's The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (a break from Stanley Fish's big How Milton Works)
•Glenn Burgess's The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (I really want a better grasp of 17th-c. political thought)
•John Guillory's Cultural Capital
•Bourdieu's Distinction (another long-term project)
•The Odyssey (a great pleasure, somewhat spoiled by being "for work")
•The Aeneid (in the "beige" Fitzgerald translation, while I wait for Sarah Ruden's new Yale)
•several different books on Samuel Johnson & biography (next semester's seminar)

and of course the stuff I'm "teaching," which means Paradise Lost and (this week) Martin Corless-Smith's Swallows. In the interstices, I read slim volumes & chapbooks of contemporary poetry (most memorably lately J. H. Prynne's Sub Songs, which would be memorable if only for its humongous dimensions). It's no wonder that I'm scattered.

Clearly, I'm not cut out to be a scholar at all – or maybe, not anymore. What I need is a gig as a (regular, paid) book reviewer, or a weekly "cultural" column for some upper-middlebrow newspaper. Anybody out there with a job for someone who knows a little something about just about everything, and way too much about things no-one else cares to know?

brown bagging

2010-11-04T11:55:00.005-04:00

(Yes, that's the back cover of Never Mind the Bollocks; click on the image to get a legible version.)

Pound, re-selected

2010-11-04T00:55:00.003-04:00

In my department mailbox today two new New Directions Ezra Pound volumes, New Selected Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth, and ABC of Reading. It's nice to see that Pound is finally getting edited. I grew up on the crunky old black-&-white ND volumes, with their sometimes erratic typefaces & generally awful cover designs. No notes, often no indices, sometimes eccentric tables of contents. But God bless James Laughlin for putting & keeping the stuff in print!

But it is good, as I say, to see that Pound's work is finally getting presented in a from that doesn't make one blush when assigning the book to class. I guess the first big step in the right direction was the 1990 reissue of Personae (ed. A. Walton Litz & Lea Bachler), which cleaned up the texts somewhat & added the 3 "ur-Cantos." Then New Directions issued, in 2003, a single-volume paperback of the Pisan Cantos; the poems themselves are simply offset from the big collected Cantos volume, but they have copious back-of-the-book annotations by Sieburth, who the same year published his massive Library of America version of Pound's Poems and Translations, which has become the industry standard for well-edited Pound.

I suspect New Directions' flurry of publishing activity this year might have something to do with the passing out of copyright of much of EP's early work, which opens the door to such projects as Ira Nadel's Penguin Early Writings, and even the Dover "Thrift Edition" of his Early Poems. At any rate, I haven't spent much time with the New Selected Poems and Translations, except to note that in replacing the dear old Selected Poems he's weeded out a number of the lame early poems & added a number of later Cantos; appendices include the original introduction by TS Eliot and a scrapped intro by John Berryman; and there are lashings of notes at the end, no doubt a welcome addition for Pound newbies and college students alike.

The new ABC of Reading, alas, is barely new at all. There are three additions: a well-turned introduction by Michael Dirda, an index of proper names (THANK YOU, NEW DIRECTIONS!), and an eye-popping magenta hue to the cover, replacing the dour old black. The text itself is still in the same gritty, spectacularly ugly typeface, with the ample margins indicating that this was a mass-market sized paperback blown up to trade size. And there's one loss: on page 9 of the old edition, there was a paragraph entitled simply "ABC"; that's been lost, replaced with a perfectly useless title page. For those who're coming to the ABC for the first time, here's what you've missed:

A B C
Or gradus ad Parnassum, for those who
might like to learn. The book is not
addressed to those who have arrived at full
knowledge of the subject without knowing
the facts.

A paragraph I realize that I know by heart, & whose implications I've tried to take to heart.

busy

2010-11-01T00:45:00.004-04:00

I seem to have survived another Halloween – this one particularly strenuous: the calendar made it so. With the holiday itself falling on Sunday night, that provided an opening for an astonishingly number of events:

•Saturday morning begins at a wholly ungodly hour with D.'s soccer game

•then a venture to the pumpkin patch, along with some last-minute makeup purchases at the party (yes, you're wondering, why wait till the last minute for the pumpkin? well, when it hits the mid-80s every day, pumpkins simply don't last – they turn into mush, we've learned over the years, in about 3 days)

•then a Saturday afternoon kids' party, which seemed to be mostly populated by 8-year-old boys in that state of adrenaline-drenched excitement that makes me say to myself, God, I'm glad we've got girls

•then a mostly-faculty attended evening costume party; great fun, even tho the conversation seemed to center on 2 of the most depressing possible topics – the internecine struggles in our own shark-snapping-its-guts college; and real-live politics (thankfully, only one Christine O'Donnell costume on display).

•Today, a solo paternal morning featuring morning violin practice for the girls followed by pumpkin-carving with minimal cursing & surprisingly few self-inflicted wounds (J. was working a pre-election phone bank)

•then another kids' party, at a bowling alley no less! – but actually great fun

•followed by the neighborhood kids' party (this is getting old)

•and finally wound up with trick or treating.

So yes, I'm bushed. And facing a looming deadline to thoroughly revise a 45-page piece.

But I've managed to add two pieces to the "Torture Garden" manuscript, & have a new biggish project moving from the back to the front burner. This one, by Ba'al, is poetry. Importunate editors wanting essays and reviews can just leave my doorbell alone for a while. (No, just kidding – I never say no.)

And the postperson delivered a shiny, mint hardcover of Simon Jarvis's Wordsworth's Philosophic Song yesterday (I seem to have lucked out – an Amazon Marketplace seller had it for $24, about 2/3 of what those creeps at Cambridge UP are charging for the POD paperback). After the ecstatic notices this thing got in the British alt-poetry community, I felt obliged to read it myself. And I've been querying every romanticist I meet – So, how's the Jarvis book? (My favorite response: "It's not as mind-blowing revelatory as you've heard, but it's not as abysmally awful and eccentric as you've heard either. It's a pretty good book.")

Now to find time to read it, among the 2 books of Paradise Lost for tomorrow & the various ditherings in preparation for the "brown bag" talk I've committed to end of next week.

Harness your OCD!

2010-10-26T00:17:00.002-04:00

I'm still reading Geoffrey Hill's Oraclau | Oracles, savoring. I'll report when I'm done. Actually, as usual I'm reading it in tandem with a stack of other things, among them Modern Painters Vol. 3, Robert Fagles's translation of the Iliad, and Allen Mandelbaum's version of the Divine Comedy. Just finished that last, in fact – and as usual, everything else under the sun seems to pale in the light of those last few blinding cantos.
***
The Milton class got their midterms back today, & for some reason it seemed as tho a sudden cloud had blotted out the sky as they filed out of the classroom, muttering grimly. Not my fault if they can't tell a quote from Lycidas from a quotation from Areopagitica.
***
I'm gearing up for some serious writing/revising over the next few days, & actually looking forward to it. My lodestar on matters of how to get academic writing done, for the past months, has been Jonathan Mayhew's wonderful blog Stupid Motivational Tricks. (Given the rampant tenure-bashing one's been hearing the past couple years, it's worthwhile scrolling down to read his beautifully concise & wholly accurate post from Sunday, "Why Do Research After Tenure?") Mayhew's a more than solid scholar – 4 books to his credit – & by all indications an all-round nice guy. If one finds his scholarly output pretty intimidating at first glance, he has a knack of breaking down the tasks of writing articles & books into doable chunks, so that even I feel I might get something cranked out in the mid-future.

Most of the "stupid motivational tricks" are just that – gimmicky but effective ways to channel wasted time & mental energy into productive labor, or handy ways of focusing your scattered energies in useful directions. But I suspect that even if I were to put all of those tricks to use, I wouldn't be able to match Mayhew, because the guy also seems to be operating with a fairly high level of OCD – a kind of wonderful over-organization that I couldn't begin to match, given the general slovenliness of my mental & physical life.

On the other hand, I reflect, I too have a certain level of perhaps useful OCD. I like organizing things, and making lists: I'm cataloguing all my books on LibraryThing, and the ones that I have shelf space for are for the most part pretty rigorously organized; I keep track of everything I've read, & actually pay attention to the "play counts" on my iPod, so that I can make sure I listen to every song thereon before I add another album or two. (I'm behind – there're about 400 unlistened-to songs – but that's out of maybe 13,000 total, so I'm doing okay.) I keep track of how many liters of seltzer I make out of every Soda Stream charger. And so forth.

So why don't I channel this low-level OCD into something useful – like losing weight? I've decided it's no fun being the fat man of the department, and my lower back and calves have begun to feel the strain, as I trundle down the long winding slope of middle age. I've looked at any number of diets & exercise regimens, & all of them come out to the same thing: eat less, move around more. I can do the moving around more bit. I own a bicycle, & I enoy riding it. I climb the stairs at work rather than take the elevator. I've been doing much of my reading & writing at a standup desk, which I'm told in itself burns more than a few calories.

But there's the "eat less" thing. It's true – I love food. Indeed, I'm a desperately oral creature. I like searing hot sauces, crunchy, savory snacks, oily things of all descriptions. I like to snack, and I tend to overeat. But there's a well-sculpted me, somewhere within these adipose waves, struggling to get out. Heaven knows, at least I can get myself looking as good as Morrissey – once the epitome of skinny hotness – does these days.

Perhaps, somehow, I can harness my own obsessiveness to an aesthetic of renunciation: of not eating that handful of cashews, just because they're there, or those malted milk balls P. brought home from her youth orchestra party. We're coming up on Halloween, I know, which may be the stiffest test of this recent experiment of mine. If I come thru without gaining a pound or two, I'll let you know. If my own OCD fails me when I need it most – well, you won't hear about it.

Ruskin v. Benjamin

2010-10-25T10:45:00.001-04:00

It's hard not to like a blog like The Leeds Arcades Project, which seems to be obsessed on the one hand with Walter Benjamin and the other with John Ruskin. Party on!

Geoffrey Hill's production pace

2010-10-21T23:42:00.004-04:00

[Geoffrey Hill on the left, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams center – try imagining Ron Silliman with Pat Robertson – oh, never mind.]

Someone should write a book on poets' rate of production. I once began a Parnassus essay on Ted Enslin with the following snarky anecdote:

Two friends of mine were waiting at the maître d's desk in a posh New York restaurant, when one of them whispered urgently, "Look over at that table – there's Joyce Carol Oates! She's having dinner with a guy – and he's holding her hand. He must be telling her he loves her." "Naw," the other said, "he's just trying to keep her from writing during the meal."

I went on to compare Enslin – who's published a veritable blizzard of books over his long and immensely prolific career – with Cid Corman & Robert Kelly, & gave some thought (& rather too much snark) to the effects of overpublication, overproduction.

I think I had in mind, as counterexample, a poet like Basil Bunting, who popped off at 85, leaving behind – what? – 250 pages of work, only a handful of lines of which I'd be willing to sacrifice on that desert island. Or Geoffrey Hill, whose slim volumes – at least thru the mid-90s – emerged with such irregularity and constipated, impacted grace that one couldn't imagine His Giant Dourness becoming a publishing machine like John Ashbery or T. C. Boyle.

Well, there's a new Geoffrey Hill book out: Oraclau | Oracles, just published by Clutag Press in Thame, Oxfordshire. As it comes closely on the heels of A Treatise of Civil Power (Penguin, 2007 – an earlier chapbook version by Clutag in 2005), it's worth casting an eye over Hill's publishing pace, as he nears 80.

I met Hill once in I think it was 1987, at Campus on the Hill, where I was impressed by his savage comb-over (he'd just gotten what seems a very bad haircut, so the combed-over portion failed to meet the hair on the other side of his bald spot, as tho he'd been imperfectly scalped), limp handshake, & implacable seriousness. I was already deeply impressed by his poems – I had his first Collected Poems (Oxford UP, 1986; Penguin, 1985), which brought together 5 books & one longish poem published over 25 years:

For the Unfallen (1959)
King Log (1968)
Mercian Hymns (1971)
Tenebrae (1978)
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983)
Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres (1984)

For those who're counting, that's something like a book every 4 years. There was a lapse between the Collected Poems & Hill's next volume, but when that one came out, it was as if someone had turned on a spigot:

Canaan (1997)
The Triumph of Love (1998)
Speech! Speech! (2000)
The Orchards of Syon (2002)
Scenes from Comus (2005)
Without Title (2006)
A Treatise of Civil Power (2005/2007)
Oraclau | Oracles (2010)

What's more, the jacket copy for Oraclau | Oracles announces that this book is actually only one of five collections Hill has completed since A Treatise, one of which will appear in 2012, and all five of which will constitute the "final section" of Hill's Collected Poems 1952-2012, "scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2013."

My word. 12 collections, then, in 16 years. The man has picked up the pace a bit. What's most surprising is that Hill's post-1990 work is to my mind his best, retaining the gnarly intensity of the early work but transposing it to a decorous (& sometimes flippant) vernacular, plumbing the moral issues with which he's always been obsessed more deeply than ever. I haven't read Oraclau | Oracles yet, but I'm itching to; at this point in Hill's career, more collections are just more of a good thing.

Maybe I should reconsider that Joyce Carol Oates joke. Or maybe read some more of her books. Naw.

timid

2010-10-21T11:36:00.004-04:00

Reading – mostly re-reading – Ezra Pound's early criticism, most of it from before the First World War, in Ira B. Nadel's Penguin Early Writings: Poems and Prose. An odd freshness to the reading, out of the aged New Directions typefaces and into the "canonical" Penguin fonts – and perhaps simply the lapse of a couple of years since revisiting the texts.

Pound was 28 when the Great War broke out; me, I'm – well – rather older than that now. When I was 28, I was living in Northern Virginia, finishing my dissertation. It would be another three years or so before I landed my first (and still only) academic position. Where I am now Full Professor, aged, grey-bearded, balding, making up for the sclerosis of my thinking with a kind of awkward Pythonesque classroom showmanship.

The cusp of 30 is a good age, a vigorous age: I read Pound's always energetic prose, his boundless ambitions, & envy:

I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost by translation, and – scarcely less important what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated. ("How I Began")

There is no waffle, no "on the other hand" or "but" or "one might concede." Positions are staked militarily, with no concessions, no "I am staking out a position" – the poet-critic speaks, & presents what he says as self-evident truth:

Ibycus and Liu Ch'e presented the "Image." Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag because of his lack of it. ("Vorticism")

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, and not from life... ("A Retrospect")

This is the writing of youth – or the writing of sublime self-assurance – or the writing, some would cavil, of monstrous arrogance. I wish I could write like this. I wonder, is my constant weighing of alternatives a mark of my fundamentalist upbringing, my deeply-ingrained diffidence (a Uriah Heepish humility – my mother always pronounced "humble" without the aitch)? or has a quarter-century in the academy so socialized me in the discourse of the "yes, but" that I'm unable, without considerable strain & self-analytical unease, to say what I think?

Note to self: a course in arrogance, in the sublime self-assurance that makes Milton (fuck you, Ezra Pound) just as great a poet as Dante, and just as scrappy.

all criticism should be professedly personal criticism. In the end the critic can only say 'I like it', or 'I am moved', or something of that sort. When he has shown us himself we are able to understand him. ("The Serious Artist")

All that the critic can do for the reader or audience or spectator is to focus his gaze or audition. ("A Retrospect")

Seth Abramson responds

2010-10-18T00:15:00.003-04:00

Seth Abramson posted a reasoned & nicely-toned response to my little recent bellyache about the professionalization of poetry; my first impulse was to respond in the comments box, but I think he deserves to be heard above the fold:

Mark,

I think it's important to remember--as I always say, in nearly every article I write on the MFA degree--that the MFA is a "largely-unmarketable, non-professional art school degree." Consequently, the purpose of the rankings is to encourage programs to fund students (and do other things that applicants care about, like emphasizing studio work and a three-year flexible curriculum) not to help anyone get a job because (say) they went to the #11 program instead of the #42 program. That's really beside the point -- the rankings are intended for applicants only, i.e. to help them understand which programs are best at offering applicants what applicants report they care about, not for the benefit of professors, employers, &c. I realize everything in life has contained within it the possibility for its misuse and misunderstanding, but that doesn't change the fact that the rankings are not conceived of, nor designed as, the sort of cultural artifact you seem to presume they are.

Best,
Seth

And here's how I'd respond:

Seth--

all your points are well taken, & I'm totally supportive of the extent to which your lists really are designed to help applicants find a program that will give them what they need, without saddling them with lifetime debts.

And I'm not presuming anything about how the rankings are "conceived of" or "designed." Alas, in this sublunary world of Consumer Reports and the US News college rankings, your lists will inevitably taken as something other than what you've conceived or designed them for. As many times as we repeat that the MFA is, in your apt words, a "largely-unmarketable, non-professional art school degree," prospective MFAs will continue to imagine that they are the lucky few who will win the brass ring: much of it has to do with simple modeling, their wholly reasonable observation that poets & writers who teach in MFA programs, especially those who've managed to hook up with the "visiting writer" and contest judge circuits, have a pretty good life of it.

And as I implied in that previous post, while the MFA ideally would be an "art school" degree, the vocational training that comes with the program – teaching undergraduate courses, working on a magazine or a book series – is directed either towards a career teaching in the academy or a more vaguely defined "being a professional writer" within the various networks that make up the biz.

In the end I suspect it's a bit of a catch-22: despite the listing's laudable intentions, & its very real orientation towards applicants rather than institutions – as opposed to the program lists Lingua Franca used to run, ranking PhDs in various sub-disciplines – it's inevitably being taken in ways you didn't intend. And its very existence, as a kind of Rough Guide for those who are about to insert themselves into the MFA & all it entails, is a mark of this "art school" degree's sliding into professionalization.

Thanks for responding so thoughtfully,
Mark

packing

2010-10-13T10:57:00.003-04:00

No, I'm not packing quite yet, but we're leaving at the crack of dawn for a long weekend in Williamsburg, VA, which has become one of our semi-habitual autumn haunts. It's good to get away to where one can really feel the chill in the air, where the trees actually turn. We also like 18th-century architecture, & the smell of woodsmoke, & people pretending to be 18th-century folks. If I lived in England, I suspect I'd be a (English) Civil War reenactor (Parliamentary side, of course).

I've decided on course texts for this spring's "Epic" class. Yes, it'll be Robert Fagles for the Iliad and the Odyssey; Stanley Lombardo tempted me, but Bernard Knox's introductions and notes for the Fagles volumes are just so very good, & the translation is so generally solid (if occasionally "chatty," as one scholar notes) that I'm not sure they're losing much. For the Aeneid, I'm leaping into the dark & using Sarah Ruden's new Yale translation. I'll let you know how it works out.

This afternoon I will attempt to make students excited about Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. I'll let you know how that works out, unless it's such a fiasco that I end up resigning my professorship and crawling into a hole somewhere. Go figure – I love teaching Milton. I just want to jump up & down & say, See, see, can't you see? He's so BRILLIANT! & he's such a PSYCHO! But that of course is beneath my dignity, so I try to do in balanced, periodic sentences.