course texts

Yeah, the memo said book orders were due June 19th; and yeah, I got mine in yesterday (July 19). So sue me. I could present my orders a year in advance to the campus bookstore at Our Fair University & they'd still get something wrong, or be unable to find some small-press thing.

In case you're wondering (I know that throngs have been on the edges of their seats awaiting this information), here's what I'm teaching from:

In the undergraduate Milton course (as I've discussed before), I'll be using the newish Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, & Stephen M. Fallon.

(Which reminds me – I was conversing earlier this evening with an old friend of J.'s, currently house guest here by the ocean, about the 19th-c. American novel course I did last Fall, & I remarked that every book on the syllabus, Hawthorne Melville Alcott Stowe James Twain & Chopin – with the partial exceptions of Chopin & Twain [Connecticut Yankee, it was] – was written in something I call "19th-century novelese." You know, complex sentence constructions, big unfamiliar words, a bit of stylistic stilt-standing, etc. And most of my students had a pretty damned hard time with it. And then I thought, Jumpin' Jesus on a Pogo Stick!, I'm teaching Milton's controversial prose this Fall. What kind of a bloody masochist am I, anyway?)

In my graduate poetry workshop, we'll be spending time with the following:

•Louis Zukofsky, Selected Poems (yes, I know, New Directions will be shortly releasing new [corrected!] editions of Complete Short Poetry and "A" – but for the nonce, this is all that's in print)

•Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems

•Martin Corless-Smith, Swallows

•Eric Baus, The To Sound

•Janet Holmes, The Ms of M Y Kin

•Brenda Iijima, If Not Metamorphic

•Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

•Liz Waldner, Trust

A rollicking good time will be had by all. Really.

vacation, minor grumbles & anonymity

So I'm back to blogging, for what it's worth. Word on the street – which means word on Facebook & Twitter & all those other micro-statement-instant-response-gratification venues – is that blogging is dead, that nobody wants to read anything longer than 140 characters. Who knows? It's not like I have a serious case of logorrhea, or need to write an essay every week or so, but it's nice to stretch out. So what if I know every single person who's visiting? It's not like I'm selling anything, after all.

When I visit a site like Acadamnit, I get the urge to vent – about the state of writing, about my chosen – ahem – profession, about the shitty little hoops they have us jumping thru. (Cf. last post, for instance – "cf.," by the way, is short for the Latin confer, meaning "compare" or "check this out": just another instance of the kind of verbal sclerosis you start to suffer from when you spend too much time in the academy.) But if I wanted to vent about silliness going on in my own department – that "if" being a total hypothetical, mind you – I wouldn't, because after all this isn't an anonymous blog, like Acadamnit or Academic Cog or Not of General Interest, some other academic blogs I really admire.

Any way, unlike say Bob Archambeau, whose mini-essays on Samizdat I take it all circle around the big-ass book he's got cooking in the laboratory, little I've written here over the past year or so has much relation to whatever I'm "officially" writing. That's okay. And I'm on vacation, after all, so I can't be expected to be doing much real thinking.

Speaking of vacation: We're on Fire Island, as I probably mentioned. Not the party-till-you-drop section, or the Oz-on-the-beach bits popularized by Frank O'Hara & WH Auden, but a rather sedate, old-fashioned "family" community. No cars, just bicycles; no streets, just boardwalks. No restaurants, just a general store where everything is twice as expensive as it is in Manhattan.

We've been pretty much dividing the weeks between the Island & Manhattan, trying to cram in kultur & friend-meeting over the weekends, then kicking back and listening to the surf during the weeks. But of course it's not working out that way: we see friends & shows & go to museums on the weekends, then try to write on the Island. J. has a juggler's plenty of projects she's working on; there are library books all over the beach house. Me, I'm trying to focus on a single big essay – so I've brought almost nothing not directly related thereto. Mirabile dictu (that's not academese – that's high school Latin), in the interstices of working on my suntan (I have this theory that fat guys look thinner when they've got a good tan) I've managed to crank out more than a few thousand words, most of them arranged in sentences I'm not deeply embarassed by.

Brief kultur notes:
•"Dream Machine," the Brion Gysin show at the New Museum on the Bowery, is a must-see for those interested in performance poetry, cut-ups, & general drugginess. And they've got a first-rate bookstore.
•On the roof of the Met, Doug & Mike Starn have erected a massive labyrinth of bamboo trunks tied together with climbing rope. It's worth seeing, tho I wonder if Bloomberg (which underwrote the thing) got the doper reference in the title: "Big Bambú." (And hey, the Met is always worth visiting, if only for the Balthuses, which never get old.)
•At the theater at Hunter College we saw a sublime performance of The Magic Flute, which the girls sat thru entranced – even the second act, what I like to refer to as "The Sublime Allegory of Enlightenment Meets All that Masonic Shit."
•The Pierpont Morgan has a wonderful exhibition on Romanticism & gardening/landscape, as well as a bunch of small but tasty mini-shows – Albrecht Dürer, Sumerian seals, Palladio (that latter not so small).

my adventures as a blind referee

"I’m also in the midst of… my annual report to the university on what I’ve been publishing – the strange answer is nothing. You see, nothing counts but “refereed” material. My three books of the last two years, and my five coming up in the press, these count for nothing, and scads of essays and reviews – scrap paper. Periodically I’m cautioned by the Dean for underachievement."
–Guy Davenport to Nicholas Kilmer, 16 November 1980

True Stories from the Annals of Blind Refereeing

Part I: So I got a request from Leading Journal in my Field the other day to serve as a referee for an essay on Major Semi-Canonical Poet. Okay, thought I, I am without doubt one of the 2 or 3 "authorities" on M. S-C. P., & I make an effort at keeping up with the criticism, so I'll do it. I read Critic X's paper, & on a 1st read found it – well – excellent. But I was a trifle peeved that Critic X managed to write 30-odd pages on M. S-C. P., including lots of biographical references, without once citing my work. Grrrr. 2 possibilities suggest themselves: Critic X doesn't like me, for whatever reason; or Critic X doesn't like my work. I don't know which makes me sadder, but I suppose I'll go ahead & recommend publication.

Part II: Hard on the heels of that request, Preeminent Journal Not Just in My Field But in the Whole Bloody Discipline asks me to be the tie-breaking blind referee for Critic Y's essay on Major Canonized Poet & Semi-Major Semi-Canonized Composer. These folks are efficient: not merely do they send the request, but they attach the essay, the readers' guidelines, & the 2 previous reports (not, by the way, anonymously – so I know who writ 'em). Reader B says "let's get Critic Y to rewrite & reconsider; there's good stuff here." Reader A rejects the essay outright. Principal reason? Critic Y has failed to take account of Reader A's own essay on M. C. P. & S-M. S-C. C., included oh-so-recently in a collection of essays published by a UK press very few of whose books, I suspect, make it across the Atlantic.

Discuss, drawing yr own conclusions.
***
Hey, we've finally got the DSL & the wifi set up here on Fire Island, & I feel once again as tho I'm plugged into the whole buzzing world of people vicariously living their lives online. To hell with the beach, the bay, & the boardwalks! I'm blogging again!

fish are jumpin'

Okay, so here’s how the summer is going so far: we’re taking long weekends (Thursday thru Sunday) in Manhattan, and spending the rest of the week on Fire Island, where I’m doing my damnedest to get some “work” done. Yeah, I know, that’s not the point of vacation, is it? But I can count my blessings in that “work,” for me, is often equivalent to “really solid & deeply satisfying intellectual labor – as is the case with this particular piece I’m working on. Stay tuned.

Time seems to stand still on the Island. We’ve been here since Sunday afternoon, but it seems like we’ve never been anywhere else. There’s no internet connection in the house, so checking e-mail or Facebook is something we do by walking the laptop down to the community library, which has free wireless. But who wants to actually get up from one’s chair in the shade, where you can hear the surf in the distance, watch the folks walk or bike by on the boardwalk “streets,” & lovingly nurse that 2nd cup of coffee (or that 3rd Scotch & soda)?

Been reading a good deal of poetry, most recently Elizabeth Robinson’s Apprehend and Janet Holmes’s F2F.

The next to the last thing I knocked out before leaving Florida, my review of Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven, is now up at The Rumpus. Do drop by and read, if you like. Caution: This review is pitched quite intentionally for the non-Bernoscenti, so don’t expect a hyper-theoretical post facto analysis of the anti-hegemonic tendencies of Language Poetry in general – it’s a vade mecum for those who might not otherwise have encountered Charles’s work. As I said to myself about the LZ bio, somebody’s got to write it, & why not me?

les vacances

So we're leaving early next morning for our French-style long vacation. Six weeks this time, to be divided between (mostly) New York, Tennessee, and a jaunt into Ohio. It's true, I can't deny it – I'm a homebody, hating to be separated from my stuff. But I've cleared my (virtual) desktop of most of the projects that have been hanging around on it, & have assigned myself an entirely doable set of things for the next few weeks: write one essay that's still hanging albatross-like around my neck; figure out what texts I'm going to assign for this fall's graduate poetry workshop; and have some fun. (Of course I'll read a bunch – I mailed off a carton of slim volumes of contemporary poetry, various Ruskin things, and my big new Milton yesterday – but that goes with the territory of "having fun" – I'm strange that way.)

The house is in the capable hands of one of our more dependable undergraduates. The roof leaks I hope are under control, & the upstairs air conditioning should be repaired by the end of the week. So he won't be living in too desperate squalor.

I'm very psyched to see the Brion Gysin retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and I hope to get down to the East Village to visit John Zorn's club The Stone: hey, kids under 12 are free, & it's time Pippa graduated from opera & classic drama to hear some stuff that makes your ears hurt. If anyone else is mad enough to be hanging around the city for the dog days of July, I'd love to get together; drop me a line

books & their enemies

My relationship with texts is deeply, inextricably mediated by my relationship with the codices in which they are represented. I suspect it's the same with many of my generation. I've been reading Pound's Cantos for a quarter-century now, & my experience of the poem always on some level involves the rust-jacketed hardcover I got for Christmas in 1986. My relationship with Ulysses is to some degree a relationship with the Random House Gabler edition; and that's not just the result of 15 years of successive palimpsestic marginalia in my father's 1986 hardcover, but involves the very typography, page layout, & pagination.

In short, sadly enough I'm as much a book accumulator – and caressor, & savorer – as I am a scholar. I'm sure I have friends who'd be delighted if they could load their entire libraries onto a Kindle (or Nook), but I have a wholly retrograde, deeply old-fashioned investment in paper pages and cloth (or paper) bindings.

We live in a region of extreme weather – extreme heat, big hurricanes, and (during the rainy season) daily torrential rains. And since there are bookcases in almost every room of the house, book are the coal-mine-canaries for leaks. I first discovered our upstairs bathroom had a problem when I took down a book from the top shelf of the built-ins in my study and found it was practically dripping. Alas, the Library of America, from Sinclair Lewis thru Vladimir Nabokov, had sustained severe damage.

While I was in San Francisco, another upstairs bathroom precipitated a flood into the kitchen. I came home to find the pantry newly cleaned out & reordered, & a great deal of junk on the window seat entirely removed, but it was only yesterday, taking down a cookbook to check the proportions for a dill aioli (which turned out beautifully, by the way – yes, I'm proud), that I discovered the water had gotten into the cookbook shelf. Not drastically, mind you – the only volume that can't be salvaged is a 2006 Miami Zagat's – and cookbooks so far as I'm concerned are meant to get beaten up.

Today, as we sat watching an episode of Slings & Arrows, my eye wandered from the TV screen to the adjacent bookcase, & I noticed an odd wrinkling to the dust jacket spine of John Sutherland's biography of Sir Walter Scott. Taking it down, I realized that at some point the book had been badly mishandled: the spine was split at the top. But I saw no water damage, & I'd been pretty paranoid about that particular case, as we've been struggling against a roof leak right over those books for some time now. But then I started exploring other volumes on the same shelf, & immediately got the sick feeling a book-lover gets when he feels books sticking to one another & to the shelf itself.

Short version: Somehow this shelf – the fourth down – and one other shelf – the bottom– had gotten wet sometime in the recent past. Scottish fiction & criticism, from maybe midway thru the Scott criticism thru Muriel Spark & the beginning of the Stevenson primary texts. I suppose you would say mild to moderate damage: water an inch or two up from the base of the books, some better, some largely entouched. Well-established mildew blights on maybe half-dozen books. Only two books, I think, are unsalvageable: a selection of Stevenson essays (heavily annotated, alas) and a nice illustrated volume that collects The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters (the shiny paper tends to glue itself together when it gets wet). The rest have been opened & lysol'd and are ready to spend a little time in the sun tomorrow.

I remember how distraught I was when I came back to Blacksburg my sophomore year after the holidays & discovered the upstairs pipes had burst, ruining my copies of Eliot's The Waste Land and Selected Poems. These days I don't get awfully upset at water-damaged books, perhaps in part because I just plain have so many more books than I did back then. I'm sorry that Alexander Welsh's The Hero of the Waverley Novels is crinkly, but how often have I consulted it lately?

With many possessions, the Thoreauvians out there will say, come many worries. Which is true enough. But if I drop Old Mortality into the swimming pool, I can lay it in the sun & in a few hours it will be a wrinkled, puffy, but wholly readable artifact. I dare you to do that with your Kindle.

the great English songbook

[Richard Thompson, with an unspeakably cool guitar]

Nothing to blog about, and blogging it:

It is officially summer, tho summer weather set in here weeks & weeks ago. Terrifically muggy, sticky, generally uncomfortable. The air conditioner in my little Cabrio died the other week (this is the second time it's done this over the car's lifetime), so getting from place to place is an exercise in temporary sauna-immersion. I'd take the top down, but the sun is unbearably oppressive, & the daytime weather here is terrifically unpredictable: if you leave for the office on a cloudless morning, there's decent chance of getting caught in a cloudburst before you get to the parking lot.

We leave for New York next week, to be away for something like 6 weeks. Am I looking forward to the trip? Well, as much as I usually do – I'm frankly a homebody, deeply inertial. I like being among my books, my guitars, my stuff. But I'll manage. I'll get things read, and get things written. I've already gotten a few little things done since the end of the semester (tho that six weeks has felt more like a week & a half).

Father's Day was nice; I'd spent much of the week before visiting my mother in God's Country (middle Tennessee), a deeply depressing, sad experience, so it was nice to come home to the girls. They gifted me with something I'd been anticipating for years: the big set of 3 Richard Thompson songbooks. Now anyone who knows me well knows that I've had a well-nigh obsessive relationship with RT's music for maybe 30 years now. Yes, I've got all the albums; yes, I know all the words (or most of them).

The songbooks were at first, frankly, a bit of a disappointment. RT's website has been anticipating them for several years now. They'd hired the Fairport Convention guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Maartin Alcock to do the transcribing, & apparently (former descriptions have vanished from the site) the plan was to present the entire RT song corpus – every single song – in detailed tablature. [Tablature, for those non-guitarist-geeks out there, is a kind of pidgin musical notation that shows the guitarist which fret & string a note should fall on: for real musicians who read music, it's a supplement, showing unusual fingerings and tunings; for musical idiots like me, who can read music about as well as I read Greek, it's a wonderful bridge to actually being able to play something.]

At any rate, the 3 volumes of the RT songbook as published don't by any means include all of his songs. It's true, the 150-odd songs here are practically everything one would want to know, but anal-compulsive completists like me are bound to miss a few things. And the promised tablature is only there for maybe 30 or 40 of the songs. Like, it's great to have the tabs for "1952 Black Vincent," but let's face it, I'll never have the technique to play that song anyway; I'd much rather have the tabs for the psychotic guitar solos on "Gethsemene" or "Dad's Gonna Kill Me."

On the plus side? (and truth to tell, the pluses far outweigh the disappointments of this set): The books are spiral-bound, so they lie flat on a table or music stand when you're trying to learn a piece. And even more importantly, while way too many of the songs have nothing more than a vocal melody line & a set of chord symbols, this is very much a guitarist's collection, in sharp contrast to the mass-produced music books of the 1970s or 80s, where the transcribers would figure out chords & then automatically punch in standard chord symbols. Here the transcriber (Alcock's still got a credit in the books, but his contribution has been massively downplayed on the website – what gives?) has scrupulously noted which tunings Richard uses on each song (lots of dropped-D, a good deal of DADGAD), what chord shapes RT plays (some of them exceedingly strange at first glance, but always eventually logical), & whether a given song is capoed. It makes all the difference in the world. Call me slow, but songs I'd worked out in standard tuning in E, & found unplayably difficult, suddenly become cool & luminous when played in dropped-D with the capo at 2.

So it seems suddenly tough to have to leave all guitars behind for the rest of the summer. And – did I mention this? – the newish acquisition. Yes, I broke down & bought a shiny black Turkish baglama (or "saz," the more generic term for stringed instrument) the other month. It's a strange piece of work, a combination of high-tech (pickups, control dials, etc.) & the primitive (the single-piece neck & headstock, the maddeningly inaccurate friction tuning pegs). It makes a lovely sound. I have its three courses tuned in "buzuk" tuning – D-G-A – so I can muddle thru with much of what I've learned on the mandolin & bouzouki. But it's still hard to get used to 18 frets to the octave, & figure out what to do with all of those extra notes. "Kashmir" sounds great, as do the Mekons' "Old Trip to Jerusalem" and PiL's "This Is Not a Love Song."

[is "baglamist" a word? yr humble blogger, flipped courtesy of Photobooth]

Ruskin, polygonally

A couple of recent posts on Bob Archambeau's blog have brought Ruskin's Stones of Venice – specifically, the classic "The Nature of Gothic" chapter of volume II – to bear on of all things Anish Kapoor's Chicago sculpture "Cloud Gate" & David Shields's Reality Hunger. Which just goes to show, after all, that Ruskin's work is always appropriate. And of course it renewed my belief in synchronicity, since I'm reading Stones of Venice II right now.

When the Library Edition first arrived, & when I'd finally carved out shelf space for it, I had to decide how I was going to tackle the thing. And what I've come to, after a few waffles and several digressions, is that I'm reading it thru in more or less chronological order. So I've read the first four volumes – the juvenilia (ick), the poetry (argh), and the first 2 volumes of Modern Painters; then I skipped forward to volume 8, The 7 Lamps of Architecture, & thence into Stones of Venice. One of the drawbacks – or potential rewards – of this process – is that for the last 2000 pages or so I've been re-reading things I read several years ago. Modern Painters 2 (the aesthetic theory) was much better this time around; Stones of Venice 1, however, remains a colossal snore. The volume's subtitled "The Foundations," & it's more or less a 500-page detailed primer in architectural terminology (with sumptuous illustrations). There's only so much this limited neural hard drive can absorb about the relative shapes of cornices, window apertures, roof gables, etc.

Volume 2, I'm happy to report, is much better. Here Ruskin settles down to the task of describing, illustrating, & analyzing the history of Venetian architecture, & painstaking (but again sumptuously illustrated) architectural detail is leavened with lots of wonderful theorizing about the tendencies of various stylistic schools. And then of course there's the blockbuster "Nature of Gothic," in which Ruskin starts out describing the spiritual tendencies of the architecture he loves so much & then veers (as is his way) into a full-throated attack on the division of labor & modern manufacturing society. It's the first blast of the trumpet that gets fully unmuted in Unto This Last. William Morris, who read it as an undergraduate along with his friend Edward Burne-Jones, loved the thing. He arranged for its separate publication as an affordable pamphlet – a key text, he believed, in both what would be called the Arts & Crafts movement and more immediately in the socialist struggle – and later reprinted it again as one of the first productions of his Kelmscott Press.

And Archambeau's right: it's one of those rare mid-Victorian pieces that still speaks directly to us.
***
Proust on Ruskin (1904):

...Ruskin never wholly ceased to commit the sin of idolatry. At the very moment he was preaching sincerity, he lacked it. The doctrines he professed were moral, not aesthetic, yet he chose them for their beauty. And because he did not want to present them formally as things of beauty, but as statements of truth, he was forced to lie to himself about the reasons that had led him to adopt them.

Discuss, paying special attention to Proust's nascent psychoanalytical impulse, & to how much his own post-decadent, aesthetic moment, might blind him to the unity of the moral & the beautiful in JR.
***
Ruskin, lecturing (channeling Whitman?):

Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may have occasionally heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is some work for people in any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.

***
Ruskin, a footnote to Stones of Venice 2 (having just quoted Henry Francis Cary's Paradiso):

It is generally better to read ten lines of any poet in the original language, however painfully, than ten cantos of a translation. But an exception must be made in favour of Cary's Dante. If no poet ever was liable to lose more in translation, none was ever so carefully translated; and I hardly know whether most to admire the rigid fidelity, or the sweet and solemn harmony, of Cary's verse.... It is true that the conciseness and rivulet-like melody of Dante must continually be lost; but if I could only read English, and had to choose, for a library narrowed by poverty, between Cary's Dante and our own original Milton, I should choose Cary without an instant's pause.

annotating Milton

It arrived today, my desk copy of John Milton's Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, & Stephen M. Fallon (Modern Library 2007), & I think it's going to be just the ticket for this fall's Milton course. It's got all the texts I want to teach in a highly readable typeface, the texts themselves seem quite sound (if modernized), the introductions are concise and thoughtful, & the annotations seem to be pitched much more realistically at my students than the unholy quagmire of Flannagan's Riverside Milton or the unrealistic erudition of Hughes's warhorse 1957 Complete Poems and Major Prose.

Hughes is of course the obvious standard of comparison, & it's the text I used last time around for Milton. Kerrigan & co. (from now on I'll just call the book "ML" for short, ie Modern Library) includes obviously the same poems as Hughes, though the translations of Latin, Italian, & Greek texts are rather more elegant and idiomatic. It has almost as much of the prose, but with the infinite advantage of printing it in single columns, rather than the crunky double-columned layout of Hughes. And while Hughes opts not to annotate Christian Doctrine at all, & reprints the funky 1825 Bishop Sumner translation, ML presents almost as copious selections, with full annotation, in the far more readable Yale Milton version.

The test of a teaching text, however, is in its annotations. Take the famous simile of Paradise Lost I.300-4, where Satan calls upon his fallen angels (I quote from ML):

he stood and called
His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
in Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades
High overarched embow'r...

Here's how Merritt Hughes annotates the passage:

302-304. Perhaps a memory of Dante's spirits numberless as autumn leaves (Inf. III, 112-14) or of the image as C. M. Bowra notes it (in From Virgil to Milton, 240-41) in Homer, Bacchylides, Virgil and Tasso. Milton may have visited the shady valley, Vallombrosa, during his stay in Florence.

And here's ML:

302: autumnal leaves: Comparison of the dead to fallen leaves is commonplace; cp. Homer, Il. 6.146; Vergil, Aen. 6.309-10; Dante, Inf. 3.112-15. Milton's description is distinctly echoed in Dryden's 1697 translation of Vergil: "thick as the leaves in autumn strow the woods" (Aen. 6.428).

303: Milton likely visited the heavily wooded valley of Vallombrosa in the fall of 1638. The Italian place name literally means "shady valley." Note its somber aural combination with autumnal, strow, brooks, and embow'r. Etruria: classical name for the Tuscan region. Shades is a metonymy for trees as well as a name for spirits of the dead.

(I'm amused by the ML editors' odd preference for Vergil, even as they otherwise pursue an aggressive Americanizing ["somber" rather than "sombre"].) Note how ML gets across the same information in a less telegraphed, more undergrad-friendly manner. They lose the reference to Bowra, but give us hard & fast line references for Homer & Virgil. And they help out my students who have no frackin' idea what "Etruria" means, or why JM uses that odd word "shades" for trees.

But there's a couple of odd notes: The proleptic reference to how Dryden will use the passage – why's that there? And it's nice close reading to point out "somber aural combinations," but that's stealing my talking points, gentlemen.

And the bit that makes the biographer in me groan: "Milton likely visited the heavily wooded valley of Vallombrosa in the fall of 1638." Where's the evidence for that particular sight-seeing side-trip of his Grand Tour? Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 2000): "It is possible though not very likely that Milton visited the Abbey of Vallombrosa, a beauty spot about 18 miles from Florence" (94).

Thomas M. Corns & Gordon Campbell in John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford, 2008), are rather more pointed:

The mention of Vallombrosa in Paradise Lost was the sandy foundation of a belief that while in Florence Milton made an excursion to the remote monastery of Vallombrosa, and that recollection of this visit eventually re-emerged as the image of the fallen angels who lay 'thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks | In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades | High overarched imbower'. There is not a shred of evidence for this visit, which was not on the itinerary of seventeenth-century travellers, but the absence of evidence did not dampen the enthusiasm of nineteenth-century travellers such as Wordsworth (1837), Mary Shelley (1842), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1847). Mrs [sic] Browning, accompanied by dog Flush and husband Robert, was hauled up to the monastery in a wine basket mounted on a sledge pulled by four white oxen, only to be told on arrival that the monastery could not accommodate women (especially, one suspects, women who announced their intention of staying for three months to escape the heat of Florence). (115)

The legend, however sandy its foundations, lives on in the notes to the Kerrigan/Rumrich/Fallon Milton.

what I saw at the ALA

or rather, what I saw in San Francisco over the past weekend. It's kind of axiomatic for me that the broader the scope of a conference, the harder it is to find things of specific interest. The very best conferences I've been to have included two LZ events in 2004 (Columbia & Chicago), separate Ronald Johnson & Bottom: on Shakespeare events at Buffalo, a Sir Walter Scott do in Eugene, Oregon, & of course the sequence of massive poetry-fests mounted at the University of Maine. I find the University of Louisville's "Lit. & Culture Since 1900" conference pretty consistently stimulating, & I get a hankering to attend the Modernist Studies Association every year, tho I've never quite gotten around to it.

The American Literature Association casts its net of presentations a bit too broadly for my taste, I must admit. I love Twain, & I love Cooper, but do I really want to see the Twain-Cooper contretemps restaged between representatives of the Fenimore Cooper Circle and the Mark Twain Society? Try as I might, I can't muster the slightest bit of enthusiasm for talks about John Steinbeck or any American realist author. And like the MLA, the ALA is strikingly poetry-poor.

So I was seesawing back & forth until the very last minute as to whether I'd even show up to give a paper on this panel on biographies of 20th century American poets. I had reasonably priced airline tickets (which I knew I could exchange if need be), but I waited till the last minute to book a hotel. Alas, the conference hotel – the brutalist, brutally dated Embarcadero Hyatt Regency – was booked solid; the back-up hotel, 1 1/2 miles away, was far out of my price range. So I took a chance and booked a room in the "charming" Aida Plaza Hotel, pretty much in the heart of the Tenderloin district. Not bad – at least I was never lacking for company in my strolls to & from the hotel, since the neighborhood is plentifully supplied with panhandlers, crackheads, drug dealers & assorted street personages. If I needed entertainment, there were two strip clubs on the block (tho if I wanted "company," the Hotel charges a $30 "visitor's fee" to allow someone into your room). Somehow, between an iPod with David Harvey's collected lectures on Das Kapital and a briefcase full of books, I managed to entertain myself alone in my 14' x 14' room (taupe plaster walls, vintage 50s-era furniture, television with 3 working channels, linens & towels that didn't bear too close inspection); after all, this was San Francisco, right?

Frankly, I wasn't expecting much of this conference, or of the trip in general. The semester had left me bone-weary. I wanted to fly in, give my paper, & get the hell out. But the weekend turned out better than alright. First, there were bookstores: I'd been to City Lights some years ago, & found myself for some reason unimpressed. Perhaps I was reacting apotropaically to the whole beatification of the Beats, the "shrine" aspect of the place. This time around, I spent some serious time with the poetry section, which is flatly excellent. On Friday, I hiked to The Richmond to visit Green Apple Books. Now my usual out-of-town 2nd-hand book haunt is The Strand in Manhattan, & my MO in the poetry section there is to pile up everything I see that I want, add to it things that I might want, & buy that. In Green Apple I found myself having to reject all of the "might wants" outright, & then performing a kind of 2/1 triage on things I really wanted. & even then ending up spending a good deal more than I'd expected. It made for a back-breaking carry-on bag on the flight back, mind you, but I've got enough poetry to keep me busy for some time. (Which doesn't mean you shouldn't send me your book.)

Lodging... book shopping... what else is there to conference-going? Oh, right: Food. A couple of splendid Italian meals, a mediocre Indian lunch buffet – but the grand find: trudging around the fringes of the Union Square district, I finally rediscovered the Indonesian place I'd visited back in I think 1991, where I had a fantastic rendang the color & consistency of 2-year-old motor oil. It was just as delightful and piquant this time around.

Yes, the Conference: well, the highlight for me was a reading by my old friend Cecil (CS) Giscombe, beautifully delivered & ecstatically received. Cecil, whom I've known for almost a quarter century now (!!), has made the big time – a job at UC Berkeley, prizes, widespread recognition, etc. And he's still as warm & delightful as ever. I saw more old friends & acquaintances than I'd expected – Aldon Nielson, Katharine Wright, William J. Harris, Lyn Hejinian, Richard Flynn, Laura Barrett, Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr, Alec Marsh (himself at work on a Pound bio). Marjorie Perloff whisked in for a panel on Gertrude Stein, where she delivered a rousing defense & analysis of Stein's language, took a few potshots at what she saw were misguided readings of Stein, and called for a new "renaissance," on the order of the whole Modernist revolution, in contemporary poetry. I was struck by her evocation of Wordsworth's Preface to the 1802 Lyrical Ballads, with its attack on the "inane & gaudy phraseology" of contemporaneous poetry, & her call for a similar revitalization of poetry. Who's to do it, tho – or who's doing it?

My own panel was something of a repeat, with a slightly different cast, of the similar panel I was on at the 2008 MLA (also in San Francisco). I found myself afterwards having supper with a group of biographers and Kenneth Rexroth fans – more Rexrothians than I knew existed. Don't get me wrong – I'd been reading Rexroth lately, and finding him a very intelligent and sometimes moving poet, but it's unnerving to be dropped into the midst of a bunch of folks for whom one particular guy is DA BOMB, pure & simple. (Yes, I know – it's the same way with LZ events.) Weirdest moment of the evening was when his biographer related some hair-raising tale of Rexroth's amorous goings-on – something to do with inviting both his wife and his mistress to the same apartment in Paris, with a couple of local pick-ups involved as well – and the women present simply sighed & smiled, and someone said, "I guess he just loved women." And everyone present nodded knowingly & sympathetically.

The weekend's very best moments happened outside of the Hyatt Regency: A lovely afternoon on the Embarcadero with Cecil and Roxi Power Hamilton, a friend who was tremendously important to me back in the ambiguous days of my graduate studies, but whom I haven't seen in 19 years (& have only been in touch with recently thru the magic of Facebook). That same evening I was taken for a brief tour of North Beach & an excellent Italian dinner by poet Susan Gevirtz and her partner Steve Dickison, director of SFSU's Poetry Center. I don't know why they wanted to know little ole me, but I had a great time; good talk, good food, good company. (Hey, isn't it time for the PC to do an LZ event?)

It seemed unseasonably chilly in SF for late May; most of the time I was wearing my big leather coat & feeling quite comfortable. When my plane touched down in Fort Lauderdale Sunday night, however, I knew I was back in the steam. I'd worked up quite a lather, overdressed & hauling all those books in the 85 degree, 90% humidity twilight, by the time I got to my car in the parking garage. Only to realize, as I turned over the ignition, that my air conditioning isn't working. Welcome back to Florida.
***
R.I.P.: Peter Orlovsky and Leslie Scalapino. that they were at the beach: aeolotropic series (North Point, 1985) was probably the first Language-related book I ever bought, at Books Strings & Things in Blacksburg, VA, after having been seduced by a large chunk of the book printed in of all places the American Poetry Review. The start of a very long journey for me; it will take me some time to process this passing.

the upright man

I'm off to the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco next week. I don't think this is a conference I've ever been to, at least as a participant (I seem to vaguely recall dropping by one of their meetings in Baltimore a million years ago, for what reason I can't imagine). Am I remembering rightly, or is this the association set up in explicit opposition to the MLA's rampant theory-binge of the 1980s (still ongoing, happily)? At any rate, I'm on a tightly organized panel about biographical approaches to 20th-century poets, along with biographers of Kenneth Rexroth & Denise Levertov. It should be fun; not an awful lot of alt-poetry types there, but I'm sure I'll run down a fair number of people I know (feel free to drop a line – let's do lunch, or coffee). And after all, it's San Francisco, for heaven's sake. How can one not have a good time?

My biggest regret is that our panel seems to be scheduled opposite a panel of homages to the late Burt Hatlen, which I'd dearly love to attend, if only to show my gratitude to the big man.
***
Another symptom of middle-aged drain-circling: back pain, not debilitating, not even really chronic, but occasional & irritating. I suspect it has something to do with sitting reading & writing 8 or 10 hours a day in ergonomically disastrous chairs. But I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of the "stand-up" desk, used – as manufacturers will tell you endlessly, by Thomas Jefferson, Goethe, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, all the way down to those contemporary luminaries Philip Roth & Donald Rumsfeld. You can google all the purported health benefits (posture, energy levels, etc); the one that struck me – aside from the overwhelming reports of decreased back stress – was a base metabolic benefit of 60 extra calories burned per hour – just by standing. Which doesn't sound like much, but that's 240 calories every 4 hours – extrapolate it out.

I wasn't about to pay the outrageous prices the whole desk-thingies are fetching online these days, nor did I want to shell out $70 or more for a plain old tabletop lectern. (I did consider stealing one from a classroom in Our Fair University, but when I reflected how difficult it's been to get one to teach at lately...) So I cleaned the cobwebs off my hunter-gatherer-manly-arts-of-tinkering-with-power-tools skills, and you can see the results above: yes, my very own homemade (from nothing more than scraps of lumber hanging about the house & environs) tabletop lectern, complete with broad working surface & that little "lip" do-jobber at the bottom to keep your pen from rolling off. Once the spar varnish dries – I was gonna jump right in to using it, but reflected that if I wanted to paint up there, it'd be impossible to get the splatters off untreated wood – I expect to be well on the road to a slimmer, better-postured, dashing poet-scholar me. I'll keep you posted.

the Bill Laswell diet

Above, the bassist-producer-all round badass Bill Laswell, photographed probably five-six years ago. (Think Bob Archambeau with an electric bass, a cool hat, & long hair.) Now I, as someone professionally & personally interested in the fashion choices of men of a certain size with clear balding-related issues, have found Bill Laswell a fashion icon for some time now. Imagine my surprise, however, when I happened upon this rather more recent photo:

My goodness. Was it Weight Watchers, the Atkins Diet, or some personal regimen of lettuce and laxatives?

Turns out to be nothing quite so volitional. Think a bout of spinal meningitis. Oof. Don't try this at home, kids; me, I think I'd settle for my own rather zaftig corporal presentation for the nonce.

deep into the mystic

Last week, in the midst of final exams, I went to see Van Morrison perform at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, part of one of those strange drinking/shopping/gambling enclaves one encounters here & there in South Florida. Odd place – sorta Disneyland for grownups, a few blocks of ersatz urbanism in the middle of the endless suburb.

I followed Morrison's music intensely for a few years; too young to be aware of his grand achievements of the mid-70s, I started backtracking thru the catalog & buying the new releases as they came out with 1980's Common One. I stuck with it, thru increasing forays into synthesized new agey gunk and hazy mysticism, thru 1986's No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. The next record, Poetic Champions Compose, with its über-pretentious title & the shocking combover hairdo of the cover photo, was too much for me. So it's been over a decade since I've truly kept up with Van's records, tho various works of his have been absolute touchstones for me: of course the classic Astral Weeks and Moondance, but also Veedon Fleece and the sublime Into the Music, which has the happy quality of lifting my spirits no matter how depressed I might be.

Morrison's music has always struck me as densely paradoxical: he has one of the great R&B voices of all time, a truly wonderful set of pipes that has only grown deeper & more flexible over the years; he has an immaculate sense of musical timing, and a wonderful way of continually recasting the same 3- or 4-chord progressions into entirely new & surprising song structures. His "spirituality," however, strikes me as at best dodgy, sometimes downright embarassing. When he growls (in "Summertime in England"), in best bluesy voice, "Didja ever hear about, didja ever hear about, didja ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge, baby?... They were rockin' by the lakeside," I just want to know who threw this guy a copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (& why couldn't they have thrown him The New American Poets?).

Morrison in concert is always a chancy affair. One never knows whether one's going to get a truly sublime experience of a master musician submerging himself in his music, or a guy who's punching the clock. His show in Hollywood, thank heavens, was more the former than the latter. Okay, he started right at 8.03, no opening act; he didn't banter with the crowd, or seem to interact with them at all; and after his hour & 40 minute set, he was gone – no encore. All of these things seemed to piss off the audience – tho if they'd done a bit of research, they'd have known that this has been more or less Morrison's performing MO for the past 3 decades.

Florida audiences are irritating; if the show is scheduled for 8.00, don't show up at 8.25 & then complain you've missed 20 minutes of music (including "Brown Eyed Girl," probably the only song you'd securely recognize) – especially if you've dropped a couple hundred bucks on a pair of the really good seats. When the music gets really quiet, & the interplay between the bassist and the reeds player is particularly complex and fascinating, please don't take that opportunity to start a conversation, or to loudly hoot for the band to "start up" again. And for heaven's sake, don't expect Van Morrison, who's released something like 30 albums since Moondance, to honor you with an "oldies" set.

His set was for me at least fairly surprising, starting with an amazing version of "Northern Muse (Solid Ground)," disinterring such little-heard songs as "Fair Play" (Veedon Fleece), "Foreign Window" (No Guru), and "Help Me." Most moving for me were astonishing versions of "The Mystery" (a song which I hadn't heard before – his live version blows the pants off of the recorded cut) and "In the Garden." There was a strange, extended, even painful version of "Slim Slow Slider," which seemed to veer into "TB Sheets" territory in its divagations. And a beautiful, uplifting "When the Healing Has Begun." At 64, Morrison is a better singer than ever (tho his enunciation isn't what it once was – he doesn't do consonants much anymore); so what if the white suit & fedora made him look like a cross between the Stay Pufft Marshmallow Man and the Godfather?

The lack of interaction with the audience was interesting. Some musicians feed off of audience response, draw their energy from the enthusiasm with which they are received. Morrison seemed to draw his from within – from whatever muse – and from his interaction with his astonishingly tight and precise band. I felt as tho I were witnessing a musician in an almost autistic trance, spiraling deeper and deeper into the layers of his own songs. And while I would have loved to hear "Into the Mystic" or "Bright Side of the Road," that was plenty for me.

progress report

I've completed four 2-page openings of an erasure/overpainting of Bartleby the Scrivener, "Bar by the Riven." I'm no Ronald Johnson, nor even a Tom Phillips, but take an intense joy in the process – exacto-ing apart the pages, gluing them down on heavy waterpaper stock, pulling out phrases and words that catch my eye, and then painting over the whole in vivid acrylic colors & designs (at this point, mostly vaguely Suprematist, but I've got a good deal of the story to go, & look forward to trying out all sorts of graphic styles). The designing is the smallest part of my pleasure: I love the texture of the paints, the sensation of laying down the colors with my smallest brushes – even the final step of embalming it all under a high-gloss varnish, bringing all the colors out into an eye-popping clarity.
***
Lisa Robertson's XEclogue (1993, my copy New Star Books, 1999) is 10 eclogues, more or less. "Nancy" and "Lady M" exchange letters; the "Roaring Boys" sing roisterous adaptations of the Pervigilium Veneris. The pastoral shades here, as it so often does, into the gardening poem, but always remains on the uncultivated side of the hedge. Robertson, as one of the most theoretically sophisticated poets writing, knows the centrality of the pastoral to Western thought (John Taggart said somewhere, recently, "the pastoral is the Western tradition"): it's the most fundamentally political of genres (cf. Empson), the field in which one steps out of the social/urban precisely to take stock of society. Robertson's is a pastoral of gender relations and the socio-psychoanalytic construction of the subject. Oof, that sounds MLA-ish, doesn't it? which doesn't get at how weird and intriguing a book this is, how pitch-perfect her voice is as she veers towards & inevitably avoids the conventionally lyrical.

[101]
***
A copy of Anathem, Neal Stephenson's latest door-stopping epic of speculative fiction, has fallen into my hands. I've turned it over a few times, contemplating all the word-of-mouth intelligence I've received, & the few reviews I've read ("huge," "daunting complex," "too clever by half"), & have compromised: I'll certainly tackle this sometime over the summer, but for now it's China Miéville's The Scar.
***
The people at Otis College of Art and Design are producing some exceeding beautiful books under the Otis Books/Seismicity Editions imprint. I am at the moment enthralled by the first stretch of Ray DiPalma's The Ancient Use of Stone: Journals and Daybooks 1998-2008, a decade's worth of notebooks – so it would seem; one always wonders, reading a published daybook/journal/commonplace book, how much retouching has been applied to the messy pages of the original. Right now I'm still in "The Ancient Use of Stone," the earliest of DiPalma's daybooks here collected – part journal, part commonplace book, part bibliographical checklist (mostly of early modern imprints). It has precisely the miscellaneous character I enjoy in these things, shifting from quotation to observational prose to verse, often in the compass of a single entry. And I can't resist looking ahead: the later daybooks are even more miscellaneous – multiple columns, typefaces, graphics, etc. More later on this large & beautiful book.

The notebook as word-hoard, prose-hoard, treasury of lines & passages. Thoreau's journals as the vast quarry from which he excavated his books; Emerson's as the practice room in which he tried out the various virtuoso passages to be included in his essays. My own shelf of notebooks seems to grow exponentially: I realize, soberingly, that I probably now own enough blank pages to keep me busy for the rest of my life (solution: write more!). The ones I've filled are of distressingly little interest: hundreds of pages of journalizing, repeated drafts of poems (I copy back & forth from notebook to notebook, keeping track – when I don't lose track – by arcane numbering schemes), passages of prose for whatever assignment happens to be on my plate at the moment. Unlined notebooks encourage me to doodle, even to draw, which makes them rather nicer to look at; lined notebooks encourage more voluble word-production.

jumping fish

The semester officially ended over the weekend, when I turned in the last set of grades. Alas, I was so exhausted by the time it finally wound down that I haven't yet had that moment of VACATION!! elation – just a kind of emptied-out aimlessness thus far, along with any number of fiddly house-related things I've started to tackle. I have this kind of fantasy wish list for the summer: 1) lose weight, stop being a corpulent old man; 2) get (sorta) into shape, slough off some of those bad (physical) habits I've acquired over the last decades; 3) clean out the hideous, sifted midden that is my study, a major archaeological enterprise; 4) write the next book.

I hope to make a teeny bit of headway on some of these; we'll see. I think tidying the study is a pretty high priority, as it's gotten to the point where I can't find a pen when I need to take a phone message. The last one, "write the next book," is probably the most sheerly fantastical of them all. But I'm thinking about it, making notes, looking over old notes.
***
Writing per se has been a problem this semester. I've written some pretty decent poems, and at the beginning of the year I managed to pump out several pieces that I'm not all ashamed of; but since then I've found myself not exactly blocked, but rather unable to get to the point: I sit down with ideas & I proceed to write around them, spin them out & then spin away from them, ending up with yards of prose that is so baggy it repels all attempts at revision. These things go in cycles, I know; maybe at some point in July everything will come clear, & I'll start reeling out the crystalline sentences & paragraphs I need.
***
Reading is never a problem, tho I think my reading lately has been even more scattered & exogamic than usual. Yes, I read thru the Harry Potter books, over the course of a couple-three weeks, just so I can keep ahead of P. Half-Blood Prince was better than I remembered; Deathly Hallows was as much of a train-wreck the 2nd time thru as the first, bales of new esoterica, distracting side plots crammed into an already overstuffed package. Give me Return of the King any day, where it all comes down to that damned ring; Tolkien, he didn't introduce 15 new magical objects that Frodo had to negotiate in his final volume, did he?

20 years later, Middlemarch is far more engrossing than it was the 1st time around. I suspect I will be deciding that missing out on Eliot has been a major problem in my life. Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages is a surprisingly good book (why "surprisingly"? – evidence I guess of my prejudice against the widely-reviewed, hard-headedly "popular"): I learned a good deal about Harriet Taylor & John Stuart Mill, & was confirmed in my opinion of Thomas Carlyle (a brilliant, self-absorbed shit). The "contemporary" commentary of Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers haven't worn very well, but the basic information is rock-solid, & it's stuff that I feel a need to know at the moment, for whatever reason. I'm contemplating with trepidation Joseph Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis.
***
Finally I know for certain what I'm teaching next year, which is a nice thing. I've already mentioned at some point the grad workshop & the Milton course for the Fall. After some consideration I've decided to go with the Kerrigan et. al. Milton, Complete Poetry and Essential Prose (Modern Library), which looks to be the single-volume edition I & my students need. If it's a disaster, you'll hear about it.

In the spring, to my surprise (well, I asked for them, so it shouldn't be such a surprise) I'm teaching an undergraduate course on the epic and reprising my graduate seminar on biography. The readings for the former are obvious: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, plus maybe something else (we'll see). Would love to hear others' experiences with particular translations of the poems. Last time around in the biography course, along with the "historical" stuff – Plutarch, Johnson, Boswell, Strachey's Eminent Victorians, etc. – we read Claire Tomalin's Pepys, The Poem of a Life, Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman. This time around I'll probably drop the Plutarch & a final session on AS Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, making room for one or two more contemporary works; maybe swap out Tomalin & TPOAL in favor of 3-4 others. As I asked before, any suggestions?

sources of depression

1] the prospect of a weekend's worth of marking papers & calculating final grades

2] the descent of Florida summer; heat index in the mid-90s today; even now, almost 1 am, it feels like soup outside

3] the Greasemonkey script I added to Firefox which tells me who's unfriended me on Facebook; this one I think I'll have to remove – too much angst in my life already, without worrying about "social" "networks"

4] as always – deadlines

2 in praise of lucidity

Above all, I found much of Lire Le Capital critically vague. It is perhaps a matter for regret that logical positivism, with its insistence on precision of intellectual commitment, never caught on in Paris. Anglophone philosophy left logical positivism behind long ago, but it is lastingly the better for having engaged with it. The Althusserian vogue could have unfortunate consequences for Marxism in Britain, where lucidity is a precious heritage, and where it is not generally supposed that a theoretical statement, to be one, must be hard to comprehend. (GA Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History)

Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonising about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible. You do not need to hail from a shanty town to find a Spivakian metaphorical muddle like 'many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism' pretentiously opaque. It is hard to see how anyone can write like this and admire the luminous writings of, say, Freud. Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. (Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent)

Harry Potter's vocational dilemma

It's kind of embarrassing to admit that I'm reading the Harry Potter novels, even more embarrassing to admit that I'm reading them again. But I'm not going all Adorno-Harold Bloom-highbrow when I say that it's an experience rather less than continuously pleasurable.

Here's the thing: P. (aet. 8) is deeply immersed in the books at the moment, most of the way thru #4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (or, as I like to call it, HP and the Cauldron of Shit). So I thought the least I could do was to gamely keep up with her, or at least try to stay a few chapters ahead. Problem is, when an 8-year-old is obsessing over a book – or at least our 8-year-old – it's hard to get it away from her to read it yourself. So I powered thru Goblet & into the next, mammoth volume, HP and the Order of the Phoenix (which I'm irritating J. by referring to by a title that makes into a piece of bookish pornography). Just finished this 800-pager earlier today, to the detriment of things that really needed to get read.

Me: This book is 800 pages long. I could be reading Middlemarch.
J: Middlemarch is harder; you have to pay attention to the words.
Me: True.

Why re-reading, you ask? Well, as I've perhaps mentioned once or twice, I have no memory for narrative or character. I remember if I liked a novel or disliked it, if I found it riveting or revolting, I remember a striking character or a vivid scene or a particularly nice piece of writing; but there're very few novels I've read, even ones I've read repeatedly & even taught, whose plot I could accurately summarize. So I knew that if P. asked me even the most simple Hogwartish question about the HP books, I'd need to have them more or less fresh in my mind if I didn't want to destroy her entirely healthy sense of paternal omniscience.

For the most part, I find the novels pretty benign stuff. Not particularly well-written, by any means, but not awfully ham-fisted. The allegories are pretty thin, and I dislike the Perry Mason-ish wrapping up that seems to end every volume. Phoenix is of course grotesquely overlong. My memories of the last two books, HP and the Half-Pence and HP and the Healthy Fellows (or something like that), are dim, but I remember them seeming even longer than Phoenix, alas. I think the good guys win in the end.

The scenes in HP & the Order etc. where the batrachian Dolores Umbridge (slimy representative of the Ministry of Magic) takes over the Defence Against the Dark Arts class, banning actual spell practice & forcing the students merely to read their textbooks (theory rather than practice – I'm sure there's an anti-Adorno message buried there) reminded me of a moment in my own educational experience – my ninth grade history class, where some poor schmuck of a teacher (he'd taught driver's ed for 30 years, & suddenly found himself forced to teach American history because of budget cuts) had us sitting in class and reading the textbook aloud.

Of course, Dolores Umbridge is Rowling's jab at educational theorists who prescribe syllabi & courses of study from an ivory tower. But I've never been particularly happy reading Rowling's account of the educational experience of Hogwarts: the kids sit around in class praticing stuff the professor have just shown them (doing spells, mixing potions); for homework, they have to go back to the dorms & write essays (measured by inches of parchment) which look for all the world like regurgitations from their textbooks. The only exception (leaving aside Hagrid's Care of Magical Animals course and Sprout's Herbology) is Binns's History of Magic, which consists of interminable, boring lectures.

So, I keep thinking to myself, is this really the way they do it at Eton? The essay homework, especially, seems to replicate some of the least useful parts of my own education, while I seem to recall having Cuthbert Binns in a social studies class in 7th grade. Why aren't I more convinced by the picture Rowling gives us of the education of a young wizard? Why don't I want to teach at Hogwarts?

The answer came to me the other evening: Howgarts isn't really an old-fashioned "public school" at all, for all its house colors, prefects, & top girls & boys – it's a vocational school. It's not Stalky & Company with potions or Tom Brown's School Days with hexes, but a beauty school or car repair academy with wands and brooms. In the end, Sprout's greenhouses and Hagrid's paddocks are the most true-to-life portions of the Hogwarts panorama, places where the students are getting hands-on experience at things they'll need to know as mature witches and wizards. The other classes, where everybody sits at the desks, facing front (or passing magical notes), is conventional classroom with an overlay of exotic subject matter.

A real live school of Witchcraft & Wizardry, one suspects, would be far more like a martial arts dojo – lots of practice rooms with padded floors & walls, lots of open spaces, lockers, showers, & cubbies. Ah, but then Rowling would have had to reinvent The Karate Kid with wands, & one suspects that wouldn't have quite the cachet of a magical Tom Brown – or at least she probably wouldn't be able to recycle so many school-story stereotypes (kindly headmaster, cranky caretaker, grouchy librarian, etc).

endgame; unfriending the prophets

Tuesday is the last full day of classes, so everything is more or less winding down around here. For some reason, it's been an exhausting semester, even moreso than usual. Maybe I'm just getting old? Or losing my patience?

Our Fair University scheduled its "Authors Reading Series" at the same time as my postwar American poetry grad seminar this Spring, so an ungodly proportion of class time got sacrificed to going to readings: first, a prize reading of MFA program students; then Forrest Gander; and last night, my colleague poet & translator Becka McKay (whose new book, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, is well worth checking out). Now all of these were good readings, & well worth attending, but they played havoc with my syllabus. As I muttered grumpily to my department chair last night, "Do this to me again & I'm quitting."

I did plenty of gadding about: First a trip to Boise to talk about biography & LZ, then the Louisville Conference; next month it's San Francisco for the ALA, where I'll be on a panel about biographies of 20th-c. American poets. That should be fun, but I'm wishing I could be in Miami (OH) for post-moot right now, or that I could be at the Duncan symposium in Chicago. (Or that I had Hermione Granger's time-turner & could be at both...)

Anyway, I have a few days of breathing room before the final flood of papers, exams, & portfolios washes over me. Maybe I'll try to read a book. Or write some of one.
***
Unfriend. That was the "word of the year" last year, according to the Oxford people. (I found it not once but twice in my last read-thru of Lyrical Ballads, but I suppose Wordsworth's "unfriended" is rather different from "unfriending" someone on Facebook.) I'm not the most assiduous Facebooker, but I suppose I'm as addicted as the next socially-maladjusted academic; ie, checking FB no less than 10 or 15 times a day, commenting obsessively on the things I like or don't like, following links, checking out profiles, & so forth.

I haven't unfriended people very often. (For those who don't follow this business, to "unfriend" means to remove someone from your "friends list" – to sever the connection that has people showing up in each others "news feed" etc.) That's mainly because I only ask to become friends with people whom I know, or whose work I know, & tend to ignore friend requests from people I don't know anything about. (Or, for that matter, from old high school acquaintances with whom I obviously have less than nothing in common anymore.) I've never quite understood the logic of becoming "friends" with 1500 people, unless you've got something to sell – oh, okay, never mind.

Facebook, for all the bitching people do about it, is pretty user-friendly about these kinds of things; if I want to maintain a "friend" status with a high school acquaintance, but my blood pressure can't stand the barking lunacy of the tea-party posts he keeps putting up, I can set the controls so that his status updates are "hidden" from me. And if I go so far as to unfriend someone, they don't even receive a notice – I just don't show up in their news feeds anymore. (I've been unfriended a few times – gosh, I wondered a while back, why aren't I getting updates from that über-hip UC Davis poet/cultural critic anymore? Well, he's been trimming his friends list, & I was dead wood.)

The other day, I found myself so exasperated by the latest series of posts in one chap's ongoing magnum opus of cultural history – posted in five or six daily installments, a relentless attack on contemporary poetry as symptomatic of the decline of Western values in the wake of some vaguely-defined "postmodernism," and "substantiated" with a series of cursory readings of 70s-era work by such up-t0-the-minute hipsters as Robert Bly, James Wright, & WS Merwin, & punctuated with snarky asides about the intellectual & moral vacuity of the contemporary academy – that I found myself engaged in a comment battle. "Elijah" (as I'll call this chap) is it turns out himself a fugitive from the academy, the editor of a fairly well-respected poet's posthumous collected works, & a fervent member of the Baha'i faith, in whose beliefs I suspect he grounds his prophetic calls for a renewal of "mimesis" in poetry in order to pave the way for the single-society world order towards which we're all evolving.

I have a soft spot for utopianism, but little patience with soft-headed utopianism, or with blanket condemnations of contemporary poetic & intellectual culture that seem to be grounded on little more than ideologically-saturated mantras. And heaven help me, but I told Elijah so, announced that my patience was at an end, & unfriended him. (He'll be okay – he's got an audience of some 1200 folks out there, or at least that many "friends.")

But it made me think. Elijah of Facebook has set himself up, not as a rational analyst of society & culture, but as a prophet, a voice crying in the wilderness. Stanley Fish, in How Milton Works, has a beautifully apposite description of Milton's method in the Apology:

almost everything in the world appears to be going in one direction, but a single just man (like Abdiel and the solitary heroes who periodically turn up in the otherwise bleak narrative of books XI and XII of Paradise Lost) knows better, and loudly proclaims his better knowledge – all the while refusing to defend or support it by the usual evidentiary standards, refusing to measure himself "by other mens measures."

That's Elijah right there, staunch in his own rightness, never conceding an ell or an inch to counter-argument, satisfied in his ignorance of the last 30 years of the poetry he rails against.

But it occurs to me, if a real-live prophet appeared among us, a thinker whose ideas were so radically against the grain of contemporary trends and common knowledge, wouldn't he similarly appear no better than a crank, a "lunatic of one idea" (Stevens's term)?

Of course, Elijah's not the man – it's all too easy to parse out his "radicalism" as a slightly gamey casserole of Baha'ism & 50s-style cultural conservatism: Jacques Barzun + mysticism. I love reading the Hebrew prophets, and I love reading latter-day prophetic types like Blake, Milton, Ruskin, etc. – but Ishtar help us, soi-disant prophets can be so boring.

a shilling life

My idiosyncracies may not be particularly fruitful, but they're mine, & I have to own up to 'em. It occurred to me the other day as I finished Francis O'Gorman's Ruskin (Sutton Pocket Biographies) (Sutton, 1999) that I've got a real taste for what I can only call "highbrow fast food." That is, while I have more than a half-dozen full-length biographies of John Ruskin on my shelves (& have even read a bunch of them), I also persist in running thru the various super-short capsule "shilling lives" I come upon.

The recent history of the capsule biography – has it been written?? – is I suspect a capsule history of 20th-century intellectual marketing trends. We see capsule biographies, as in Diogenes Laertius' lives of the philosophers, in Plutarch, or in Johnson's Lives of the Poets, emerging even before the full-length biography. And they don't go away with the advent of the post-Boswellian doorstop biography: witness Leslie's Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography, and its various spinoffs.

In the latter part of the 20th century, it seems, short-scale biographical/critical studies, aimed at a wide readership, have gotten even more popular. Should this be dated to the inception of the Frank Kermode-edited Fontana Modern Masters series in 1970? Oxford UP responded to the popularity of the Fontana volumes with its own Past Masters series, & in recent years there seems to have been a spate of "Very Short Introductions," pocket lives, & even graphic novel-style adaptations of various figures' lives. (The interchangeability of many of these series is striking – various volumes of the OUP "Very Short Introductions" series are actually reprints of "Past Masters" volumes.)

Is it all an index of a general readership's thirsty demand for immediate enlightenment? Or is it a symptom of our painfully shrinking attention spans?
***
Herewith an assessment of some of the Ruskin "shorties" out there (if you know of others, do let me know):

Quentin Bell's Ruskin (George Braziller, 1978), which came from my father's library, & was the first Ruskin book I ever read, doesn't quite fit in the "capsule biography" category; it was first published in 1963 as part of the Hogarth Press's "Writers and Critics" series, & is actually quite a substantial assessment of JR's life & career, clocking in at around 150 beautifully-written pages. This is probably still the first book (not by Ruskin) I'd press on someone wanting to know more about Ruskin.

George P. Landow is one of the best of the old-school Ruskin scholars, proprietor of the excellent Victorianweb research site. His The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton UP, 1971) is exhaustive & exhausting, but his Ruskin (1985) in the Oxford "Past Masters" series does a splendid job of surveying the life & work in about 90 pages.

Robert Hewison is the most prolific Ruskin scholar I know, paying particular attention to Ruskin's art criticism (of the many Ruskin books he's published, several are exhibition catalogues). Hewison's John Ruskin (2007), in the OUP "Very Interesting People" series, is on its face longer than Landow by about 30 pages, but in reality quite a bit shorter, as it's printed in a larger typeface with far more generous margins & spacing. The "Very Interesting People" series is really just another Oxford recycling project – the series, which features David Levine-style pen & ink caricatures on the covers, & describes itself as "Bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures, amounts to paperback reprints of some of the more substantial entries in the 2004 Dictionary of National Biography. As befits a DNB entry, Hewison's life of Ruskin is sober & informative, but it's far less lively & searching than Landow's.

Alas, Francis O'Gorman's Ruskin (Sutton, 1999) is the loser among this bunch. The Sutton Pocket Biographies are "Highly readable brief lives of those who have played a significant part in history, and whose contributions still influence contemporary history." For "highly readable," I'm tempted to read "dumbed down." Fontana's Modern Masters & Oxford Past Masters, for all their implicit popular appeal, never condescended: Jonathan Culler on Saussure or Barthes, Martin Esslin on Artaud, Donald Davie on Pound (all Fontana), Anthony Kenny on Aquinas, Rosemary Ashton on George Eliot, Peter Singer on Hege (all Oxford) – all of these were highly sophisticated advanced introductions. But O'Gorman, who's done his share of real Ruskin criticism, seems to take his assignment from Sutton as a kind of scholarly holiday, chance to ramble over the life & trot out a few touchstone quotations from Ruskin; the Sutton Ruskin is breezy, readable, & in the end as forgettable as a 50-minute History Channel biography.

So there, Ruskinian Padwan: begin with Bell, if you can find him. If not, read Landow (read Landow anyway). Hewison is optional; O'Gorman is not recommended.

Of course, what I'm really hoping for is the graphic novel Ruskin (cf. the "For Beginners" series). If there's an artist who's itching to draw JR, I'm game to script it.