The Latest Alice

Lewis Carroll's Alice books ought to be irresistible to contemporary filmmakers: finally, with all of the high-tech animation & imaging techniques at their disposal, they can capture something of the metamorphic dream-logic of the two novels the shy, child-loving Oxford maths don Charles Dodgson published in 1865 & 1871, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I came into Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland with a pretty open mind, in my ears one of my student's kvetches from a few weeks ago: "Tim Burton can't do anything but dark remakes of classic stories!" "But have you actually read Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?" said I, "or Frank Miller's Batman?"

The Alices that hit the screen are almost inevitably conflations of the two novels, with favorite bits of Looking-Glass (Tweedledee & Tweedledum, Humpty-Dumpty, the Walrus & the Carpenter, etc.) stuck into the elastic, picaresque frame of the first novel. (Frankly, I don't think I'd seen any of the film adaptations, animated or otherwise, until the last few years & the advent of my own kids. I remembered the books from repeated, obsessive re-readings from early childhood thru college – Wonderland as a perplexing, hallucinatory but generally jovial dream, Looking-Glass as a dark, scary, even tragic nightmare.) That's always struck me as in one way or another inadequate.

Burton's solution is ingenious, if ultimately also inadequate. He sets his film as a return to Wonderland (or "Underland," as the denizens call it) by a 19-year-old Alice. (Shades of Walter Murch's 1985 Return to Oz.) All of the favorite characters are there – the Cheshire Cat, the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, Tweedledee & Tweedledum, the White Rabbit – and Burton incorporates the "game" frames of the novels (Adventures revolves around decks of cards, while Looking-Glass is modeled on a game of chess) by structuring the film as a quest-adventure-conflict in which the Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham-Carter, for once not at all attractive with a three-times digitally inflated head), leading her army of amazingly conceived card-soldiers, is on the warpath against her sister the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, radiant in white clothes, white hair, and black lipstick), whose troops wear helmets modeled on chess pieces. And oh yeah, Alice herself has to take up the Vorpal Sword and slay the Jabberwock. Stephen Fry voices a Cheshire Cat who looks remarkly like Sir John Tenniel's illustration, and Johnny Depp alternately out-crazies Jack Sparrow and out-emotes Stanislavski as the Mad Hatter.

Yes, the visuals are amazing, no other word for them. But one can't help leaving the film with the sense that Burton's entirely betrayed the novels. It's worse than Charlie, where Burton seemed compelled to invent a quite silly back story in order to "explain" Willy Wonka's wonderful, inexplicable eccentricities: his fidelity to the bulk of Dahl's novel redeemed that film, even made it superior to the "classic" Willy Wonka (J. disagrees). Here he's turned a pair of marvelously pointless, endlessly thought-provoking, picaresque dream-journeys into just another coming-of-age adventure flick.

At the end, Alice is told that she's welcome to stay in Underland (and boy is there a "spark" of something between her & the Hatter), but of course she opts to return to Victorian England. In the film's final scene she (wholly unbelievably, monstrously, patently anachronistically) becomes a partner in her father's old firm and sails East to open up the China trade (any guesses on what was in the caterpillar's hookah?). That, I'm afraid, is as much a dream as Alice's shaking the Red (chess) Queen until she turns into a kitten. But given the hokey journey to self-knowledge and self-reliance Burton has built his movie around, he couldn't very well have put her back into the realistic choices available to a Victorian woman.

Douglas Rothschild: Theogony

Okay, as of last night, we're back. All of us. The girls & I, miraculously intact after a 4-hour drive, met J. in Sarasota, where she was doing the Medieval/Renaissance conference at New College. She conferenced Friday; the heavens opened in a miserable deluge; the girls & I went book shopping. (Nice finds at a little 2nd-hand place: Thomas Meyer's The Bang Book, a lovely Clarendon Vergili Opera. The latter, perhaps playing on some submerged, deep-seated longing for dead tongues, has sent me back to the stacks of Latin primers around the house: A semi-resolution: 1/2 hour of Latin every day.)

I finished Delbanco's Melville in Sarasota, & will have something to say about this gem of a book. And simultaneously discovered that the big critical work I'd hauled along, David Loewenstein's Representing Revolution in Milton & His Contemporaries, is spotted with blank pages thru the second half. Let's see whether Cambridge UP can make this right.
***
Theogony, Douglas Rothschild (subpress, 2009)

Imagine Frank O'Hara as a dyed-in-the-wool, place-saturated, native New Yorker, who takes all five boroughs as his home ground, all their parks, neighborhoods, bodegas, apartment developments, social distinctions as his purview, rather than a Boston-bred artsy Manhattanite. Then imagine his "I do this I do that" poetics, with all their camp humor & delight in popular culture intact, stripped of their art world in-crowd talk & surrealist flights & focused on the immediate state of mind of the real New Yorker (continually worried about the rent, about what new enormities the mayor's about to perpetrate). Then put, him, equipped with an angry socio-political bullshit detector, into the most savagely repressive & bewildering moment in recent American history – the post September 11th morass. Then set him to work jotting down poems that angrily & painfully pin down the cost to the American psyche of our Republican masters' reactions to the World Trade Center destruction.

That's the long sequence "The Minor Arcana," something of a masterpiece of making the political personal in an age of electronic media. But all of the sections of Theogony are quirky, moving, and deeply impressive, as strongly rooted in polis as Olson's rambles around Dogtown – and a hell of a lot funnier.

[99/100]

Spring Break Biographies

I suppose Spring Break is now officially more than half over. Tomorrow afternoon I bundle the girls into the car & we cross the penisula to Sarasota, where we'll hook up with J., who's flying down from New York to New College for a medieval/renaissance conference. It'll be nice – a new place to explore, & a chance to hook up with the excellent Robert Zamsky & his family. But I'm not looking forward to the 4-hour drive: it'll be the longest road trip the girls have been on, & their first with only one parent – and the grumpy, taciturn one at that. "Shut the frack up! I'm listening to All Things Considered! Didn't I tell you the rest area was in another 20 miles? You can hold it!"

I've actually gotten some significant work done in the first part of the week, & might get some more out of the way. Of course, my besetting sin, when I've sent a project off to its editor, is to take a half-day's holiday & go book shopping. Yesterday included a run to South Florida's (probably all of Florida's) best second-hand bookshop, Bookwise, where I picked up a stack of literary biographies: Paul Mariani's The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (Norton, 1999), Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005), & GE Bentley, Jr.'s massive The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale, 2001).

(The very massiveness of Bentley's book set me to thinking about paper stock in biographical publishing: is it a good thing or a bad thing for a biography to be a thick book? Do potential readers go for the fat book over the thin one? Clive Fisher's Hart Crane: A Life (Yale, 2002) is a good 70 pages longer than The Poem of a Life, but it's considerably slimmer, due I'm sure to a thinner stock. I like it that I wrote a big biography, but my groaning bookshelves prefer the thinner books these days.)

The Bentley's a book I intensely coveted when it first came out. A ravishing beautiful job of production (the endpapers reproduce in color Blake's engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, for instance), for one thing. And a quick read of the preface & some dipping thru the text convince me that this will be a mostly "just the facts" kind of biography, but as many of the facts as Bentley can shovel in, particularly as they relate to the economics of Blake's career as a fine & applied artist. I think I've read 2 or 3 other Blake biographies – Jacob Bronowski's & Mona Wilson's perhaps, & certainly Peter Ackroyd's, soon after it came out. But it's really hard to get enough of WB.

I'm not sure why I bought Mariani's Crane. I already own Fisher's, the two books seem to tell pretty much the same story (candy magnate dad, tortured relationships, final cruise-ship dive, etc.), and I'm not even that big a fan of Crane's work. I read Mariani's life of WC Williams back in the day, & found it consistently useful if dreadfully, Victorianly overlong; maybe he's restrained himself this time around. (Then again, Crane killed himself in his early 30s. If he'd lived a full lifespan, Mariani might have written another thousand-pager.) I suspect this will be something of a case study for me in comparing biographical approaches: clearly Fisher and Mariani were working independently at much the same time, dealing with the same materials. As usual, it'll be instructive to see what different edifices they construct out of their shared "factual" bricks. (This kind of case study has been going on in my reading room for some time now: 5 different Ruskin biographies, 5 or 6 Pounds, who knows how many Shakespeares: next up, the vast plains of Virginia Woolf biography.)

The real winner here, or at least the book that's totally derailed me from the Hegel & Lawrence Stone I meant to be reading today, is Delbanco's Melville. Delbanco starts with an advantage: he's writing in the wake of Hershel Parker's über-massive, 2000-page 2-volume life of Melville, a book which aimed to chronicle every known fact about HM. Having that kind of spadework already done is a gift to the interpretive biographer, which is what Delbanco unapologetically is. What's totally enthralled me in the 50 or 60 pages of Melville I've devoured this morning is the extraordinary deftness & grace of Delbanco's writing, the way he's able to weave a impressive density of cultural background & literary interpretation into a breezily readable narrative. The book wears its depth lightly, as opposed to something like David Reynolds's similarly learned Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1996), which all too often pretty much sinks the reader in digression.

I have several shelves groaning with unread biographies right now – Wordsworth, Defoe, Conrad, Pope, Gray, Dickens (2x), Browning, Swift, etc – & I'm at some stage of reading lives of Wordsworth, Thelonious Monk, Andy Warhol, Leonardo, Dickinson, William James, Foucault, & Wittgenstein (those last 2 re-reads). It's all fun, even the bad ones (and lemme tell you, I'd rather read a bad biography than a bad book of literary criticism any day). And the best part is that I can justify it all to my superego by gesturing towards that book on biography I keep talking about writing.

all about appearances

Been pretty much exclusively a Firefox browser lately. One word: Zotero. But there's another, much more superficial, reason to switch: Personas, these snazzy "skins" with which you can customize your browser. The internet equivalent of those colorful cases for your cell phone. This is how the browser window looks at the moment:

Now If I can just find a skin that features Theodor Adorno...

Five Years

It's that time of year when I clap my hand to my head – zut alors! sacre bleu! – Culture Industry has been around another year! (As the guys on NPR say, "You've wasted another perfectly good hour on Car Talk...") I could do the usual, lament the fact that my blogging has been desultory (for going on four years now), that I don't update often enough, that I haven't noticed your book (which I will, eventually) –

But this time around I do sense a sea change in the intertubes, a generalized shifting of momentum from the open-ended blog format to more quick & to the point social networking-style things. Much of my traffic gets driven from Facebook links these days, it seems, or even from tweets. And yeah, I'm less interested in updating the blog just to say that I had a great lunch but a lousy afternoon, since I can do that on Facebook & have half a dozen "friends" (most of whom I've never met) say they "like" it.

I'm still quite taken with the weblog as writing format, however: it gives me the collapsible space to post a funny footnote or natter on at length on things I know little about; it's simultaneously casual & semi-formal, like those tuxedo t-shirts that were all the rage back in the '70s. So Culture Industry remains online for the foreseeable future. I can't promise 3 updates a week, but I can promise (sometime soon) a mediation on what it means to call it the English Civil War or the English Revolution, & why it matters. As usual, my heartfelt thanks to those who keep dropping by; and warm welcomes to those who blundered here by googling "furry animal bestiality wifeswap culture."

Spring Break!

Yes, as of 10.00 last night – the end of my graduate seminar – I'm on Spring Break. I guess I won't take a road trip to Florida, being in Florida already; and anyway, it doesn't feel very Floridian these days: this has been the coldest winter in living memory down here, and we're in the midst of another cold snap (which means lows in the 40s at night, & daytime highs that make you consider putting on a sweater – yes, no sympathy from Chicagoans or Northeasterners).

So how do I plan to party down? Well, I suspect I simply won't. J. is off to New York this afternoon, so I'm anticipating the adventure of a full week's single parenting (something neither of us have yet tackled, I believe). At least the girls will be in school, so I'll have the days to devote to Spring Break kinda things – you know, polishing up & sending off those 3 essays that are sitting on my hard drive in 90% finished form, working up my classes for the next few weeks, maybe even working on a few poems. At least, for the first time I can remember, I'm entering the break without a stack of student essays or tests to mark. Thank Astarte for small blessings.

And of course I'll do some reading. Last night I finished John Ashbery's As We Know, which I'd started maybe a half-dozen times over the years but never made headway on, so much so that the binding of my old paperback (never strong) has entirely separated from the pages. For some reason, the Library of America big Collected Poems 1956-1987 has made tackling the book easier. Really, it's that pesky "Litany" – took me a long time to figure out how to negotiate reading those two parallel columns that theoretically should sound simultaneously. (Turns out Pennsound has a recording of Ashbery reading the poem with Ann Lauterbach, which would have helped immeasurably.) I love mid-period Ashbery, but are the poems really supposed to evaporate from my mind as soon as I read them (or as I read them)? (Note to self: worry about early-onset senility...)

I keep dipping into, making progress on Robert Sheppard's big Complete Twentieth Century Blues, marvelling at the formal variety, loving the pornographic aggressiveness of the language & images, & then getting exhausted by the relentless montage. This is a funny book, a mean book, sometimes even a heart-breaking book. Maybe even, if such a thing still exists, an important book. It deserves a big essay on it one of these days. Not, however, to be written over Spring Break.

Ashbery, Ginsberg, & the Velvet Underground

[Tony Scherman & David Dalton, in Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (Harper 2009), describe the opening night of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable (a multimedia spectacle centered on the Velvet Underground) at the Dom in the East Village, 8 April 1966:]

A reporter from New York University's newspaper, the Washington Square Journal, corralled Ginsberg in the opening-night audience. The poet was in tiptop rhetorical form: "We're living in an expanding universe," he said, or shouted, to the young reporter. Ginsberg loved the show, whose "multiple association symbolically represents the LSD experience, but we need some flesh orgies and copulation on the stage." In the coming weeks, Barbara Rubin would arrange for Ginsberg to join the Velvets onstage and chant Hare Krishna while [Gerard] Malanga did his whip dance. (It may have been shortly after this that [Paul] Morrissey finally drove Rubin out: she "left the Factory one day screaming, never to return.")

Few incidents better illustrate the shift from New York's fifties artistic subculture to the new sixties version than the reaction of Ginsberg's fellow poet John Ashbery, recently returned to New York after almost a decade in Paris. Standing in the midst of the strobe lights and guitar feedback and biomorphic slide-projected shapes, Ashbery was traumatized. "I don't understand this at all," he said and burst into tears.

Richard Blevins; Tom Mandel

Captivity Narratives, Richard Blevins (Meeting Eyes Bindery/Spuyten Duyvil, 2009)

To get past the obvious: Blevins is an Olsonian, a real live Olsonian – he took over editing the Olson/Creeley correspondence after George Butterick's death. As poets, Olsonians (my limited experience has shown me) tend to have a certain repertoire of moves that Olson has made familiar : an obsession with history, a tendency to splice documents into the work itself, a self-reflexive awareness of their own position as poem-makers, even as they write. Blevins has all of these (as does, say, Susan Howe). What he doesn't share with the Big Man is his (liberating?) formal sprawl, his taste for the cosmic & the anciently recondite – the Big Gesture, sometimes registered in geological epochs.

Captivity Narratives is a pair of intense investigations into a couple of figures with whom I was not at all familiar before cracking the book: the photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), one of the first advocates for photography as a "fine" art, & the maker of mysterious, often homoerotic pictures; and Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914), a poet whose work I was vaguely aware of, but whose fame has largely waned since the days Carl Sandburg championed her. Blevins reads these two figures relative obscurity as their own versions of "captivity." His poems are as much about the researching – sometimes down to the details of library visits & overnight travel – as they are about FHD and AC themselves, but the effect is to position Blevins's own work something of a (necessarily interminable) detective story. (The biographer in me finds this irresistible.) I'm particularly taken, among the stretches of short-lined verse, rambling narrative prose, and sheer notebook-entry fragments, to find Blevins casting his impressions of Crapsey into her own invented form, the "cinquain."

[97/100]
***
Four Strange Books, Tom Mandel (Gaz, 1990)

Elias Bickerman's classic study of anomalous Hebrew Bible texts, Four Strange Books of the Bible (1985), focuses on Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes" for you Christian-types), and Esther. It's easy to see why he calls them "strange": Jonah is not a book of prophecy, but a kind of Three Stooges parody of the Isaian prophetic call; Daniel is a strange, back-dated collage of various tall tales and prophecies; Koheleth advances a depressing stoic philosophy that seems at odds with much of what the rest of the HB advocates; and Esther is a fairy tale that manages not even to mention the Hebrew deity.

Perhaps on some rereading I'll figure out a bit better precisely how Tom Mandel's wonderful Four Strange Books plays off of Bickerman. Right now I'm just reveling in the pleasure of this late-discovered (for me) classic. Mandel may at the moment be becoming my favorite of the Grand Piano poets (I read his To the Cognoscenti over the holidays in something of transfixed delight). He has an unerring eye for the movement of the everyday, a stern sense of juxtaposition, and a wonderful knack of shifting diction. The opening of the title poem, "Four Strange Books," which plays on various phrases of biblical & archaeological resonance, is one of the most striking, hieratic moments in poetry in the last two decades:

A tract was sealed in the catacomb of cylinders
by three youths called Ejection, Sacrifice,
& Trellis. To a skeptic the treatise speaks
of things still possible.

What it says will never do. If they reach
toward me I will collapse. Touch me then
my shoulder with strengthened lips; that
man was swallowed!

[98/100]

cheeky footnote #146

[from Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Harvard UP, 2001), p. 577:]

15. I should acknowledge that this picture of Milton and his world is one that some critics reject and find repellent. See, for example, Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), who complains that readings like mine "suggest...a Milton who subjugates fictive play to didactic tenor, manipulating intertextual reference so as to underline the powerful and abiding coherence of Puritan ideology" (71). That about gets it right.

canon-making, in progress

[Lest we forget, here's Francis Jeffrey, the Helen Vendler of his day, writing in the Edinburgh Review in October 1829:]

The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber: – and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, – and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, – and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness, except where they have been married to immortal music; and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride.... The two who have the longest withstood this rapid withering of the laurel, and with the least marks of decay on their branches, are [Samuel] Rogers and [Thomas] Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate elegance of their writings, than for that fiery passion, and disdainful vehemence, which seemed for a time to be so much more in favour with the public.

Friday

A strangely torpid Friday; the sun is out, it's cool but comfortable at my back porch desk, all circumstances should be perfect for diving once more into the stack of Tempest papers I have before me – but instead I've been paying bills, dithering online, turning over a few chapters of Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival, reading some of Ruskin's responses to his reviews at the end of Modern Painters I. (JR can be testy, but heaven knows he doesn't threaten someone with a libel suit in response to a bad review, as this hair-raising story recounts.)

Much is being made online of David Alpaugh's extended lament about over-production – or rather, over-publication – of poetry in the US these days. I suppose I might write something about it, if i didn't seem so much like one of those periodic teapot-tempests that get raised every five years or so about the general mediocrity / inbred backscratchingness / overall dumpiness of the poetry scene. Didn't I read something like this, minus the references to the internet, back in 1989 or so? Didn't Ruskin complain about the same phenomenon in visual arts back in the 1850s? Once I get over my general irritation at Alpaugh's overall weird elitism, his piece makes me think three things:

1) Alpaugh doesn't really understand the mechanisms of cultural canon-formation much at all, if he still really believes that it's a matter of sifting the gems out of the pebbles (or the grains out of the horse-droppings, choose your metaphor). He should read Bourdieu and John Guillory – though I suspect he hasn't the patience.

2) Yep, there's more poetry than ever to sort thru & think about. So what? Well, for Alpaugh it comes down to the fact – and you don't have to read very deeply to see this – that his own chances of some kind of "fame" (perhaps even posthumous canonization?) are that much smaller. A lot more tickets for the lottery have been sold. Alpaugh whines that

Every now and then someone asks me, "Who are the best poets writing today?" My answer? "I have no idea." Nor do I believe that anyone else does. I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art. That would be the most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable.

That, not to put it politely, is bullshit. (My own answer to the pro-life folks who ask, "What if Beethoven's mother had aborted him?": We wouldn't have missed him, would we?) Yes, the loss would be incalculable, precisely because it wouldn't be a loss. We only consider Blake & Dickinson essential elements of our culture because we have Blake & Dickinson; if we didn't have them, we'd be living in a different culture. It's an effing time-machine game, Mr. Alpaugh – stop playing Star Trek and start reading, writing, & promoting as best you can the poetry you value. That's the way critical approval, fame, canonization & the rest have always worked.

3) I really need to get my finger out & find a publisher for my book manuscript. Otherwise how can I enjoy any of those lavish perks & "po-biz power" out there?

conferencing

So I'm back in Florida, after a long weekend in Louisville at the "Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900" – formerly known as the "Louisville Conference on Twentieth Century Literature." The weather was surprisingly moderate, even for someone whose blood has "grown thin" (as they say) living in south Florida.

The recession is hitting the conference scene: the 1st thing that gets cut when university budgets are straitening is of course faculty travel funds (what, you were thinking administrative salaries?), & that shows up in decreased attendance rates at conferences like this – most notable at the plenary lectures, cash bars, & (alas) at the usually huge but this time rather nicely intimate end-of-conference party.

What did I see & hear? A number of excellent talks: Joe Donahue & Robert Zamsky gave luminous talks on Gustaf Sobin, promoting the much-anticipated release of Sobin's collected poems, out any day from Talisman House. There was good work on LZ by Julius Lobo & Michael Fournier (corresponded with for years, only now happily met), provocative work on Pound by Kristine Danielson. An arresting panel on performance & poetry by Tyrone Williams, Bill Howe, & chris cheek, who performed his semi-improvised piece inside the projection of his powerpoint, images bouncing off of his utility kilt.

Michael Davidson delivered an excellent plenary address on George Oppen, punctuated with recorded snips of the poet himself: I'd never heard Oppen read, a wonderfully heymish "Old New York Jewish" accent, tho to my ears an unfortunately sing-song delivery. The closing talk was a disappointment. Of course, speaking late Saturday afternoon to an audience that's been conferencing & carousing since Thursday is a tough assignment, and Rita Felski came off very well in terms of lively delivery, clarity of argument, & so forth; that's what an Anglo-Australian education'll do for you. But her talk itself, under the title of "Suspicious Minds" (always a bad sign when an academic goes for the pop song reference, but the pop song's a bit over 40 years old), disappointed. She was addressing the old shibboleth of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (obligatory nod to Paul Ricoeur), why we in the academy insist on readings that demystify the text, that demonstrate how it means otherwise than it seems, works at cross purposes to its seeming intent. Problem is that her talk, which wound around and around the same presuppositions like some elegant labyrinth, never itself stepped out of that hermeneutics, never paused to seriously consider its alternatives. 50 minutes of elegant wheel-spinning?

And as M. Zamsky observed to me afterwards, what's this "we" so invested in demystifying texts? Some of us are still interested in figuring out how the writings that allure us work in the first place. Perhaps, when the history of literary theory from the 1970s to the 1990s is written by those who have enough distance from the period not to have a dog in the race, the "hermeneutics of suspicion" in English departments will come to be seen as a moment of Oedipal rebellion on the part of critics interested in prose fiction and hyper-canonized poetry. (Itself, I know, a demystifying description.) Readers of alt-poetry need not apply.
***
A grand house reading at Alan Golding's on Saturday night. I know I'm leaving someone out, but among the performers were Lisa Shapiro, chris cheek, Bill Howe, Michael Davidson, Joe Donahue, Ewa Chruschiel, Aldon Nielson; coolest moment: Norman Finkelstein reading his mid-length poem on George Oppen at Altamonte; most moving moment: Alan reading some of the late Burt Hatlen's poems. (So who's going to edit and collect the best of those hundreds of uncollected essays Burt published over the years?)
***
I seem to have acquired more than a few books on the trip, a sentence that I could probably paste into any summary of any trip. A nice second-hand copy of Alan Moore's From Hell, which I probably shouldn't have bought because it keeps luring me away from reading for classes and grading papers. And something I'd been coveting for some time: Frederick Ahl's recent translation of Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford, 2007). Okay, so I've been coveting this book in part because it's just such a beautiful physical package: a stunningly minimal cover design (Virgil | Aeneid | A New Translation by Frederick Ahl on Jan Brueghel the Elder's Aeneas and Anchises Fleeing Troy), a hefty but compact Everyman's Library-sized binding in the old-fashioned Oxford deep blue, eye-poppingly readable typeface, yellow ribbon marker, etc. Hey, I judge books by their covers all the time. Just saying.

But the translation itself, for all the eccentricities of Ahl's approach – he's rendered Virgil's Latin into his own version of English hexameters, & he's tried to get across some of the anagrams that he's convinced are an integral part of Virgil's poetic technique – is pretty boss. He gets across the nail-biting violence of the fall of Troy in a way that I've never encountered. Here's Achilles' son Pyrrhus (or Neoptolemus) dealing the death-blow to King Priam:

Pryrrhus replied: "You'll report this, then, to my father Achilles,
Fully, in person. Remember to tell him the tale of my grisly
Actions. Describe Neoptolemus just as he is: a degenerate bastard.
Now: die."
While he was speaking, he pounced on the quivering Priam,
Dragged the king, slipping in pools of his own son's blood, to the altar,
Grabbed his hair, yanked back his head with his left, with his right drew his gleaming
Sword which he then buried up to the hilt in the flank of the old king.

The Aeneid is the red-haired stepchild of the big three classical epics, inevitably the also-ran beside the Odyssey and the Iliad. Virgil gets dismissed as pen-pusher for imperialism, or recuperated as a clever underminer of imperialism (H of S, anyone?). Pound didn't use Virgil to jump-start the Cantos; Simone Weil didn't write a momentous essay on the Aeneid; Joyce didn't shape the book of the 20th century around Virgil. But I've been fascinated by the poem a long time (I know it best in CD Lewis's translation), & this new rendering is just another damn thing to distract me from the things I ought to be reading.
***
Update: Oof! Aldon recorded that reading at Alan Golding's house, & it's available to listen to or download from the PennSound site. Be sure and listen to Norman's "Oppen at Altamonte," or check out where I am in Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles.
***
Another Update: Not merely was he recording audio, but Aldon was snapping pix as well; check out his HeatStrings blog for a great selection of snaps of the conference & reading.

the internets iz yr friend

Peter Nicholls, writing in his own edited collection (with Giovanni Cianci) Ruskin and Modernism:

Ruskin had in a sense laid the ground for both men [Pound & W. Lewis]: 'The art of any country,' he wrote in Modern Painters, 'is the exponent of its social and political virtues. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country is an exact exponent of its ethical life.'

Nice quote, one I can use; the footnote reference is to the JR Library Edition, 2:38-9. Problem is Volume 2 of the Library Edition is "Poems." Modern Painters doesn't begin until volume 3; no such quotation on pp. 38-9, nor on 138-9, 238-9, etc.

Back in the day I'd be pitchforking thru stacks of books & papers, looking for somebody else's citation of this (after all rather famous & important) couple of sentences. In our brave new intertubes world, all I have to do is google up the first sentence, where I learn that it's not from Modern Painters at all, but Ruskin's inaugural Slade Professorship lecture at Oxford – the Library Edition's volume 20, that is, rather than volume 2.

(And the sentences in question are on page 39, not pp. 38-9, not to mention that there's another sentence in between 'em, not indicated by ellipses. Methinks Peter is doing the old "second-hand" quotation thing, scooping up the ripe bits from another book – in this case SueEllen Campbell's The Enemy Opposite: The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis, also cited in his note. Something we've all done once in a while, I bet. Smashing good article, anyway.)

back

Advancing age, in my case, shows up largely in the increased discomfort of cross-country travel. Got back at an ungodly hour last night from Boise, Idaho, after I don't know how many hours of airplanes & airports, & am still recovering. An extremely pleasant visit: I'd been invited to talk on a subject of my choosing, revolving somehow around the LZ biography (which a grad seminar – mirabile dictu! – has actually been reading). So I delivered another stab at the next book-in-progress (in-gestation?) on the genre itself of literary biography: excursuses into Richard Ellmann's dealings with Joyce's childhood, LZ's correspondence with Edward Dahlberg, John Ruskin's (non-) burning of JMW Turner's erotica. (Alas, I couldn't get any decent scans of the latter, so I decided that without naughty drawings by Turner, it just wasn't worth the trouble to work up a PowerPoint presentation.)

Yes, Undine – it never gets easier, at least for me. That goes for lectures as well as classes: nervous hiccups in my voice, twitchy, tic-like movements behind the podium, an occasional adrenaline-fuelled three-pace stride back & forth. And always that reedy, twit-ish voice echoing in my ears. Only consolation is that it's probably more painful for the auditors than for me. But visiting the seminar afterwards was pretty much straight pleasure. Janet Holmes presides over a bright, talky bunch – a group refreshingly attuned to the tactile qualities of the poems under discussion: more than cool to hear (& pitch in with) full vocal readings of "A"-9 and "4 Other Countries."

I fear that regular blogging won't resume for at least a couple more weeks. Right now (among everything else, including – hey, I almost forgot! – my actual classes) I'm putting the finishing touches on the Ruskin-Pound-Hill piece for next week's Louisville carnival. And when I'm back from that, then I can actually catch my breath, remember my kids' names, & read a few books of poetry – oh, to hell with poetry: I've got two China Miéville novels that really want reading, & Robert Richardson's really incredible biography of William James.

Scroggins World Tour: Spring 2010!

[photo copyright Shannon O'Brien]

Scheduled Dates:

•Monday, 8 February: "Queen Victoria's Birthday Present: Some Aporias of Literary Biography." 3.40 pm at LA-208, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho.

•Thursday, 18 February: "The 'half-fabulous field-ditcher': Ruskin, Pound, Geoffrey Hill." The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. 1.30 pm at Bingham 106, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.

Less Tangibles:

•27-30 May: "Zukofsky, Rexroth, and Levertov: Literary Biography and the 'Supporting Cast.'" Panel on "Biographical Cross-currents," ALA, San Francisco, California.

Tickets available at LiveNation/Ticketmaster. Or just drop by. And should I go to AWP, just for kicks?

Tod Thilleman: Root-Cellar to Riverine

Root-Cellar to Riverine, Tod Thilleman (Meeting Eyes Bindery [Spuyten Duyvil], 2009)

Tod Thilleman's been running Spuyten Duyvil as long as I can remember, & he's published some memorable books indeed: the best, for my money, the three volumes of Norman Finkelstein's big Track project & Peter O'Leary's luminous Watchfulness. (SD's also keeping important things of Michael Heller's in print, &, yes, they published – & did a lovely job of – my own Anarchy.) So ashes of shame on my head for never having explored Tod's poetry before the lovely Root-Cellar to Riverine turned up in my mailbox. It's a quirky little book – a single long poem in something like 60 12-line, very small-format pages. Thilleman has a music all his own, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dissonant; pretty consistently surprising. I'll admit "root-cellar" always sets me thinking of WCW's "cat" poem – you know, the one with the jam-closet & so forth. But Root-Cellar is very un-Williamsesque: more an assertion – nay, a demonstration – that ruminative, considerative poetry is still possible. You've got to admire Thilleman's ability to leap from the jars in the cellar to the meaning of life; and it doesn't at all hurt that the poem to my ear 's shot thru with echoes of Briggflatts.

I'm glad to see SD back on deck, after some heavy weather, with a (relatively) new(ish)* poetry imprint, Meeting Eyes Bindery. A couple more things on my shelf I'm looking forward to opening: Richard Blevins's Captivity Narratives, which looks like precisely the sort of history- and text-based thing (Stephen Collis, Susan Howe, Olson) that gets me excited; and a twofer, Breathing Bolaño, which pairs (in different print orientations) Thilleman's Breathing and selections from Blevins's Corrido of Bolaño, along with a chunk of the two poets' correspondence.

Perhaps I'm trying, given the new year & so forth, to be a bit more directed in my poetry reading this time around. We'll see.

*(revision!)

[96/100]

"once more..."

Two of three syllabi have been "finalized" (temporarily, subject to revision, etc.), up-to-the-minute rolls have been printed out, talking notes have been assembled – so I'm off for the first classes of the semester, bracing myself not merely against the wholly unseasonable chill in the South Florida air, but for that inevitable moment of stage fright when I first stand up in front of the assembly & introduce myself: "Hi, I'm MS; I'll be your instructor this semester..." Odd – after doing this for over 2 decades, the 1st day really doesn't get any easier.

new year

So I'm back – back from the holidays, back from a harrowing weekend at Sanibel Island on the Gulf Coast: not that Sanibel isn't a lovely place, but when the weather's dipping into the 30s at night, even the heated pool's too frackin' cold to swim in (don't even mention the Gulf itself!), you've got two young ones who are altogether too young to enjoy the meditative pleasures of wildlife observation, & you're stuck on a skinny little island where there's nothing to do but resort-y things – well, things can get tedious. Yes, I know, my northerly comrades shoveling snow don't have much sympathy.

New year's resolutions? Well, first (as always) to get done the things I didn't finish last year. (Managed actually to get a decent amount of that done on Sanibel, surprisingly.) Yes, to lose some weight (as always): getting rather tired of that "portly" look. There's nothing I can do about the shiny pate & the grey beard, but heaven knows I shouldn't be going around looking like Dom Deluise – this is South Florida, after all. (I remember seeing Hüsker Dü back 'round 1985 or so & thinking, damn, Bob Mould is FAT – I look at the videos now & he looks pretty darned slim, compared to yr humble blogger.) Maybe get around to getting those tattoos; then who knows? maybe some serious body mods – pointy Spock-ears, cleft tongue, etc. Hey, I'm a full professor now – I never have to interview for a job again!

Other more serious friends (Brian & Amy, Eric – big huzzah!) seem to have resolved to ease up a bit on the nano-discourse of Twitter & Facebook & blog a bit more steadily, which is a fine thing. (See Amy's fine meditation on the multitasking-enabled mushification of the American brain.)

I was mulling over the notion of a decade's-retrospective post, & I may still get around to that, but there's this matter of syllabi to cook up before next week's classes, so that'll have to wait.

That last post on voracious poetry-reading stirred up some responses. To respond to some of my commentators:

Norman – I hear you. But I think it's also true to say, as Samuel Johnson says somewhere, that in your youth (or, lest I be guilty of calling you "middle-aged," in the earlier part of your youth), you most definitely "read hard." Both Norman & Ed are right about too much reading scrambling the circuits of one's own creative work; maybe I'm just in a heavy reading mode right now because I'm in a lower gear in my own writing?

Curtis – absolutely right, & I suspect that there's a point at which I'll taper off, or ratchet down. And of course by no means all, or even the majority of, my poetry-reading is from the shelves of newish unknowns – I mean, I seem to reread Spring and All & Tender Buttons & various other personal "classics" at least on a yearly basis, & am regularly plunging into some acknowledged monument I haven't yet read. And a significant chunk of what I read – probably about 1/3, at a quick guess – is re-reading.

I don't think you can find the books that "touch" you without reading a certain number of things that you'll probably forget, maybe instantly. And this is where "marukusuboy"'s Sherlock Holmes quotation, as much as I like it, fails: I'm by no means cramming all those poetry books into an already overcrowded mental "attic": rather, I'm filing the ones that "touch me" in among what's already there (LZ, Olson, Pound, Blake, Dickinson, Stein, Johnson, Palmer, Johnson, Howe) & putting the rest on the shelf (or hauling them to the used bookstore to pile up some credit – the reviewer's trick).

Eric responded in a measured way on his own blog. Not sure I like that word "pathology," but have to plead guilty to at least a bit of OCD on this score. Hey, I like to read; it's not my worst habit.

Perhaps the most thorough & thoughtful response has been from Andrew Wessell, whose blog A Compulsive Reader will go on my blogroll (if I ever get around to updating it). He's got two excellent posts titled "On Reading," the second of which quotes an email from his friend Nik, who in turn links to a Poetry Foundation piece by Paisley Rekdal, in which PR takes up the gauntlet thrown by Timothy Liu at last year's AWP – Liu, it turns out, reads FIVE books of poetry a week.

Have a look at Wessell's posts, if you're at all interested. But two quick thoughts:

1) When Jacques Derrida told the interviewer (it's in the Derrida film) who asked him if he'd read "all those books" (the classic doofus question – cf. Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" essay) oh, no, only three or four of them, but I've read them very thoroughly – HE WASN'T BEING SERIOUS.

2) In re: Nik's final sentence ("it reminded me of a 9th grade bench pressing contest — whatever that mfa’r said, whether it be 50 or 75, scroggins was going to put up at least 25lbs more"): I wanna say something intemperate, but won't. I'm not trying to one-up anyone; it just struck me as a little symptomatic of the thinness of writing education. Put it in perspective: The guy I quoted had just finished an MFA, a "professionalizing" degree in poetry writing which typically takes 2-3 years, & was happy he'd been required (!) to read 50 books of poetry. That's 25 books a year, two books a month. Let's imagine a graduate film production person who watches 2 videos a month, or a student at a conservatory who listens to 2 albums or goes to 2 concerts a month. Hmmm.

And a little more perspective: most contemporary books of poetry clock in under 100 pages; chapbooks at maybe 30 tops. Even a careful, recursive reading isn't going to take more than 2 or 3 hours for the books, maybe an hour for the chapbooks. How does one find the time? I can only answer for myself – but I don't watch TV, I don't have a Wii or an Xbox, I don't stand in line at Starbucks. Yeah, I read a lot of poetry, & a pretty good deal of other stuff: but I play with my kids, I cook the meals in my household, I noodle around on various stringed instruments, & I make a pretty good pretense of doing my job. And I do a little writing on the side.

Quantification is for the birds, ultimately. But Sean Bonney's Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt, 2005) is pretty damned devastating – by a long shot the best thing I've read this year. Go read it – but take your time, if you like (or if you can – it's one of those propulsive reads).

reading (lots of) poetry

I'm of two minds about it, the whole business of bulk-reading.

On the one mind, I'm all for it: I was always astonished by the statement I read somewhere by some recent MFA grad who was gushingly thankful for having been required to read 50 books of poetry during the course of his two or three years in the program. Wow – fifty whole books! (Read that with heavy irony, okay?) Sorry, fella, but it's a really slow year when I don't read at least half again more than that, & lately I've been trying to keep up a pace of at least 100 volumes (counting chapbooks, of course, but also counting big things like The Prelude & "A" & JH Prynne's Poems) every calendar year. And that's not counting magazines, journals, & miscellaneous stuff online.

It's partly vocational: as a guy who teaches modern/contemporary poetry, I feel like I've got an obligation to know, at least to the limits of my ability, the "field." So I try to look into things I don't find very congenial at a first glance, sometimes even to plough thru an entire volume to find out what the reviewers are so excited about. And I try to have a pretty clear picture in my head of what's happening in the sorts of poetry I find more exciting. Given the pace of poetry production and publishing these days, that's probably a quixotic intention, but still–

And as poet & lover of poetry (not necessarily identical subject-positions, we all know) I simply want to know as much of the stuff as possible, to hoover down as much of that sweet word-work as I can. The Doritos effect. So when I was admiring but not particularly enthusiastic about Karla Kelsey the other day, & then even rather disspirited by what struck me as the virtuosic self-absorption of Jorie Graham, I turned to two little chapbooks published last year by Slack Buddha, Catherine Wagner's Hole in the Ground X and Tom Orange's American Dialectics, and got all excited about "doing" poetry again. And I've got a stack of more SB productions on my desk right now, just waiting to stoke the excitement-furnace.

But on the other mind: I told a class this past semester that one doesn't really come to terms with a book until one's read it at least twice. Maybe that's me, perennial slowcoach: I don't really begin to come to terms with a book until the second reading. So in many ways the poetry reading that means most to me is reading something for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, nth time: Going back thru Prynne's Wound Response for the 5th time, Geoffrey Hill's Triumph of Love for the 6th time, Susan Howe's Bibliography of the King's Book for the who knows how manyeth time. You can review a book on a first read (usually, you have to); but you can't really think deeply – or I can't – about it until it's so familiar it's become somehow absorbed into your cerebral grooves.

So I'm more than willing to forgive a certain degree of tunnel-vision in my scholarly friends – the Stevens guy who hasn't read anyone since Stevens, & precious few of Stevens's contemporaries, the Auden scholar who's never heard of LZ or Bunting; that tunnel-vision probably compensated for by a deeper understanding, a deeper engagment with their chosen figure. (At the same time, I distrust their historical sense, & suspect that rather than a love of poetry in all its forms, they love just one sort – like the "gourmet" who always orders the same thing at the restaurant, or the "music lover" who only listens one narrow sub-genre.)

And I think I'm still capable of mustering the intense engagement I brought to LZ's work all those years ago, even if I seem to have less time for it these days, what with all this mass reading (oh, & work responsibilities, parenting, etc.). But how am I ever going to find just that right poet to fixate on if I'm not reading at least a 350-degree swathe? So, back to the chapbooks & the coffee.

interim; Karla Kelsey, Jorie Graham

In that odd in-between time after the major holiday festivities (we have, as usual, absolutely nada planned for New Year's) and before the beginning the spring semester. I'm doing my best to avoid planning my classes, & only slightly less successfully avoiding writing the things that need to be written. I'm happy, however, not to be in Philadelphia at the MLA, which is unfolding its whole baleful carnival as I write. There's lots I love about the MLA: the sprawling book displays (an academic candy-store); the lively off-site poetry readings & events; the chance to spend time with friends & colleagues from far away, & to make new acquaintances; sometimes even the lectures & papers being presented. But as anyone will observe, the problem with the MLA as academic conference is that both the intellectual and the social sides of it are always inflected, inevitably negatively, by the job-market aspect of the gathering. And since, as a recent story in Inside Higher Ed confirms, jobs in English are heading towards an all-time low, that means nothing but nonstop angst (though, as good English professor wannabes, we all pronounce it in the proper German fashion, ahhhngst, rather than the illiterate New York ang-st).

The holiday was nice: many pleasant meals & gatherings with friends. Some nice presents under the tree. What did I like best? Well, that'd have to be this, a fantastically sumptuous coffee-table book on the Velvet Underground in the '60s NY avant-garde art milieu. Great pictures, many of which I'd never seen before, despite my small shelf of Velvets books. And two volumes of these, DVD sets of classic avant-garde films from the '20s thru the '50s. Lots of stuff, I suspect we won't be watching with the kids. And some we may be.

A late but very welcome present from Fors: Just when I'd begun to suspect The Poem of a Life had dropped entirely off the edge of the earth, an old Cornell acquaintance contacts me to let me know that the book was indeed reviewed in Choice (back in January), and has now been listed as one of Choice's "Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year." How cool is that? Anyway, for those of you who don't subscribe to Choice (ie, if you're not a librarian), & to primp up my flagging self-image, here's what R. J. Cirasa said about the book back in January:

Though this volume is important because it is the first biography of a poet whose importance is steadily growing, the merit of Scroggins's book is not just that it fills a vacuum. Avoiding the precious psychological and other extrinsic, theory-driven framings common among scholarly biographies, Scroggins presents the events, circumstances, and interests of Zukofsky's life in a refreshingly direct way, showing all these contingencies (many quite ordinary) to be the illuminating literal sources of the poet's famously opaque, even unintelligible work. Scroggins places this comprehensive account of the myriad "hushed sources" (Zukofsky's own phrase) on which (despite Zukofsky's own belief to the contrary) any real understanding of Zukofsky's work depends within Zukofsky's own paradigm of quotation, translation, and especially transliteration as a "graph of recurrences" that constitutes all of human culture. A series of "interchapters" on the poet's methods interspersed throughout the narrative of his life combine with Scroggins's impressively concise and illuminating running keys to Zukofsky's individual works (as they emerge in his life) to make this volume the single most important critical as well as biographical resource for Zukofsky studies. This is a necessary acquisition for the study of 20th-century American poetry. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Hmm. Couldn't have said it better myself.

***

Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary, Karla Kelsey (Ahsahta, 20006)

A fine instance of the period style in obliquity, descending one suspects less from a reading of Michael Palmer than from a sustained engagement with Jorie Graham's mid-period work. Kelsey's writing is lean and surprising, many lines little short of amazing. But I can't help feelign that the package as a whole, from the big white spaces of the pages, the breathless gravity of the lines, the intensity of the jacket photo, even the book's overall design (Jeff Clark – is Quemadura becoming to poetry books what Hipgnosis was to album covers in the '70s?) – is all too familiar. Kelsey largely redeems herself in the book's last section, where the focus shifts from individual epistemology to the "polis," the intersubjective social realm. And none too soon.

Is subjectivity the only thing worth reading about? Has today's period style merely reinscribed the Romantic Ideology (cf. Jerome McGann) within a framework of vaguely post-avant, paratactic formal gestures?

[94/100]

***

The Errancy, Jorie Graham (Ecco, 1997)

Is this what one calls "mid-period" Graham? At any rate, she's retreated from the more extravagant formal experiments of The End of Beauty & Materialism to a more recognizable, if still extravagant, 1st-person-centered subjectivity here. I can't gainsay the brilliance of the writing here, the endlessly proliferating excess of metaphor and striking language, the lyrical phrases that seem to pour out as if from an unstoppable cornucopia. But must it always, always be a mere tracing of the poet's brilliant & sensitive processing of the world? It's as if Graham's sensibility is one great open wound of perception and thought, constantly aching out a stream of language in response to the world's phenomena. "The river," at least, speaks to the poet in terms of self-recognition: "why do you hurry to drown yourself in me /its flashing waves laugh-up, / why do you expect constant attention /why your eagerness for self-creation, self-explanation – / what would you explain..." Kelsey, in contrast, is a model of restrained thought, a careful sorting-out of the rush of particulars in the sensorium; Graham is the rush itself.

[95/100]