the fate of books

I was arrested by Kenny Goldsmith's post early this week on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog. He was browsing a flea market near his New York apartment and came upon a stall which was selling what seemed like the bulk of poet Jackson Mac Low's library: "the entire history of New York's underground" in chapbooks, records, and ephemera seemed to be there, Goldsmith notes. The books weren't cheap – the dealer had arrived at his prices by checking the internet. It reminded Kenny G. of the moment, a few years back, when word went out that novelist David Markson's books had been sold to The Strand.*

I know that feeling of happening upon a book that's been owned by someone you know or respect, though in my case it's usually books by obscure academics or poets that have been owned by other obscure academics or poets. I have a few books on Ruskin that were owned by John D. Rosenberg, author of the ground-breaking The Darkening Glass; I have a copy of a colleague's TS Eliot study that was sent by the publisher to Denis Donohue, then promptly disposed of at The Strand (DD left the letter from the Press's editor folded in its pages); I have a number of poetry collections presented by one poet to another.

But what Goldsmith's post really made me think about was the fate of my own books. I've been accumulating books pretty seriously for almost three decades now, to the point where the shelves are full and groaning, and the stacks on the floor just won't go away. Back at my mother's house in Tennessee, there are several hundred of my dad's books – many of which I want to keep, some for sentimental value, some for research – and probably a couple hundred of my own paperbacks from my adolescence, many of which I can't bear parting with. While there are a few feet of shelf space still available in my university office, there are at least a thousand or 1200 books there.

I'm not for the moment concerned about the borderline hoarding behavior this manifests (I've probably worried about that in this space at other times...), but rather, what will become of those books when I'm no longer around to cherish them? I'm no James Joyce or Northrop Frye, that a library would want to take my books as a collection. I'm not even a Jackson Mac Low, whose books a dealer would be anxious to sift thru for whatever treasures might be there. I'm just a lowly minor poet & academic, who's accumulated several thousand volumes – most of them, frankly, worthless – over the past decades. Do I want to stick my daughters with the task of liquidating this stack? The local used bookstore has some 75-odd cartons of books from a deceased academic; they've been gradually working thru them for some 5 years now.

I think the solution is a gradual letting-go, as I've seen others do. One cousin-in-law retired from her film studies job and simply gave away all of her research library; she'd rather paint and study herbalism. A colleague in French moved to Paris; I now have the bulk of her Beckett library. LZ trimmed his library down to a few hundred volumes (mostly Loebs, I sometimes think) in his last years.

I think that's the solution. I'm not ready for it yet. I'm still in the accumulative mode. Come around in a couple decades, if you're still interested in that defunct technology, the book, & I'll be able to set you up with a few hundred.


*Goldsmith was pretty upset, & takes the opportunity to lament research libraries' having passed over Mac Low's personal library; but on a happier note, word has it from the UK Poetry Listserv that Mac Low's actual archive went to UCSD, & that a dealer expert in such matters culled the books of lasting scholarly interest. But still.

late Ruskin, on the rocks

Reading late Ruskin can be a disspiriting affair. There is a heady charm to the digressiveness of Fors Clavigera, a wonderful sense that one never quite knows what's coming next, and that very surprise is part of the power and – one might venture – innovation of the ongoing text (though Ruskin does indeed at one point in Deucalion refer to it as a "book"). But when it comes to the more straightforward "books" of his later years, the incompletion and digressiveness seem less charming or exciting than simply depressing, as though one were witnessing the slow-motion disintegration of a great mind. The effect is not unlike that produced by the later Cantos, I fear, where Pound's shored fragments no longer hold any luminosity in and of themselves, but simply function as shirt-cuff notes, shorthand indices to intellectual complexes that he can no longer be bothered to spell out or to explore in any detail.

Ruskin is of course always more discursive than Pound at even Pound's most voluble, but that very discursiveness, in the later books, is too often directed towards arcane polemics (as in the arguments with geologists in Deucalion) or, when he's lecturing, in puerile whimsy. The other week I finished the twenty-fifth volume of the Library Edition, that containing Love's Meinie (lectures on birds and bird-lore, mostly delivered at Oxford) and Proserpina (essays on flowers and floral classification, intended for various educative purposes). I'll admit I don't know much, and alas don't really care much, about either ornithology or botany. That may be one of my own failings. But neither did I learn much from either of Ruskin's books, and more than anything else found myself frustrated by their incompletion and air of general thrown-togetherness.

The twenty-sixth volume, containing Deucalion and various other writings on geology and mineralogy, is even more frustrating. It begins with a couple of articles on mineralogical subjects frankly too arcane for me to even begin to follow. The volume Deucalion itself, issued like so many of Ruskin's later works in serial installments, is a self-admitted ragbag. Ruskin begins the book proper by lamenting how many projects he has worked himself up for, how many books he could write, had he the proper time and his connected wits about him. But in the meantime, he concedes, he will throw together what notes he has accumulated on various subjects into books, and in Deucalion he will collect materials on his first and longest-lasting intellectual passion, geology. (More or less concurrently, Ruskin is also selecting passages – or overseeing the selection of passages – from earlier works such as Modern Painters to be reissued in various "Ruskin on ____" collections, all of which will be given typically arcane Latin titles.)

Despite all the passion as Ruskin invested in mineralogy, what's collected in Deucalion falls far short of gripping reading. There are several chapters on the "denudation" of landscape, which seem to grapple with the implications of Lyell's geological theories – that most aspects of currently observable geology can be explained by the action of forces we can observe every day (erosion by wind or water, most notably), only extrapolated over an enormous period of time. Ruskin is no young-earth creationist (though he takes many ill-directed jabs at Thomas Huxley along the way), but his arguments with the long-span incrementalists seem remarkably naive and obtuse. He wants there to be a shaping hand in the landscape, but he can't quite bring himself to throw out Lyell for Genesis; he just can't see, or can't stretch his time-vistas long enough to comprehend, how a small river can wear out a deep canyon.

Even more depressing are the several chapters devoted to explaining the movement of glaciers. It's not worth going into the details here, as much of this material is devoted to picking fights with one previous geologist, and promoting the work of another. Suffice it to say that Ruskin is convinced that a glacier cannot carve out a valley or a lakebed – any more, he explains, than honey is able to carve out a runnel in his teaspoon. He takes great delight in describing his glacial experiments in the kitchen of his friend Lady Mount-Temple, in which various cooking-pots and folded napkins play the role of mountains, while great quantities of ice cream represent glaciers.

The first volume of Deucalion ends with a discussion of the stratification and folds of mountains, in which Ruskin demonstrates his own counter-experiments to observations of other geologists by careful drawings of dyed and squashed folds of uncooked pie-crust. The second volume begins with of all things a lecture on the movement of snakes. It is frankly one of Ruskin's most embarrassing performances, all the more so because of the deep fascination he had with serpents (played out at great length in his discussion of Apollo and Python in the final volume of Modern Painters). "Living Waves" is a jumble-sale of drawings of snakes, first-hand observation of them at the zoological gardens, snake-lore from England to India, and some mildly interesting discussion of serpentine iconography in medieval art. It's most interesting when Ruskin takes on Huxley's evolutionary discussion of how the snake is related to the lizard; Ruskin prefers a moral, functional conception, in which the snake is midway between the trout and the bird.

It's hard to imagine what a live audience made of this performance. Ruskin notes at the outset of the lecture text that he had been cautioned that the lecture was somewhat discontinuous, so he provides a his reader with a thumbnail outline – which frankly does nothing more than underline its discontinuity. The brief chapter which follows, however, almost makes Deucalion worth the reading. "Revision" is in essence a reassertion of the whole of Ruskin's writings on nature and natural science, and on the representation of nature in art. It recapitulates and reasserts his faith that all observation and representation of natural form has the effect of giving the human observer access to knowledge of the divine hand that has made everything. Natural religion, Ruskin explicitly notes here, has always underlain his own commitment to nature itself.

Following this rather moving reassertion of Ruskin's life-work, there is a brief chapter on stellar shapes in minerals which trails off (abruptly and unconvincingly) into a piece of classical iconography. And then Deucalion, mercifully, is over. Well, almost – for like all of Ruskin's other late books, the text proper is followed by a score of pages of notes, drafts, and fragments for its continuation.

I have suffered for my Ruskin-obsession. Someday, if I ever get around to writing and publishing this book, you'll have the same opportunity.

illustrated living

A couple of years ago in this space I reported on "brief lives" of Ruskin, offering capsule reviews of capsule biographies by Quentin Bell, George Landow, Robert Hewison, and Francis O'Gorman. I won't take back anything I said there – the recommendations still stand – but I've got to admit that, so far as the possibly mythical "general reader" goes, Kevin Jackson's The Worlds of John Ruskin (Pallas Athene & the Ruskin Foundation, 2010) is the brand-new, shiny and beautiful state-of-the-art vade mecum.

Last time I mentioned the role which biographical series played in the production of those earlier books: Bell's Ruskin was written for the Hogarth Press's "Writers and Critics" series; Landow's for Oxford UP's "Past Masters"; Hewison's for the grandparent of all English capsule biography series, the Dictionary of National Biography (then republished in OUP's "Very Interesting People" series). One series I didn't mention, and one book I didn't note, was Frederic Harrison's John Ruskin (Macmillan, 1902), published in the "English Men of Letters" series, edited by John Morley. That series, which Morley took on in 1877, seems to have attained almost Cliff's Note status for British students. As John Gross notes in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters,

No comparable series has ever come so close to attaining the rank of a traditional British institution. In [Harold Nicolson's] Some People, the unlovable J. D. Marstock keeps a complete set on his mantelpiece while cramming for the Foreign Office examination, a long row of thin yellow Men of Letters and square red ones: '"My tutor," Marstock would say, "told me that the examiners expect one to have read the E.M. of L.S."'

Be that as it may, Harrison's is a really delightful little book. Harrison was an erstwhile disciple of Ruskin's who found his true spiritual home with the religion of Positivism, but who retained his deep love and respect for Ruskin's thought. He writes very well indeed; his remarks on Ruskin's celebrated "purple" style are matched only by Chesterton's.

But flashing forward a century, were I asked to put a single book on Ruskin in the hands of a neophyte, right now it would be Jackson's Worlds of John Ruskin. Jackson isn't so much a critic or scholar of Ruskin (as are Hewison, O'Gorman, and Landow) as he is a deeply invested advocate. Jackson is a literary journalist who writes on all manner of subjects for the Independent; he's scripted two comic book adaptations of Ruskin's thought, How To See and How to Be Rich; he apparently has a big illustrated history of high modernism in the works. He writes very well, in the manner of intelligent British journalists. And he's immersed himself in Ruskin to an impressive degree to produce The Worlds of John Ruskin.

This large-format book is not at all in the category of the handy pocket Men of Letters or Past Masters series; it reminds me more of Thames & Hudson's illustrated "Literary Lives" series (Peter Ackroyd on Pound, Chester Anderson on Joyce, etc.). But it's larger & longer than the T&H books, and the typeface is more compact. In the course of his 140 pages, Jackson presents a judicious life of Ruskin – he doesn't pass over any of the weird bits (the messed-up marriage to Effie Gray, the obsession with Rose La Touche, the icky fascination with young girls) – and a thumbnail overview of the works, highlighting what's ground-breaking and not passing over what's problematic (JR's inability in his later years to stick to a point for more than 5 pages, for instance).

So far so good, but Jackson's text is still outclassed at least by Bell, Hewison, and Landow. What's really the selling point in The Worlds of John Ruskin, however, is the illustrations, 165 of them, all beautifully reproduced (if occasionally too small) and lovingly captioned in detail. It's always nice to know what the subject of a biography looks like, & the picture inserts in most big biographies enable us to put faces to the subject & (with luck) many of the other major players. Here we've got plenty of pictures of JR, along with Effie, Millais, Rossetti, William Morris, Rose La Touche, and so forth. But we've also got 111 of Ruskin's own drawings and watercolors, ranging from architectural details, to self-portraits (cf. the cover), to fully-realized landscapes.

Ruskin's writings are peppered with bilious little complaints: while he's got to explain something in prose, he's got to write this lecture or book, he's got somehow to save the world through this piece of writing – but he'd rather be looking at flowers or stones, he'd much rather be drawing. The book manages, as no other biography of Ruskin I've encountered, to keep us in touch with Ruskin's eye, the sense that is at the center of all of his aesthetic and cultural thought.

[John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock at Glenfinlas, 1853]

Hillary Gravendyk: Harm

Harm, Hillary Gravendyk (Omnidawn, 2011)

One feels old. The letter carrier today brought Michael Heller's huge and beautifully designed This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010 (Nightboat), and all I could think was, this isn't right – Mike's a guy with a handful of exquisite collections, not a brick of a book like this. But then I realized, I was stuck in the late 1980s, when Heller published In the Builded Place; and he's been publishing a new, strong collection every few years since; and before you know it, yes all those slim volumes add up to an almost 600-page volume. Need I add that I can't wait to dive into This Constellation, to re-meet all those old acquaintances among his poems, & savor the new work?
***
I suppose we've been witnessing the full-blown return of the lyric "I" for the last 2 decades or so – and some of course would say it's never gone away. Hillary Gravendyk's Harm is an almost unbearably personal sequence of poems, written in the wake of the author's double lung transplant. "Harm" – the harm of her decade-long pulmonary disorder, the harm of the unimaginably invasive medical procedure that she's undergone, the psychological harm of living with one's face to a fundamentally uncertain future – harm is here fused intricately and inextricably with healing, so that the process of healing itself becomes a kind of torture, the hive of bee-stings with every breath taken in.

Gravendyk intersperses densely metaphorical prose poems with sparser, still metaphorized, verse. In the end it's the sure-footed lyricism of the book, the impressive music of the lines that carries the reader onward thru the at times nightmarish hospital landscape, where the body becomes interpenetrated, even fused with the digital mechanisms our century deploys to prolong, sustain, and jump-start life.

Shore curved like an instep against the soft fray of water
but all the litter of other lives
and minus shells, minus salt glass

begins a poem on a "Sleep Chart": see how "lives" and "like," "litter" and "water" bind the second line to the first, how the 2nd and 3rd lines play variations on the "l" sound, how the delicate spondee of "salt glass" (delicate on account of its short vowels) touches a faint rhyme with "lives."

I want to use the words "lovely" and "moving" for this book – they feel like boilerplate. Suffice it to say that Gravendyk's collection kept me, rivetted, in the rooms & neighborhood of a hospital – my least favorite place on earth – for eighty rapt pages.

[119]

£ian economics, & where not to learn about them

Like most people who've read & worked on Ezra Pound, I've always found the economic side of his writings pretty tough going. Sure, I can understand and sympathize with his outrage at how capitalism was working itself out in the first part of the century. And needless to say, I've always found the "Jewish-banker-&-financier-conspiracy" place he arrived at in his later thought to be just plain obscene. But in between Ruskinian outrage and anti-Semitic madness, there's Social Credit, the economic scheme hatched by Major Clifford H. Douglas in the early part of the century, passed on to Pound by AR Orage, and ominipresent in Pound's thought and correspondence form the mid-30s on; and I've always found Social Credit a hard business to understand, even in the relatively lucid exposition Hugh Kenner offers in The Pound Era.

So I was mightily pleased when I discovered, a year or so back, that Meghnad Desai, former LSE professor of economics & the author of Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso 2002) had written a book on Pound's economics. Desai (that's Baron Desai to you commoners) is, in the words of one reviewer, a "mild sort of heretic himself who has written sympathetically about Karl Marx, but who, whether he admits it or not, is now a mainstream economist." That's certainly my impression of Marx's Revenge; not at all a Marxist text (despite coming from Verso), but one of the most lucid and impressive histories of economic analysis I've encountered. I had high hopes that the Baron would be able to untangle and usefully contextualize Social Credit, Silvio Gesell, and all those other economic "heresies" that figure so largely in the mature Pound's thought.

The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound (Faber 2006) is not an easy book to come by, and I finally got my hands on a copy, thanks to the magic of internet shopping, early last week. It proves to be quite the disappointment. I don't mind that Desai doesn't really address the poetry; it's not his bailiwick, after all. And I suppose I don't really mind that he doesn't even attempt to tackle the mountain of Pound secondary literature. I do mind, however, that the secondary material he tackles feels like what happened to be on his shelves at the moment: we get The Pound Era, we get Paul Morrison's and Peter Nicholls's books on Pound's politics. But for biographical reference, we get Noel Stock's ancient (1970) biography (he's "Nigel" stock on the first page of the Preface, a clue to how well copy-edited this book is) and John Tytell's 1987 rehash of Stock (not to mention E. Fuller Torrey's psychological slash-job The Roots of Treason). Where, pray tell, is Humphrey Carpenter's huge and (for better or worse) state-of-the-art 1988 A Serious Character?

And why, if Desai's proposing to write on Pound's political economy, hasn't he dipped into some of the more recent excellent studies: Alec Marsh's prize-winning Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The Spirit of Jefferson (University of Alabama Press 1998), or Tim Redman's Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge 1991), or Leon Surette's Pound in Purgatory (Indiana 2003)? Desai doesn't even cite Earle Davis's Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics (Kansas 1968), which flawed as it is is far more careful and thoughtful than The Route of All Evil.

The problems of Desai's book go beyond the copy-editing blips of misremembered names, dropped commas, and multiple outright repetitions. Events are given as taking place at one date on one page, a different date on the next. Paragraphs veer off course into name-dropping digressions. Sentences metastasize into ungainly, well-nigh ungrammatical blobs. Explications of abstruse economic theory take us out to the deep end of the terminological pool (and this in a book explicitly pitched for the general reader) then, just as they seem to be nearing climax, abruptly break off into biographical notes.

This is in short one of the most ill-edited, ill-written books I've encountered in ages. It's not merely a work "of the left hand," as Milton famously called his own prose tracts, but it seems to have been written in snatches, dashed off in airport lounges between flights, or scribbled at in the twenty minutes before lights-out that we call "story-time" around here. Desai claims that his book will elucidate the roots of Pound's economic theory, situate it within the context of other "money cranks," and show that Pound's ideas have relevance to the age of globalism. Score: #1, C-; #2, D; #3, F (I count maybe three sentences in the book that assert – not demonstrate – the relevance of EP's economics to the contemporary).

What does The Route of All Evil offer the Pound scholar? nothing. What does it offer the general reader? nothing she or he can't get more lucidly, and more elegantly, from a half-hour's nosing around in The Pound Era. So why, for the love of Pete, did Faber of all people publish this thing? There's a clue in the Preface, where Baron Desai recalls an evening in "House of Lords in the Peers' Guest Room (the only bar where peers can entertain guests," and a conversation with his friends (Baron) Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's biographer, and Matthew Evans, Baron Evans of Temple Guiting, in which the topic of Pound's politics came up. Yes, that Matthew Evans – managing director of Faber, who of course encouraged Desai to put up a proposal & write the book. And they say small press publishing is an insider's game.

the tangible thing

Reading Wells's Tono-Bungay on the iPad, after reading stacks of his science fiction things on my (pre-Touch) Kindle over this past summer. The iPad reading experience is, at least to these aging eyes, rather more pleasant than the Kindle experience. I appreciate the Kindle's lightness, its slip-in-pocket-of-your-cargo-shorts go-anywhereness; I like its seemingly infinite battery life; but I'm not sold on the "digital ink" display, nor do I like any of the typefaces available. That's okay: it delivers the text, and it's been more than good enough for engrossed readings of Verne, Wells, Gaskell, and a bit of George Eliot.

Tono-Bungay? From the first fifth of the thing, I can say that it's quite well written indeed. Rather moving, in fact. Hard to see in what direction the story's going to head – I'd picked it up after reading a description of it (in John Gross's Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters) as a kind of ripping satire of Victorian commercialism, but thus far it's shaping up as a rather intimate Bildungsroman. Wells is better than Gaskell here (at least the Gaskell I've read), but he's no George Eliot.

I had the occasion to revisit the other Eliot (T. Stearns) the other week, in the form of the bulky HBJ hardcover of his Complete Poems and Play 1909-1950 – the one where the cover is dominated by the aged eagle staring purse-lipped from behind his round spectacles. The binding of that particular book is in a parlous state, I'm afraid; a couple of signatures are on the verge of falling out. And that's not to mention the rather shocking degree of underlining & marginalia pretty much throughout. (Okay, not quite throughout – I haven't really marked Practical Cats much at all, nor the weaker of the plays.)

I bought the book in my second year of graduate school, ostensibly for Joel Porte's course on American Modernism, but really because I wanted an Eliot. My own copies of his poems – if you're of a certain age you know the editions, those thin little HBJ mass-market paperbacks, The Waste Land and Other Poems in grey, Four Quartets in yellow – had gotten soaked one undergraduate year when the pipes in the apartment above me had frozen. I kept the books, swollen and curled as they were, for a few years, unwilling to part with the familiar typeface, the now-blurred ballpoint notes, but eventually the mold drove me to throw them away & replace them with the Complete Poems and Plays, itself now foxed and beginning to disintegrate, the corners of the leaves of the first hundred pages or so almost entirely worn into finger-friendly curves.

No, I have nothing really new to add to the proliferating conversation on the merits and demerits of digital, screen reading. I'm by no means an early adopter, but I'm happy with the Kindle and the iPad, happy to be able to carry around bookcases'-worths of Victorian and Edwardian novels, never having to worry about eventually shelving them. But I wonder if I'll ever make of any of those books my own in the same tangible way that I did those Eliot volumes, or that copy of To the Lighthouse I read to tatters, or the creased and multiply-read Princess of Mars back in my mother's house? Tono-Bungay remains oddly intangible to me, and even when I digitally "underline" passages, or fill the digital "margin" with typed notes, I can't feel myself interacting with the page in that same way.

novelties

As of 3.00 pm Friday, I've been on Spring Break. Which means of course beer bongs, foam raves, and general non-stop partying. Not really. Indeed, I'm wondering whether I've forgotten how to relax. Even reading novels, rather than recondite slim volumes of contemporary poetry or gnarly, ill-written works of literary & cultural criticism, makes me feel guilty, as tho I'm stealing time away from what I ought to be doing. You can take the boy out of the fundamentalist, guilt-ridden, work-ethical protestant church, I guess, but you can't take the protestant, fundamentalist, guilt-ridden work ethic out of the boy...

At least there's a tenuous Ruskin connection in Forster's Howards End (1910), which I finished re-reading last night, in a kind of ecstasy of wonder at the man's prose and the complex balancing of thought and emotion in his characters. The ill-fated Leonard Bast, that is, when we first meet him is making his way thru Stones of Venice. That reading marks him in our eyes, and in the eyes of Schlegel sisters, who're hip enough to be concerned mostly with far more current movements in art & literature, with Wedekind and Augustus John. Bast, in contrast, falls into precisely the group Stuart Eagles (After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870-1920, OUP 2011) defines as "upper-working-class and lower-middle-class autodidacts who often worked as clerks..." So that's good for at least a sentence or two, I guess, contrasting JR's readership in the 1st decade of the century with what the cool kids were reading.

On the other hand, there's really no excuse for re-reading Michael Moorcock's spectacularly hastily and sloppily written Elric novel, The Vanishing Tower (or The Sleeping Sorceress – choose your own overheated title). Maybe someday I'll put the thousands of hours of my youth (and the scores of hours of my recent middle age) I've devoted to Moorcock to some kind of use. Maybe there's a biography there to be written...

energized

My resolution to jump right back blogging seems to have gone awry. Any way –

No, I didn't go to AWP this year. I know I should've gone. All the cool kids went, and after all I've got two newish books I ought to be flogging more assiduously. Sometime I'll go, I think, but till then I'll forgo writing about it from the outside. I'm not sure I could handle all that many poets in one place at one time.

Where I did go (last weekend) was the Louisville Conference, of which Bob Archambeau gives a pretty decent précis here. I had a good time, saw some friends, ate some good food, bought a few books. More importantly, it gave my thinking life a shot of monkey glands like I hadn't had in ages.

That is to say, this has so far – and it's over half done – a particularly gnarly semester. The administrative position, combined with an uncongenial teaching schedule, has left me months and months behind on all sorts of writing obligations. And along with that, the planning & blocking out of the new "big" project has gotten entirely sidelined. But I was on a panel with Bob – whose own "big" project I've been watching take shape for a couple years now – and Vince Sherry, one of the people I consider among the true shining lights of modernist scholarship, and the mere proximity to those folks, not to mention hearing their work-in-progress, got me back to thinking about Ruskin. Not just Ruskin – because not an hour goes by in which I don't think about Ruskin (call me obsessed) – but Ruskin in larger contexts, Ruskin as proto-modern, Ruskin as a vast unacknowledged influence on the century that follows him.

The problem of writing & arguing this, of course, in much larger than that of being able to spin it out in cocktail conversation. I find myself with at least three directions to pursue, three "leads" to follow in linking JR to the "high" modernist conversation. None of them amounts to a kind of "field theory" of Ruskinian modernism, but taken together, they make a compelling if disjointed argument. Right now what I'm trying to untangle is precisely what is Ruskin & what is Ruskin & a bunch of other guys (Carlyle, Pugin, etc.). That is, I'm trying to separate out the specifically Ruskinian from a whole phalanx of aesthetic and social theory. It means reading a lot of stuff on the Victorians (as I've already been doing), & thinking a good deal about the social situation of what John Holloway called the "Victorian Sage" (and what Stefan Collini calls the "public moralist").

Today however has been mostly a non-work day. A few hours at the Florida Renaissance Festival (after Thursday's mind-bending gumbo and last night's Thai, I had my doubts as to whether my kilt would still fit), then a lazy afternoon of tinkering at my latest infantile time-waster: model ships. It's all new to me; I built tons of plastic models as a kid, but it never occurred to me to actually paint them. Now I realize, surfing around the web and being astonished at the jobs various folks have done on models I own, that the finish is really the heart of the enterprise.

checking in

I have been a poor blogger. That's not true: in point of fact, for a bit over a month now I haven't been a blogger at all. I hope to get back to it in a few days. I trust no-one's missed me.

Nothing particularly earth-shattering has happened over the last month. I did a reading for Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles at Our Fair University, to a really humblingly large turnout. I think it went well. I don't know whether anybody's buying the book. It can be gotten from that link there, or from Small Press Distribution.

There have been two reviews, both of them very gratifying: Lisa Lynne Moore, whose more normal field of study is 18th-century literature and the poetics of gardens (why didn't we talk about this stuff back when we were in grad school together?), noticed the book in her excellent blog Sister Arts. Patrick Pritchett, in his blog Writing the Messianic, says some very nice things indeed. I'm pleased to know that my "Osaka Bondage" is the first poem he's encountered to make use of "the perverse practice of bukkake"; truth to tell, it's the only one I've yet encountered to make any use of it. But I don't get around much.

I've had copies of the next book, Red Arcadia, for a couple of weeks now. I'm still very proud of it, and a little mystified at how I managed to write some of the poems in there. It can be gotten from the usual sources: from Shearsman, at the link there, or from a variety of sellers they've linked. By word-count, it's a much better buy than Torture Garden (more pages, more poems, more words). We'll see whether the world thinks so. I've sent out several batches of copies now, and aside from a few enthusiastic words from friends – well, the first few weeks after a book comes out one always feels that it's dropped off a cliff into a void.

I'm off to Louisville for the Conference Formerly Known as the Twentieth Century Literature Conference next week, on a panel with the most excellent Bob Archambeau and Vincent Sherry, both of whom will no doubt put me to shame as we all talk about continuities between 19th-century literature and high modernism. Yep, for me that means what else but Ruskin? Another three or four volumes of the Library Edition have rolled by since last mention. Right now I'm in the middle of Love's Meinie, his book of (what else?) ornithology. Yes, the man could write a book about any damned thing that caught his interest. The question is, should he have?

When I get back from Louisville, I have high-toned moral resolutions in place to be blogging again on a regular basis. No apologies: I still believe in this medium.

shameless self-promotion

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

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

Joseph Donahue: Dissolves

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

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

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

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

[118]

year's end lists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

shameless (but virtuous) self-promotion

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

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

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

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

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

my robert creeley

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

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

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

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

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

ruskin crossroads (revised)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ruskin crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

being edited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

blurbs

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

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

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

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

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

John Peck, Contradance (U of Chicago)

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

Alan Halsey, Even if only out of

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

my military

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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