various; Susan Stewart: Red Rover

We leave Sunday for several days in God’s Country – Tennessee, my home state – & when we get back we’ll be spending most of the last week of the “vacation” on Fire Island. I hope that there I’ll be able to get some actual writing done. Heaven knows I’ve read enough over the last month, but I’ve made little headway at the various projects that have been piling up on my desktop. So maybe I’ll get at least one of them behind me before classes begin again.
***
Been re-reading Dante, this time in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, which seems sturdy & idiomatic enough. (Alas, the Everyman single-volume Comedy I just bought has no Italian text, but who can afford those Bollingen volumes, anyway?) I don’t know Dante anywhere near as well as I know Milton & Homer (not even to speak of Pound & Zukofsky), but I’m always surprised by how familiar the famous lines & set pieces of the Inferno are. An astonishingly good essay by William Arrowsmith, “Ruskin’s Fireflies” (in the John Dixon Hunt/Faith Holland collection, The Ruskin Polygon) reminds me of how absolutely saturated Ruskin was in Dante – probably as saturated as any major English-language writer except Eliot.
***
Why, alas, did I waste an hour of my life reading Philip Roth’s The Breast? What a nasty, shallow, prurient little book. The difference between Joyce & Roth: Joyce would have imagined the situation of The Breast, bunged it into a hilariously funny page-&-a-half of the “Circe” chapter, & then moved on; Roth wrote a novella (& then 2 prequels). Is P. Roth any relation to Samuel R., the man who first pirated Ulysses in the US (& who ran an English for Immigrants outfit that employed LZ for a while)?
***
Red Rover, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2008)

More spare than the poems of Columbarium and The Forest, less of the lush lyricism of those volumes. The contemporary seems to nag the poet, a humming distraction or a moral quandary continually pulling her away from a contemplation of first things – either the immediate data of the natural world, or the spiritual, martial, & erotic matter of the middle ages & classical antiquity.

[77/100]

place-filling book grouse

Not much news here; backlog of poem-books to note, some CDs purchased the other day.

But here's a grouse: I've noted, over the past few years, that when I buy a hardcover book, its spine is at a nice right angle to its front & back covers (like this: |_. By the time I finish reading thru it – or even by the time I'm halfway thru – the spine is at a slant: ie, \_, with the back corner a trifle further out than the front. Am I somehow mishandling my books? I phoned a rare book dealer friend with this complaint (somehow remembering I'd once upon a time heard a set of instructions for "properly" reading a book). His response: cheap bindings; nothing to be done. Sigh.

I personally don't really give a fast flyer about acid-free superpermanent paper; if my books turn to dust 50 year hence, I probably won't be around to lament them. What I'd like is for them to look half-decent on the shelves right now.

Pound in the marketplace; Susan Stewart: Columbarium

When we first got into the city, I headed down to Union Square & the Strand to pick up a stack of Ruskin books I’d bought online. I didn’t really spend a lot of time there that evening; there were a lot of things I wanted to read thru on hand already, & I didn’t want to disperse my always tenuous attention. Anyway, t'other night I finally made the big pilgrimage & did some serious shopping, filling a bag (mostly) with slim volumes of contemporary poetry.

Do I need to say that decent poetry bookshops in South Florida are pretty much nonexistent? Well, there aren’t many anywhere, for that matter. I don’t know the midwest or the west coast, but on the east coast & south the only good new poetry bookshops I know are Bridge Street in DC, Talking Leaves in Buffalo, & St. Mark’s in NYC. And places that have consistently interesting used stock are even rarer – Rust Belt in Buffalo is the only one that springs to mind. But the Strand’s poetry section is so damned large, & I get up here so rarely, that there’re always at least a dozen things I end up buying. Indeed, semiannual trips to the city & the Strand seem to be the primary way recent works of poetry enter the house anymore. (But yes, I bought your book new, straight from the publisher.)

One of the few non-poetry books I picked up, however, was Gregory Barnhisel’s James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (U Massachusetts P, 2005). A very solid piece of scholarship. It’s weird to think of our distance from the modernists, which these days is approximately that of the modernists themselves from the late romantics. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to get histories of modernist writing that aren’t in the “heroic” mode of Hugh Kenner et al. What they called the “new historicism” in early modern studies when it hit modernism became the “new modernist studies,” & it’s not so much a “new” historicism as the first round of a real live critical history-writing.

At any rate, Barnhisel’s is one of those books whose thesis is so simple & unified & compelling that you wonder why the hell this book wasn’t written decades ago. After a very interesting examination of Pound’s publication history thru the 1930s, veering between trade publishers & small press coterie editions, Barnhisel traces how James Laughlin & ND published & promoted him in the postwar years – when Pound was a political pariah; Pound wanted to be Ruskin, the commentator on culture & society: ND promoted him as Pater, a mostly apolitical aesthete. Or rather, they promoted his poetry & his literary essays & downplayed precisely the public persona he most valued, that of political & economic gadfly.

In the process they implicitly supported & underwrote New Critical apoliticism, & a notion of aesthetic autonomy that went far beyond Pound’s own; for Pound, the poet was both the technician of a purified language and the prophet of corrected social structure: that latter role disappears in his public face, as presented in ND books, between 1946 & 1973 (the year of the Cookson-edited Selected Prose, which finally made many of his economic writings available).

I wish Barnhisel’s prose were a trifle more elegant, & I’d like to see a bit more Bourdieu brought to bear on these issues, but on the whole this is a very useful book indeed. (Not least, he confirms that at least one other reader has conceived the 1930s American publishing scene in much the same way I did in Poem of a Life.)
***
Columbarium, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2003)

A book of “first things” – between the bookends of four longish poems on the 4 Empedoclean elements – air, fire, water, earth – a series of shorter poems on various themes, arranged from A to Z. The elements of which we are made & among which we live, & the 26 glyphs by which we comprehend & express them. A curious blending of the pre-Sokratic & the high classical (Virgil’s Georgics one touchstone). As always in Stewart’s work, an almost obsessive, loving regard for the evidence of the senses. An impressive range of forms in the alphabetic section, most of them ad hoc & gracefully realized.

[76/100]

Donald Revell: Thief of Strings

Thief of Strings, Donald Revell (Alice James, 2007)

I read Revell in a kind of enraptured haze, I’m so taken with the odd combination of his poetry: a lovely, consistent lyricism, a mild, very American surrealism, an entraced eye for the unfolding details of the (especially natural) world, closely tied in with a genial piety. If Geoffrey Hill is a High Church Anglican Prophetic poet, & Susan Howe an Antinomian Calvinist poet, then Revell is a Franciscan poet. And that’s a compliment.

[75/100]

Susan Stewart: The Forest

I didn’t think I’d buy it when I saw it in Book Culture (used to be Labyrinth), but ultimately I couldn’t resist Robert Hewison’s John Ruskin, in the Oxford UP series “Very Interesting People.” The series itself seems a reductio ad absurdum of the “Very Short Introductions” series – 120 or so page lives of British worthies, small paperbacks in large type with ample margins & generous spacing.

A glance inside shows that what they’re doing essentially is marketing single lives from the big 2000 relaunch of the Dictionary of National Biography. I suppose with 55,000 entries to that monstrosity, along with the rumors I’d heard of less than stellar sales, OUP is trying to recoup some of what must have been an enormous investment. But Hewison is one of the biggest names in Ruskin studies, author of several important books, & the damn thing was only $3.98 – how could I lose? At any rate, it turns out to be a very nice compact biography indeed, managing to do justice to almost every aspect of JR’s life & career. A definite recommendation for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the man without investing in a full-length life.
***
The Forest, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 1995)

A kind of effortless mastery to much of this book, & a deep interest in interesting things quite apart from the poet’s own sensibility, which I appreciate – the embryology of “The Desert 1990-1993,” the Biblical rewriting of “Lamentations.” “Medusa Anthology,” which revolves around Gericault’s grand Raft of the Medusa, is the great set-piece, but for my tastes it ends on afar too lyrical, conclusive note – as do too many of the poems. I think I like the more ambiguous, fragmentary works of Part I, “Phantom,” better than the more accomplished longer pieces of “Cinder,” the 2nd part. But there’s much to admire thruout the book, even if Stewart in her more traditionally formalist moments isn’t my cuppa.

[74/100]

back on the air

The city has been considerably less muggy & unbearable than last summer – less, that is, like Florida. That hasn’t kept me from being in a state of almost savage torpor, sitting in the sun & reading book after book. I have now joined the 200 or so members of the Have Read All the Way Thru Fors Clavigera Club. The last half-volume or so rather sombre stuff; Ruskin returns from his penultimate bout of lunacy annoucing that from now on Fors will renounce its rage and contumely, that he’s going to clean up his act & stop digressing all over the planet, & that he’s generally going to be nice. Of course, he can’t keep any of those resolutions, but he tries to hold to them staunchly enough to quell much of the flame of the book. His mind is elsewhere, on the genial autobiography Praeterita which he’s already writing.

Far more fun are the 10 or 12 volumes of Guy Davenport’s I’ve brought along with me. He’s always a pleasure to revisit, if only on the basis of style (heaven knows he can be enormously off base when it comes to the fiddly business of facts). Even Objects on a Table, the book on still life, has paid off more this time around than the first time I read it.

Little Women, which I was reading (ashes of shame upon my head) for the first time, ended satisfactorily. If Alcott felt compelled to bow to readerly pressure & marry off Jo, rather than preserving her as an independent writing woman, then I approve of marrying her to a portly, bearded professor-type. Mark well: only portly, bearded professor-types can truly satisfy a thinking woman!
***
And the occasional bouts of “culture.” I went to see Godot on Broadway, in a production with brilliant Bill Irwin as Didi, Nathan Lane hamming it up as Gogo (one wonders what he’ll do when there aren’t any more Zero Mostel parts to reprise – if he doesn’t go on the South Florida borscht belt circuit with Fiddler on the Roof), & the hulking John Goodman as Pozzo. Surprisingly good, actually, tho I kept feeling like I was attending Old Home Day of my kids’ favorite actors (Irwin in “Mr. Noodle” on Elmo’s World, Goodman Sully in Monsters Inc., Lane the warthog in Lion King): audience members without small children no doubt had entirely different associations for each of those worthies.

The real prize was Krystian Lupa and the Narodowy Stary Teatr’s hour stage adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works, under its German title Kalkwerk & performed in Polish. Devastating. As I described it to J, it was a cross between Wozzeck and Endgame, only spread out over three & a half hours, and punctuated with ear-splitting dissonant music. Certainly a limit-text for traditional theater.

Oh yes, and Janet McTeer in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, a full-blown Romantic reinterpretation of the all the old Shakespearean dramatic moves – but nonetheless quite compelling.
***
Weeekends have been spent on Fire Island, where one kills mosquitoes at night and horseflies during the day (sorry, Buddhists), and the worst traffic noise comes from bicycle bells.

***

100 poem-books shortly (I hope) to recommence.

ad interim

Hi folks – he said shamefacedly. Well, I was pretty sanguine about keeping the blog updated over the summer this year, but obviously that hasn't happened. And I don't think this note is going to add up to anything more than a placeholder either. But we're still here in New York: we've been to scads of culture: Godot, Mary Stuart, Alan Ayckbourn on Broadway; the fantastic Polish adaptation on Thomas Bernhard's Lime Works at Lincoln Center. Seen some people, read some – well, read a lot of – books. I'm considering a resolution to restart regular blogging next week – when we get back from Fire Island, that is. Till then ––

interim

Here on the upper West Side; the weather is holding beautifully – little rain, low humidity, a veritable paradise after Florida. Alas, I packed precisely two books for the trip (still awaiting the various cartons we shipped) – Guy Davenport's Tatlin! and the last 2 vols of Fors Clavigera. And now I've finished Tatlin!, & fear that Fors will last until the rest of the books arrive. Or I may have to go out & buy more.... (Always a distinct possibility in NY)

(And yes, despite myself, I'm blogging from Starbucks – which beats blogging from my phone...)

lights out, for a bit

We're leaving this afternoon to spend much of the rest of the summer in New York; dunno how much sustained internet access I'll have, & don't fancy blogging from Starbucks. So the updates here will probably be even sparer than they've been lately. But for those who're interested, I'll no doubt be twittering, & I'll certainly be posting occasional Facebook updates.

Time to read some books, I guess, & get some actual writing done.

Would be nice to hook up with anyone who wants in the city; drop me a line.

Hunt on Ruskin

Just finished John Dixon Hunt's The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (Viking, 1982). A very good read, all told. It's maybe the 4th Ruskin biography I've read, in some ways the most likeable. Tim Hilton's 2-volume monster remains the book of record for me, but I can't imagine anyone who's not already addicted to JR launching out on the uncharted seas of Hilton's big 2nd volume. Wolfgang Kemp's The Desire of My Eyes – well, I read it while I was doing heavy research at the HRC in Austin, & don't remember a thing about it; might've been good. John Batchelor's John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life is still the one I recommend to beginners – very gracefully & sympathetically written, very strong on Ruskin's late political & economic obsessions.

But Hunt is very good indeed, in the 400-page compass of his life. A trifle more suggestive than explicit when it comes to critical & interpretive moments; me, I like my literary biography to be thoroughly "critical." Hunt does however throw out a couple of ideas that seize my imagination: The likeness of Ruskin's mind & work to a Kunst-und-Wunderkammer, a chamber of curios of the sort so beloved by the Victorians & Romantics, but blown up to an enormous scale; and the extent to which all the natural & cultural phenomena with which Ruskin was so fascinated were interconnected in his mind, & how the fragmentary & digressive forms of his late work are an attempt to forge literary form to embody those interconnections.

Hunt himself is a scholar for whom I have an enormous deal of respect, even awe. How did his generation – & here I'm thinking as well of Frank Kermode, Annabel Patterson, et al. – manage to be so prolific? I can't find a birth date, but Hunt's first book – on the Pre-Raphaelites – came out in 1968, so he was probably born sometime in the 1940s. In the purely literary field, he's published lives of Andrew Marvell & Ruskin, edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, & written a commentary on The Tempest. On the other side of the fence – garden history & theory – he absolutely dominates the field, having edited at least 4 books & written 8 of his own, including most recently a full-length study of Ian Hamilton Finlay. His bibliography makes me weary just looking at it.

***

I'm beginning to get a trifle nervous – we're leaving for New York this Friday, for the better part of the rest of the summer. So before then I need to get my book orders for the fall in, figure out what books to pack & ship, sort out my list of priorities, etc. All in the baking heat (broken for a bit yesterday by a line of torrential thunderstorms; welcome to hurricane season).

fish are jumpin'

Okay, so summer's here. I think it hit 95 or so today, with humidity at about 300% & the heat index up around 112 or so. Just amazing to step outdoors & feel the heat settle on you like a big fat hand o' God. There's a reason south Florida as a region didn't really get shaking until the invention of air conditioning.

Post-"season" – which ends at Easter or Passover, whichever comes later – is the ideal time to be down here: suddenly the roads clear up a bit (all of those Long Island drivers have gone back to Long Island), you can actually get into restaurants without waiting half an hour, lines in the supermarkets are bearable. It would be just grand – except for the bloody weather.

***

Here's a soflo phenom that puzzles & irks me not a little bit: South Florida is the world's capital – yes, I so assert, the world's capital – of valet parking. You can get valet parking not merely at restaurants, but at shopping malls, at concerts, hell, for all I know at church. Our Fair University is thinking of setting up a valet parking system.

But in most of the places I've lived (you know, the civilized world), valet parking works like this: You come up to your destination, you see that all the handy spots are taken, & you hand your car over to some spotty 17-year-old who drives it off somewhere in the next county & then sprints back. Sure, you have no idea where the car's gone – it's probably out back of the K-Mart down the street – but hell, you only shell out the money for a valet when all the obvious & handy spots are already taken.

In Florida, however, it works a bissle differently: Here, after the obligatory (& wholly rational) handicapped parking spaces, all of the prime parking – that is, everything within eyeshot of the restaurant – is reserved for valet parking: roped off, coned, razor-wired. So the valet drops the car into a spot about 12 feet from the entrance & is back at his desk before you've had a chance to give your name to the maitre d'. If you want to be so primitive as to park your own car, you wind up scrounging for space around the dumpsters two buildings down.

Is it like this everywhere these days? How out of it am I?

***

Okay, maybe it's not a good idea to be reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, & Modern Painters I at the same time. My head is in a kind of genial Protestant preacher-"did you ever notice the angles at which snow clings to the Jungfrau"-steampunk-slasher place right now.

father's day

A fine holiday, all told: breakfast in bed, lunch out, an afternoon movie, friends over for supper, a stack of lovely & unexpected presents (media of all sorts, a sheaf of the sort of coloring books Jessica S. loves, a striking illustrated version of Kingsley's Water-Babies). It all made me think of my own father, who died a little over 11 years ago, & whom I find myself missing more every year.

He came from a dirt-poor country family (Tennessee? Kentucky? I only know he was born in Arkansas), & was probably the first to go to college – who knows if there were any high school graduates in his family? They drafted him out of his senior year at the tail end of World War II – not the Pacific Theater, but the occupation forces in Austria – and the GI bill sent him to the university to study art. Which he abandoned, as he would abandon a number of pursuits over the years, taking degrees & graduate degrees (a master's in education, another in history, & yet another in English), reënlisting in the service when things didn't pan out & then going back to school.

Eventually, he settled down for the long haul, enduring assignment after assignment to a dreary listening post on the East German border (he was a Russian linguist – some of my earliest memories are of military housing at the army language institute in Monterey) before he retired. The military paid the bills, gave the family direction, kept us in healthcare (filled my mouth with second-rate fillings, which I'm now replacing one by one). But he hated the discipline, he hated the interminable paperwork & bureaucracy, & he hated the the pointless wastage of our Vietnam adventure.

I wouldn't quite call him an autodidact, but he filled cases & cases with books, the books he wanted to read & the books he thought he ought to read. And read them, probably more assiduously than I have (underlinings & marginal notes, notecards filled with references to look up, notebooks filled with reading notes). He came from the generation that believed in literary "greatness" – no library should be without sets of Kafka, of Proust, of Mann, of Joyce. He read them, & nodded to their majesty, & returned to what he really loved – Dickens & Tolstoy. During his last summer, in between bouts of his illness, he was working his way through War & Peace in Russian (again); when it became clear that his fall relapse would be his last, he turned to an English translation. I bought him a clutch of Ian Flemings at a library sale during that last stretch of illness. He turned them over, read some pages, & decided that he'd rather have another go at Great Expectations, for which I can't blame him.

the rankings game

Yes, it's true – every year J & I pick up a copy of the new US News & World Report "America's Best Colleges" issue. Yes, we know the rankings are largely subjective, perhaps even bogus – but it's always entertaining to see whether Our Fair University (of which we are both wage slaves) will pull itself out of the fourth (lowest) tier, & the issue does after all provide a wealth of interesting statistics about colleges around the country.

But how do they arrive at those rankings, a ladder so controversial that one non-profit organization has started a grass-roots movement for colleges to entirely opt out? Well, they ask college presidents to evaluate a list of peer institutions on a scale from "marginal" to "distinguished." These are meant of course to be confidential documents, but thanks to Florida's "sunshine" law, the Gainesville newspaper has obtained a copy of the survey submitted by Bernie Machen, president of the University of Florida. Eye-opening indeed, as the snippet below shows.

Hmmm. Well, I'm not surprised that Machen consigns Our Fair University – along with five other institutions – to the "marginal" category; nor am I surprised to see the U of Miami & Florida State in the "good"category. But what in the world was he thinking in rating the University of Florida – his own institution – "distinguished"?

To put this in perspective: Of course, Machen's out to pump up his own school's rating, no doubt about it. But who else made his "distinguished" list?: Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, & Yale. (He had to think twice about Stanford & Berkeley, which he originally marked "strong." You can see his entire list in PDF here.)

Which means that, in the mind of the president of the U of Florida, UF is better than: Cornell, Duke, Dartmouth, Georgetown, the U of Texas, Johns Hopkins, & the University of Chicago. In what bizarro universe could this possibly be the case?

Methinks there is a serious disconnection from reality happening in a presidential mansion in Gainesville these days.

[Our local paper, of course, is distressed that the prez of UF has been dissing our hometown school – even as the prez of OFU hastens to dismantle whatever shreds of credibility we have.]

***

UPDATE: Actually, Bernie Machen doesn't look quite so bad when compared to Clemson's president James Barker, who appears to have given his own institution the only "strong" score on the form, consigning the majority of the other universities in the country to the "marginal" category. Margaret Soltan's been following this one.

reading (around) Ruskin

Spent much of the day pitchforking thru great stacks of old mail around the house. My papercuts have papercuts. Must have opened 150 envelopes or more.

***

Taking a break from Modern Painters & reading some secondary texts on Ruskin. Giovanni Cianci & Peter Nicholls's Ruskin & Modernism (Palgrave 2001) seems to hit almost all of the obvious interesting points of JR's influence, direct & indirect, on the high modernists – except for (a) Pound, which has been covered in a number of articles over the years & (b) Joyce, which I'm not sure has received its due. Essays all a bit too short – they feel like conference papers, which I guess they are; but most of them quite solid.

Then turned to an oldie, George Landow's The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton UP 1971). They don't publish them like this anymore: solid 450+ pages, footnotes at the foot of the page where you can use them. The style is clear without being simplistic, the pace measured without being otiose (too often). Me, I need someone to say things like this, this clearly (part of a discussion of JR's version of ut pictura poesis, in the context of Romanticism):

As long as critics considered poetry a mimetic art, its natural analogue was painting; but once it became an art whose central operation and purpose were expressive, poetry's natural analogue became music.

That makes a lot of sense. How one gets from Sir Joshua Reynolds & Pope to Pater. (Note how Landow's sentence, clearly no grand shakes stylistically, derives a certain authoritativeness from the chiastic juggling of "poetry" and the pronominal substitution "it.")

***

Bloomsday – or pre-Bloomsday – last weekend went just fine: good time had by all. I venture to think my talk was actually "entertaining," as they kept billing it; entertaining enough for the pub to keep me fed and drinking for the rest of the evening, which was fine by me. We ran thru our scratch set of 3 songs, then played another three, then found ourselves in an actual session, with other (real!) musicians sitting in.

archive fever

Undine is doing archival research, & man am I jealous. Some observations she makes:

•I'm in Research City, spending long, concentrated days in the archives, enjoying hours spent seemingly inside the head of the authors whose letters I'm reading, and wondering if, with all this typing and transcribing, absorbing words and sentence structure, I'll start to sound like these authors once I'm done.

•It may be easier, on the whole, to be a tortured creative genius and fill notebooks with tiny handwriting in black ink than to decipher that handwriting years later.

•No matter how much energy I think I have, it is never as much as that of an author who likes to write letters.

Some of the most intellectually energetic weeks of my life were the three months I spent doing groundwork for the LZ biography at the HRC in Austin. One can intellectually accept, even endorse, all of the post-structuralist arguments about the death of the author, all the substitutions of an "author-effect" for the old-fashioned author, & still get swept away with a kind of immediacy when you're actually holding in your hands the letters, the drafts & notes, that a given poet wrote. (I've written about this before.)

As Undine's specific comments above: 1) Yes you will, at least in bits & pieces; part of what Leon Edel calls "transference" (tho I think he presents a severely emaciated version of the process); probably in the end not a good thing, so be aware. 2) Of course it's easier to write the notebooks than to read them; hell, I'm not even a "creative genius" & I can't decipher my own handwriting from six months ago. 3) I wonder if the species as a whole hasn't declined since the 19th century, energy-wise. God knows Ruskin seems to have churned out a couple dozen pages of manuscript & correspondence every day, & he didn't have to resort to heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, & amphetamines (like Sartre). Then again, I suspect the absence of radio, television, electronic media, & telephones – plus the fact that all cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. was done by others – added to his writing time.

***

Random LZ archival notes:

•A prominent LZ scholar once opined to me that Zukofsky's increasingly "crabbed" (LZ's own word) handwriting, beginning mostly in the 1950s, was due to the psychological constraints of his marriage. Interesting theory, but Occam's razor suggests something more prosaic: the invention of the ballpoint pen. LZ, you see, was a lefty, & in the days of fountain pens would perforce have to write rather slowly & carefully in order to avoid smearing the still-wet ink. Once a "dry" writing instrument was invented, he could follow his natural bent & write as microscopically as he pleased. (This is clearly evidenced in a long early letter to Carl Rakosi, written on a train from Chicago to Madison, where his pen runs out halfway thru & he finishes in pencil – in much smaller script.)

•One thing that hit me more & more as I read thru the correspondence – & not merely the HRC's collections, but various other collections around the continent, along with bales of photocopies sent from various hands – was the extent to which every letter is in some sense addressed: that is, every bit of "evidence" you glean from a writer's correspondence has to be weighed & calibrated on the basis of the writer's relationship with the addressee. Probably necessary to extent this to most notebooks & journals as well (as Claire Tomalin does in her brilliant Pepys biography): even if the journal is entirely private, somewhere in the writer's mind there's an intended or ideal audience, & the writing is to some degree addressed to that audience.

more B-day mishugas

I can't say I've gotten much substantive work done this week, what with a thousand piddly errands to run, the girls on a truly crazy summer camp schedule, & much of my mind dominated by the madness going on in the corridors of Our Fair University. So I haven't really thought much about the "entertaining" half-hour talk on Joyce I'm supposed to deliver tomorrow (in "Edwardian dress, if possible").

A quick Google search reveals almost no decent Joyce jokes on the internet. The closest to funny is an anticlimactic thing:

Charles Dickens walks into a bar.

CD: Give me a martini.

Bartender: Olive or Twist?

James Joyce walks in an hour later.

JJ: Give me a Guinness.*

Bartender: Hey, Charles Dickens was in an hour ago.

JJ: mmm.

B: He asked for a martini, so I said "Olive or twist?"

JJ: mmm

B: Because, you know, he wrote this book Oliver Twist...

JJ: What a shitty joke.

Okay, so no jokes. What I'm really worried about is nailing the fiddle break on Paul Brady's version of "Mary and the Soldier."

*Convicted Joyceans know, of course, that Joyce's spirit of choice was Swiss white wine, which he described as "drinking electricity" – as opposed to red wine, which was "drinking beef."

Kafka-land, Florida (academics only), part 2

Well, the comments stream for the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on Our Fair University's peremptory firing of five tenured faculty members has metastasized, & some really ugly name-calling has started – no doubt simply reflecting the overall morale of faculty here. At a Board of Trustees meeting today, Our Maximum Leader (ie the President of OFU) gave us the short version: OFU

respects tenure as much as any other state university..... As president of this university I want that quote to be entered into the record in a way that cannot be misunderstood and shouldn't be accepted as anything but what I mean it to be. This university supports tenure. That's a fact.

Well, that's always nice to hear, but is it borne out by what's been going down? Five tenured faculty, all of them with more than 15 years' service here, given pink slips & told to clean out their offices by August – not even the one academic year's notice mandated by the collective bargaining agreement.

What really boggles me about all this is how it was done. The College of Engineering went thru a massive restructuring this spring (with one suspects absolutely minimal faculty input). Several departments were merged, among them Computer Science & Electrical Engineering. But on top of that fairly common merging activity, the following arcane horizontal structure was cross-cut over the three remaining departments ("Ocean/Mechanical," "Computer/Electrical/Computer Science," & "Civil/Environmental/Geomatica" –dig those snazzy names)*:

Yes, that's right: every faculty member, of every rank from instructor thru full professor, belongs not merely to a department but to a "Functional Unit" as well, based one assumes on her or his "function" within the college. (Those units, in case you can't read 'em, are "Pre-professional Program," "Innovation Leadership Honors Program" [huh?], "Undergraduate Programs," and "Graduate Programs/Research.")

If the administration wanted to lay off a handful of faculty from a given department, by the terms of the collective bargaining agreement they'd be obliged to lay them off in order of seniority, instructors & assistant professors first. But lo & behold, by some unaccountable fluke, it turns out that the "Functional Unit" devoted to "Undergraduate Programs" consists of nothing but tenured faculty. So they're slicing the pie, not in a traditional department-based direction, but on the basis of a set of "Functional Units" whose precedent I've never seen in the academy. (Feel free to enlighten me, by the way.)

If one were paranoid & distrustful of authority, one might suspect that the "Functional Units" were expressly established to rid the college of a handful of highly-paid tenured faculty.

But Maximum Leader has told us that "This university supports tenure." And I believe, just as I believe we have always been at war with Eurasia.

*If you're a glutton for punishment, the entire presentation from which this snippet is drawn can be yawned thru here.

***

UPDATE, via the Palm Beach Post education news blog:

The President's full statement (dig the 3rd person):

This president respects tenure as much as he did when he arrived. I need to go on the record saying that because I think if it will be a negative impact on this university it will be brought about by the rhetoric of those making the statement that this is an attack on tenure. The fact is it’s not, period. So the suspicions are misguided. FAU respects tenure as much as any other state university. As president of this university I want that quote entered into the record in a way that cannot be misunderstood and shouldn’t be accepted as anything but what I mean it to be. This university supports tenure. That’s a fact.

(Thas a fact, Jack.) Now I don't wanna get all Orwellian, but it's kinda fun (once you've sorted out the grammar) to parse the logic of that there 2nd sentence.

Kafka-land, Florida (academics only)

This brief piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on Our Fair University's bold new approaches to "efficiency," is worth a look. Especially interesting are the comments from those on the ground, especially #2 ("jonathon") & #6 ("FAU Prof"). If the administration spent half the time they used concocting such arcane reorganizational schemes on actually improving things around here, who knows where we'd be?

bloomsday countdown

Mission accomplished; Ulysses read in a week flat, & without eating my mind. I suspect it's a book I could read 4 or 5 times a year. This time, without the pressures of seriously teaching the thing, without worrying about reading all of my marginal notes & making those various connections – well, actually making the connections is one of the great pleasures of the book, but this time thru I didn't feel compelled to follow thru with everything – the reading process was pretty much an unmitigated pleasure. Tho frankly, the older I get, the less patience I have with that tiresome, pretentious prat Stephen D.

A limbering-up session on the stringed instruments last night. We sounded pretty good, I thought, tho perhaps that was only thru the alcohol-earphones. Now I just need some Joyce jokes, of which there seem to be surprisingly few good ones out there.

***

Louisiana State University Press is having a humongous summer sale. I went there on a colleague's recommendation – Evelyn Scott's The Wave, a mostly forgotten cinematic-modernist epic novel on the Civil War (with the bonus that Scott & I share a Tennessee hometown) – & discovered that Jay Wright's big collected poems, Transfigurations, is on sale for a song. A book every serious poetry bookshelf should include: let's see if we can't buy it out of stock, okay?

***

Midway thru the first volume of Modern Painters again, & disinclined to go over (blogging, that is) ground I've already covered. But also working my way thru an extraordinarily rich collection of essays, Ruskin and Modernism (ed. Giovanni Cianci & Peter Nicholls), that rather deftly makes a lot of the basic connections I've been thinking about.

***

Did I mention LeFanu's Uncle Silas? That one's a grand read indeed.

Ulysses, at speed

I haven't read Ulysses in a couple of years, after several years of reading the novel at least once, sometimes twice annually. Then I got a call a couple weeks back from someone doing publicity for a brand new Irish pub up the road – "Tim Finnegans," of all things, & proudly without an apostrophe – wanting me to come in this coming weekend & give a half-hour "entertaining" talk about things Joycean as part of their grand opening Bloomsday celebration.

Now I view Bloomsday parties about as seriously as J, who's an early modern drama scholar, does the Renaissance Fair. But I've started jotting down my best Joyce jokes, & various "deep" thoughts about this ungainly novel that no doubt 9/10s of the people present haven't made their way thru. (After all, why should they?) Anyone who wants to contribute "entertaining" things I should say is welcome to.*

Unfortunately, my OCD side led me to pick up the novel itself again last week. Tuesday, to be precise: in part to test out a little theory I'd nursed for some time. That is, the last few times I've read Ulysses have been in conjunction with teaching Ulysses, so I've spaced the 18 chapters out over 9 or 10 weeks. But for goodness' sake, I read Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Uncle Silas in 3 days the other week out of sheer page-turnability: wouldn't it be possible to read Ulysses in the course of a week, without feeling that the novel had entirely taken over one's brain?

At any rate, it's Saturday night & I'm at the very end of "Oxen of the Sun." The early chapters tripped by at the rate of 3 or 4 a sitting; a flying visit to Tennessee over the past couple of days gave me airplane time to read thru a chapter on each leg of the flight (even counting inevitable dozing off). What's ahead is all downhill: "Circe," despite its imposing length, has always been one of my favorites, a very fast & funny gallop, & the 3 chapters of the Nostos section ("Eumaeus," "Ithaca," & "Penelope") are probably my favorite bits of the book. So I expect to have finished Ulysses in just about a week, & comfortably.

Rereading the book reminds me of just how radical it gets in its second half – or rather, beginning with its 11th chapter, "Sirens." Everything that comes before (save perhaps the newspaper headlines of "Aeolus" – which as Michael Groden shows Joyce actually went back & added late in the compositional process) is strictly realistic, a painstaking attempt to chart the internal monologues of his characters. It's only with the "fugal" form of "Sirens," followed by the various stylistic shenanigans of the later chapters, that the novel plunges off the diving board of realism into a kind of heaven of textuality.

*What's really daunting is that my old friend & musical partner OB volunteered us to play a mini-set of Irish tunes after the talk, & my bouzouki fingers are far rustier than my toastmaster skills.