"Do I have to buy the book?"

[Slide #1: The Turbot]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this fall's booklist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

catty editors, part 439

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

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

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

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

opsimath's notes

[Walter Pater]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kindle canon

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

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

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

In alphabetical order, they are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

vacation reading ii

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

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

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

vacation reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nelle Walker Scroggins, 1927-2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day's. Best. News. (really)

[Professor Scroggins, preparing to begin his lecture]

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

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

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

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

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

Victorian copiousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

manuscript dating, with special reference to LZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

crap...

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

ruskin: turner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

overload

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

home stretch

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

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

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

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

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

the seductions of lecturing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hegel's 'do

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

How about:
Yeah, that works.

progress report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

anthologizing ii

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

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

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

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

anthologizing

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

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

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

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

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