14 march

The semester wears its ways towards the end; I feel weary, deeply weary. Off to the ICFA conference next week. My paper is for the most part written—only a few lines of the conclusion to go. I wrote it, after accumulating notes and scribbles and thoughts for the better part of the semester, in a couple of hard sessions on the 750 Words treadmill. The thing actually works, at least for me. At present I'm on almost a 20-day streak of writing at least 750 words a day, most days well over 1000.

I think it was Jonathan Mayhew who at some point put me onto the notion of the "chain," which he seems to have gotten from somewhere on Seinfeld. I don't know the reference, but this particular "stupid motivational trick" works pretty well for me, with my thankfully rather mild case of OCD. I like continuity: I like knowing that I've read a certain number of books each month, I like knowing that I'm making steady progress thru a long text (re-reading Ulysses at the moment, for instance, three chapters a week), I like making measurements and keeping track of things.

What I write on 750 Words is turning out to be pretty useful, as opposed to what I write in my notebooks, which tends to go unread for many days, weeks, sometimes months after I've jotted it down. (Usually just long enough for me not to be able to make out my own handwriting at crucial points.) Every day, Trollope-wise, I start by re-reading what I wrote the day before. I copy and paste useful passages into a Word document so that I'll have them ready at hand. And then I start in on a new day's page. Happily enough, I often find myself not running out of things to say before I get to 750 words, but running out of time in which to write, having pressed well past the 750 mark.

I think I might be applying this platform to the next two minor writing assignments on my platter. After that, when I start tackling bigger things, who knows?

11 march (annotation & its discontents, part 985)

The latest chapter in my crusade against misleading, mistaken, and outright batshit insane annotations in teaching texts:

I habitually teach out of Norton Critical Editions. They are for the most part sturdy & reliable, and include handy selections of secondary material. They vary in quality from just okay to quite excellent. I have yet, however, to encounter a NCE that doesn't have at least one howler in its annotations. Case in point:

This semester I'm teaching King Lear out of the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Grace Ioppolo. It's a good edition, with the text based on the Folio but with Quarto emendations and editions—a composite text, yes, but this particular semester is too short to get them fully to grapple with the differences between F and Q texts, as a facing page edition would do. The secondary material is first-rate, from Tate and Johnson through Kott & Brook down to Stanley Cavell.

And then, reading the heath scene of Act 3, scene 4, I hit this famous—and to me very moving—passage. Lear is exposed to the weather, and has begun to comprehend how harsh the realities of life are to those "Poor naked wretches...That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm," who have never had the protection from the elements that he, in his royal state, has enjoyed:

Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just. (3.4.33-36)

I've always found these lines fairly self-evident: Lear is addressing "pomp" itself, or those who enjoy the comforts of wealth—himself, really—enjoining the lucky to "take physic" or medicine by exposing themselves to the harshnesses that the poor habitually undergo, so that those lucky ones—"pomp"—might give of their excess wealth (the "superflux," surplus, superfluity) to the poor.

And how does Ioppolo gloss these lines? As follows:

33. physic, pomp: medicinal curative (or purge) and excessive food.
35. superflux: (1) surplus; (2) discharge from the bowels.

So let me get this straight: given these glosses, we read Lear's sentence as saying, Take a laxative and eat excessive food, so that you can take a big ole shit on the poor. Well, I'm all for reconsidering received readings, and reevaluating previous interpretations — but I'm not sure I can go along for the ride on this one. Indeed, all I can think is, what the aitch-ee-double-toothpicks was the editor thinking when she wrote these notes?

birthday

By the way, I just realized Culture Industry turned 9 years old yesterday. Golly. A couple of months back, I was under the misapprehension that I'd been at this for almost 10 years, and was seriously wondering whether I ought to pull the plug and put the thing out of its 12-readers-a-day misery on its 10th anniversary. But hey, I'm actually having fun with this again, throwing a few thoughts out now & again, and posting some new poems. So I think I'll keep it up, on some level, for at least another year.

8 march

Busy. This week has been our spring break, but there's been no real let-up in the busyness. A trip to Ikea, and the concomitant dithering about with Alan wrenches and hammers, putting things together. Finally biting the bullet and buying a Time Capsule so that our computers can be backed up automatically — with the delightful side-effect of greatly improved wifi coverage. Installing a big-screen TV that has been sitting in a box in the dining room for eight months, and for which we really didn't have an adequate space. (Feeling quite handymanish and masterful about figuring out how to do that one!) Grading papers, and more grading papers.

My ICFA paper has yet to be written out, though there are plenty of notes on hand. I have, what, eleven days or so? I'm half tempted to get up and try to deliver the thing extemporaneously, from notes, as I were talking to a class. But I don't think I have the courage to do that; while I've come to the point where I feel I can hold my own critically with the sci-fi/fantasy crowd — and certainly I think I know more about this set of texts than almost anyone else, at this point — I know that my improvisatory skills, while perfectly adequate for the baggy time requirements of the classroom, are highly likely to lead me well over time in a panel setting: that is, I go on too long.

I almost wish I had nothing but the title on hand — that ICFA weren't publicizing abstracts, as they did last time around. Because if that were the case, I could work up the essay I'm deeply excited about right now. Get this: Michael Moorcock is usually the most conservative craftsman possible, in terms of narrative technique; his books are so straightforward they make Lord of the Rings, with its back-and-forth between focal characters (see especially the cunning structure of Two Towers) look avant-garde.  But there are a handful of books — Mother London, the third and fourth Cornelius books, Breakfast in the Ruins, and one or two others — in which Moorcock's narratives are highly fragmented, deeply paratactic. One could argue that he's following Burroughs (William, not Edgar Rice) in this, or other postwar figures. But I think it's possible to make the argument that Moorcock arrives at this echt modernist narrative technique, not through any recognized path of literary influence (say, Flaubert to Joyce to Burroughs) but precisely through the pressures and habits of the trashy pulp writing which he grew up and came of age writing.

Details to follow, at some point. Maybe in the Moorcock book I'm quite seriously contemplating writing.

4 march

[more tens:]

A touch on the audio screen and one

harsh word brings the whole evening

crashing down. I've been on edge,

you've been on edge, she's been

on edge – conjugation of inevitable

verb. The mystery of the lost meter,

to be rendered moot when the sea

percolates up through the limestone

and erases all our mistakes. Both

entrances blocked. Drive trains.

                  ***

The natural posture is upright. Natural

position. Problem of the "natural." I toss

and turn, every night, to get you closer.

We run, where in sunlight or rain,

to stand still. This damned—another—

book. Pieces, bite. Shards. How do

"ew" vowels evolve: my father pronounced

it "strown"? Towards the end, he

couldn't live in comfort, slept propped

up with a finger on the morphine trigger.

                  ***

The dream of great icicles fallen, smashed

on the sidewalk. Not on her, impaling

or crushing, but she herself shattered.

The Church retreating, the license

plates "Christian." This night suspends

water, hums with stone. I see only

from machines. Signs at the foot

of Trümmelbachfälle, the fatal

dangers of drinking one's water

too cold. Ammonia through the ceiling.

1 march

[some more tens:]

A gravid female apteryx, in x-

ray: the four-pound body swollen

with a gross one-pound egg. What

system would account for thirteen

separate sorts of finch, thirteen

acts of special creation? Long dappled

grass, a highway paved with

linnets' wings. Discipline. You learn

to channel those nasty drives.

A word for it, Hegelian almost.

                  ***

The Real Thing. Das Es. Look, but don't

touch. Don't see. One language alone,

he tells, won't do, but what's said

isn't worth the hearing. Some god

bends his graceful, rib-rounded

torso to touch some nymph. Instant

rerun. She has an idea for the muse,

sharper than she ought to be, more

determined by far than me. Father

Helios, all a-wobble.

                  ***

Very like a whale. Or a wombat.

(Begin again.) The beautiful young

people once dazzled with their earnest

resolve. Today the coastal metropoles

crumble as ironic sea levels centimeter

upward. How much of that debt

is mine, how much yours? And who

do we pay it to? Era, earful, any time

of day. Others' letters delivered, speed

on to whatever shadowed box.

27 february

[some tens:]

 
-->

An electric clap, and the sky shuts

down. And pours. My desires, like yours,

are I expect rather simple. Orality, say.

The windows are sheeted, the streets

glazed with water. I do not know

my desires by sight or name, suspect

licking and swallowing and tasting

are involved. We all want

to be loved – they say. Everything

is there for the eating, under the clouds.

                  ***

Can you feel the muscle hardening?

Is it there? Is it tasty, or visually

satisfying, or moist? Where does it go

afterwards? When someone shuts off

the lights. Clap clap. If this has

a history, it's news to me, but there

are more things I don't know than

things I do. They preened themselves,

evidently, on their visual literacy. Does

it move independently of the joint?

                  ***

Pretty ballerinas at the barre. At

the bar. I stretched, pirouetted,

and forced my feet into numbered

positions for about three weeks,

then pulled a muscle. Like facets

of a crystal. They twirl and dip

and swoon. Alone, the slim body

curves as with pain, or hunger,

or aspiration. Reach for the stars.

Where did I put my shoes?

18 february

Sunday, in a kind of all-day fury of writing, I finished a draft of the paper I'm to deliver later this week in Louisville. I've never been one to put these things off to the very last minute; I know folks who've turned out dazzling papers the night before a conference, or on the plane en route—but I need at least a few days' cushion, especially when there's a question of time. Right now it's at 9 pages, which is a bit long, given my drawly delivery, for a 20-minute paper. So I need a few intense hours of cutting to get it into shape; it'll be where it needs to be before Friday, I know.

Next month is the Fantasy/Sci Fi conference; that paper exists pretty much as a detailed abstract and several thousand words of scattered notes, which will magically coalesce into a 20-minute rhapsody in the week or two before the conference. (Or will be forced into such with a great expense of sweat and blood...) I'm not a great improviser of thought or expression. I know folks who, when asked an out-of-the-way question, or given an unexpected prompt, can come up with a wholly plausible and even interesting argument, right on the spot. That's not me. Everything I write, it seems, is the product of a long process of stewing over a given question or a given text. So even if I write the conference paper in a single concentrated 8-hour session, the resulting document is the boiling-down of many many hours of thought.

Alas, however, the recursive and scattered nature of my thinking is such that what gets boiled down is often no better than nugatory.

15 february

So here's what I'm thinking about this Valentine's Day weekend: first & most importantly, I took the girls to see The Lego Movie this afternoon. It was okay—despite what the reviewers might say, I thought it was no better than okay. General consensus between the girls was that you had to be a boy really into Lego to entirely enjoy it, but it was okay. Familial reaction to the message of be yourself, don't always build by the rules, etc.: great, girls, but the model soldiers are still off limits until I can trust you to paint horses for me.
***
I'm finishing up a conference paper—Louisville, in just a few days' time—on Ronald Johnson's ARK and science fiction. I guess this counts as part of my recent hurling of myself into the SF/fantasy field, tho it's also part of my longstanding investment in RJ. (One reader notes that Intricate Thicket seems to contain an entire "short monograph" on RJ.) Baby steps into SF/fantasy, really. I find myself running over genre-defining & genre-defending arguments that most of the more seasoned scholars in the field, alas, would consider painfully old hat.

But then I'm working on another paper, this one for ICFA—a real live SF/fantasy conference—on Michael Moorcock and how he's revised his work over the years. Which means I've been thinking a lot about the mechanics and motivations behind post-publication revision (think Auden, think Wordsworth, think Sir Walter Scott), but I've also been thinking about it in the context of the SF/fantasy field, where reworking one's earlier work, so far as I know, is a rather less common thing for a writer to do.

It's true, I've been feeling lumpish and stupid for a good long while now—that may in part explain why I've done so little towards maintaining this blog-thing—but at times I reflect that the moments when I feel lumpish and stupid are perhaps the moments when I'm most conscious of my ignorance, and am working hardest to allay it: the moments, that is, when I'm learning something.

13 february

I have trouble writing. No, that's not quite true—when I've gotten going, I write fairly fluently and not particularly slowly. What I have trouble doing is a) screwing myself down into my chair or in front of my notebook/laptop and starting something, and b) writing on a regular basis.

I've been toying with more or less artificial frameworks to keep me at it. One has been a Word document on my desktop called "NOTEPAD," in which I resolved to write at least 500 words a day—500 words on a single, coherent topic, making some kind of significant exploration or intervention. I was doing pretty well; I'd kept it up for the better part of a week with only a single day's break. But I knew that I was going to inevitably "break the chain," as it were, and there was no external monitor that'd chastise me.

Then I remembered the 750 Words website, which I'd joined a couple of years ago and forgotten about over the past year. It's pretty straightforward: you write at least 750 words a day; the site tracks your word count and your diligence; if you keep it up day after day, it rewards you with little doodads and dingbats. There are problems no doubt—there's no way to write in italics, you can download what you've written, but only as txt files, etc.—but for sheer mechanical prodding, I'm finding my return to the site pretty darned useful.

I'm sure there are hundreds of similar things out there. If you know of a better one, let me know.

10 february

In a long aside in his 1977 essay “Sturgeon” (collected in Starboard Wine), Samuel Delany discusses the widespread fan impact of Theodore Sturgeon’s revision of his 1947 story “Maturity,” which was first published in Astounding, then printed in a significantly revised version in an anthology. Apparently, for a scifi author to revise his work was practically unheard of at the time. Delany relates this to  a wider phenomenon: that while writers of literature are apt to place an enormous value on the process of revision, at times even boasting about how many times they have worked and reworked a text before it sees publication (and here their models would seem to be Flaubert and Joyce), SF authors don’t talk much about their writing process, and would even seem to fetishize the production of first-draft publishable work.

Delany teases out two explanations for this: The first, a “synchronic” description of the genre, would have it that the field of science fiction is something like a circus, in which multiple wonders are performed simultaneously, and in which the desired effect of any given piece (ie, story) on an audience is something along the “gosh, wow” line of the audience's response to a particularly good trapeze jump or a particularly good piece of clownery. You do a trick, and then you go on to the next one; to go back and re-do that last tumble, just because it wasn't quite perfect, is pretty much unheard of—just not how it's done under the big top. Literary fiction, on the other hand, places a much greater emphasis on a kind of muted, methodical realism. SF writers, then, are far more likely to stress the ideas and the novums of their work; literary writers, in a kind of compensatory gesture, tell us how much labor and craft went into the making of their far more understated gestures.

Delany’s second explanation is a “diachronic” discussion of the differing fields of “serious” literature and science fiction and their historical development. Drawing on Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts, he argues that serious literature has developed under the aesthetic of the “Good Physician”—that it is meant in some way to be good for you. (This ties in with the general distrust of “reading for pleasure” in academic circles, which he talks about with some subtlety, including an excellent discussion of the sort of concerted work necessary to gain the eventual pleasure of any genre, including science fiction.) Sci fi, on the other hand, is a popular genre, rooted ultimately in the pulps—a kind of writing which is by definition and cultural consensus bad for you. If you are the “good physician,” you can go to some trouble to specify the labor that has gone into the writing that will presumably have a salubrious effect on your audience; if you writing in a genre that corrupts the youth, then to confess to an inordinate interest in craft is to confess yourself not just a scamp but an outright criminal.

            ***

This should be tied, I think, to Moorcock’s revisions, and his compositional practices. One of the deepest “seams” in his overall stance is the implicit conflict between being a “popular” writer (MM’s own preferred term; he shies away repeatedly from confessing himself a genre writer) and being a “serious” or literary writer. Perhaps it’s an oversimplifiction to say that his ambition pulls him in one direction—“serious,” sprawling, complexly plotted and thematically “heavy” works like Mother London and the Pyat novels—while his audience, and economic pressures, pull him in another (fantasy, science fiction).

The New Worlds episode is perhaps exemplary, or at least parallel: while MM was editing the magazine, he sought as it were to push the field of writing (speculative fiction, what have you) in a more “serious” direction—to move it away from the adolescent fantasies of Golden Age SF, to incorporate the disjunctions of late modernist fiction (Burroughs especially), to explore not outer space but the human interior (“inner space”). At the same time, in order to keep the magazine afloat and the printers’ bill paid, he was churning out whole strings of fantasy novels, written to precise formulas and produced in a matter of days.

9 february

I can’t remember the first time I received proofs of a piece of mine that was going to be published (in actual print!), but I do remember that for at least the first few years of my publishing career I did so with a kind of elation. I suspect every young writer feels that way—these are my words, and they will look something like this when they're actually there on the page for people to read!

 It’s been about twenty years or so since I began publishing more or less regularly, and the joy and wonder at receiving proofs has long ago worn off. I think it began to wear off rather rapidly when I was in the process of publishing Upper Limit Music, and fell into a series of conflicts with an officious and rather thick copy editor, conflicts which led me on several occasions to angry phone calls to the Press’s managing editor—going over her head, as it were. That was my worst experience with copy editing, and since then I’ve gone through quite a lot of different editorial hands, ranging from the general hands-off if there’s a problem we hope you’ll catch it of the little magazines, to the roots-to-branch evisceration and sometimes rewriting of Parnassus: Poetry in Review.

 I’m old enough to miss paper proofs, I confess; when I receive page proofs in PDF, I very often print them out, even if I see no errors when I read them over on the screen. I’m not sure I end up catching more errors that way, but it’s just somehow more comfortable, it gives me a surer sense that this particular piece is for real. But truth to tell, I’ve gotten to where I do some of my proofing—for briefer pieces, especially—on the screen alone. I too, like all of us, are being gradually weaned of my paper addiction.

These days, when I’m publishing between a half dozen and a dozen pieces every year, it seems like there’s always something in some stage of needing looking at. Of course, there is the next piece to be written, or in the middle of being written; but more irritatingly, there are all those pieces that have been sent off, and need second-round attention: the (electronically) blue-pencilled drafts, the copy edited manuscripts, full of queries that need to be carefully checked (these are perhaps the most irritating, as they often necessitate pulling books down or heading over to Google Books to check quotations), the sets of proofs to be read.

I’m well aware of the necessity of it all, that my prose and my arguments have often been mightily improved by careful editing, that copy editors have often drawn my attention to really bone-headed errors and omissions, and that carefully reading proof is the best way to avoid looking like an idiot when a piece actually comes out in print. That doesn’t, however, make these secondary tasks any less arduous or tiresome. Or at least that’s how I feel some of the time. At other times—like right now, when I’m going over the copy edited manuscript for a piece for the Cambridge History of American Poetry, and not coincidentally avoiding grading a stack of papers—I can take a positive delight in publication as a social process: something that I’d be entirely missing if my prose were going straight to its readers.

 (NB: connect this to Michael Moorcock’s early career, when he was writing, as he puts it somewhere, not “for an editor but for a printer.” Cautionary tale.)

7 february

Asked to contribute something to the fifteenth anniversary issue of a journal I was in on the ground floor of, & have watched for the decade and a half since, I cast my eyes over my hard drive. Should I send some of the emerging 10-line poems? They seem too fresh, too raw, not quite ready. Do I have any essays on hand, or books I'd like to review?

Almost by chance, I stumbled on a conference paper on Susan Howe I'd delivered not long ago. I tend, when writing conference papers, to write towards the 20-minute frame—it should begin with a hook, continue in a lively and unexpected manner, and end with a minute or two to spare, in case I want to crack a quick joke along the way. (I have little patience with the old This paper is a part of a longer project, so I'm going to be making cuts on the fly as I read thru it business, which has irritated me from too many of my colleagues.) I also tend to write rather formally in such situations, footnoting my references as I go. I've noticed that Geoffrey Hill, in his Oxford lectures, actually reads out his footnotes, publication dates page numbers and all—but this is purely for my own use.

Which leaves me with a well-turned and (I venture to say) smartish essay on Howe, references and all, that I've just never gotten around to placing. And looking over my CV, I find myself blushing at how many of such nicely-put-together 3000-word pieces I've actually got gathering dust. Enough, if I were to add in fugitive book reviews and a few little uncollected essays, to make another collection the size of Intricate Thicket. I need to get busy.

6 february

(giving up for the nonce on descriptive titles...)

Two recent publications, accessible online:

•A piece on Robert Duncan's H. D. Book, in the context of a mystical or "gnostic" modernism, courtesy of Ed Foster's Talisman: here.

•A review of Robert Archambeau's The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, from Notre Dame Review: here.

***

Expect perhaps more silence than usual this spring: the semester is turning out to be a real bear, with a set of teaching assignments that I'm finding more than merely a grind. But I have been writing poems—a series of 10-line things, a trifle less paratactic than the little gristly bits of Torture Garden, but less lax & expansive than the longer poems of Red Arcadia. I'll probably call a halt to this current "sequence" when it hits some sort of talismanic number—maybe 100, or 150, or something; right now I'm somewhere in the 40s, tho I'm not keeping close count.

Two weeks hence I'll be packing to go to Louisville, where I've cooked up something of a mini-celebration of the recent Flood Editions reprint of Ronald Johnson's ARK. Some tasty goings on, I hope. Peter O'Leary, RJ's executor and editor of this lovely new edition, will be there, as will other luminaries, including some very dear old friends. I of course am still sweating over my talk, which will attempt to read ARK as some species of science fiction.

Which has been much on my mind: once again, like last year, I've committed to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. And like last year, I'm trembling in my newish Doc Martens at the prospect of (re-)venturing into the world of SF/Fantasy criticism. Perhaps it's because I've spent a good deal of time learning about the field since last year. I've read a solid lump of criticism, and quite a few novels. I've thought a lot. And the more I think, the more I read, the more I realize I don't know. This isn't simply the jitters of embarking on a new expansion of the "knowledge base," as I did when I set out to come to terms with Ruskin & his surround.

My anxieties about ICFA, and my whole venture into the SF/fantasy field, are tied up with my growing sense of ageing, of getting older. Yes, I’ve gotten to the point in my life and career where I am in the upper middle of the academic demographic; in the wrong half of my 40s I am older than probably half of the people in the profession I meet, and as a tenured full professor with a decent teaching load at a large state university, I have more disciplinary consecration than the vast majority. But the conferences I go to—and ICFA in particular—are dominated by people younger than myself, by graduate students and young scholars; and those younger people, simultaneously, are far more deeply versed in the subject matter.

 It has something I know to do with the intensity of interest we bring to our obsessions in youth. When I was sixteen, I knew more about certain things than anyone else I knew: I knew a particular strain of alternative rock music backwards and forwards; I knew certain fantasy authors (and, to a lesser degree, certain science fiction authors); I knew literature. And I had a kind of endless energy for adding to that knowledge. When I bought a new Moorcock book, I would read it with a passionate intensity, fitting it into the fictive universe he had created, judging how well it dovetailed with the scores of other Moorcock novels I had read. When I bought a new record, I brought it home immediately and shut myself in my room; I listened to intensely, following along with the lyric sheet, probably three times in the first day, and a dozen times over the week to come.

 It’s very hard (imposible?) to replicate that intensity in middle age. When a book comes out by an author I’m deeply invested in, I buy it immediately—but I don’t immediately set aside time to read it, and re-read it. When a new album comes out by a musician I’m interested in, I’ll dutifully download, but there’s no guarantee I’ll listen through it more than once in the first week.

When I was a kid I was a fan, but I was never a member of fandom per se, either for the musicians I liked or the books I read. That, I am beginning to see, has been a great absence in my life, and in some ways continues to be. I’ve never, in any of my substantial endeavours, felt that I’m a part of community—I’ve always been going it along, whether reading Moorcock as a 14-year-old, reading Ruskin as a 40-year-old, or painting model soldiers earlier this year. Fandom provides (especially the young) enthusiast for any given cultural field a social context in which ideas and enthusiasms can be discussed and tested—a community. (The only times I’ve felt a member of an active community, alas, were in the MFA program at Cornell and among the scholar-poets who are interested in the same poets I’ve written about.)

And there is still a very intense atmosphere of fandom in the SF/fantasy community. Perhaps I got off to the wrong start in reading John Clute’s criticism. Clute frankly seems to have read everything in his field, and much of his criticism revolves around how writers fit in in with what has already been done within the field—how the genre has historically developed, that is. It’s quite intimidating to confront this kind of encyclopedic generic knowledge, especially when there’s been something like a twenty-year lapse in my own investment in SF/fantasy, roughly from when I went off to Cornell for grad school to about five years ago, when I started seriously looking back at the books I had so loved in adolescence. The ideal SF/fantasy scholar, I suspect, is someone who began reading the books much as I did—as a maladjusted teenager, intensely and copiously—but who early on formed links with the fan community at large, and who never gave up on their interest.

Which doesn’t mean necessarily that such an ideal scholar goes to grad school to study SF/fantasy, but that she or he doesn’t toss those books aside as I did in favor of “serious” literature. I now find myself back-pedaling, looking back at the SF/f canon to find things I value in the same way I value Joyce and Nabokov and Woolf and so forth, and retooling my critical instruments to think usefully about the sources of value in books that were not written with the evaluative criteria of mundane literature in mind.
***
Frankly, it does not help matters to be reading A. E. Van Vogt and Ulysses at the same time.

the book meme

There’s a book meme going around Facebook these days, which I’ve followed with a bit of interest, but haven’t yet chimed in on: something like “name 10 books that have stuck with you [which means a lot of folks have listed things they’ve read in their childhood]; don’t give it too much thought [an attempt to try to stem second-guessing – is this book highbrow enough, does this one make me look like an idiot?]; tag 10 people [no way I’m doing that].”

Anyway, I’ve seen responses to the meme enough times that I can’t fulfill the “don’t give it too much thought” requirement; yes, I’ve thought a bit about what books made (or twisted) me into who I am. And I’ve tried to separate out things that I’ve read over and over and over, but which didn’t really sink in on the first reading (Ulysses, for instance, which I didn’t really “get” when I read it at 16, but by god have gotten in the dozen or more readings since), and things which I’ve come to over the last 20 years or so.

So here, in no particular order:

William Shakespeare, Macbeth  – and a lot of other plays, which I must have started reading in 3rd grade or so, first the Classics Illustrated redactions, then the whole plays, following along with Old Vic recordings. Only now, thinking back, do I realize how much Shakespeare opened up the possibilities of the language to me.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience – probably the first books of poetry I ever read on my own, after Dr. Seuss.

L. Du Garde Peach, Oliver Cromwell (A Ladybird Book) – my parents bought me this wee hardback, sumptuously illustrated in alternate color pages, on a trip to London when I was maybe 9. I blame it for my 4-decades'-long obsession with the English Revolution and all things Puritan. (Rereading it for the first time in many years, I'm surprised to find it a pretty balanced overview – no whitewashing Drogheda, for instance.)

TS Eliot, The Waste Land – I read this sometime in high school, after a teacher described it as "incomprehensible"; yes, I was that kind of cocksure, jackass hs student, who wanted to comprehend the incomprehensible; suffice it to say that no, I didn't understand the poem; but by god it stuck.

Michael Moorcock, The Cornelius Chronicles – I had already read bales of MM's trashy sword & sorcery novels when I bought the fat Avon paperback of his 4 Cornelius novels, but they sure didn't prepare me for the radical narrative disjunctions of the last 2 of those books, The English Assassin and The Condition of Muzak. But MM's narrative techniques primed me for disjunction in modernist poetry and postwar prose more than anything else I read in my teens.

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings – okay, I didn't actually read these the first time through: my dad read them to me. That is, until about 3 chapters into Return of the King, when he had to forgo bedtime reading sessions for a stretch; I couldn't wait, so I soldiered thru the worst of Tolkien's high-falutin Maloryisms to finish the book myself. And it stuck.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time – who knows how many times I read this book? It taught me that it was okay to think, okay not to be cool, okay to be a "geek."

HP Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories – I can't say this one "influenced" me in any way besides depriving me of a lot of sleep, shivering in anxiety at every ambient noise.

Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination – now we're getting into college; Tom Gardner lent me this one. For better or worse, it's probably shaped my life. At the very least, it taught me that expository prose could be a pleasure, rather than just an instrument.

Ronald Johnson, The Book of the Green Man – of course I came to Johnson by way of Davenport; everybody does, right? And if my student poems sounded like a cross between Johnson and Davenport's Flowers & Leaves – well, one can do a lot worse for beginners' models.

contented

In case you're wondering, the tentative (well, not really, but am still doing a wee bit of tinkering) table of contents for the book:

Intricate Thicket: Some Late Modernist Poetries

Introduction

Longer Views

Coming Down from Black Mountain (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley)
Z-Sited Path: Late Zukofsky and his tradition
The Palace of Wisdom and the Six-Minute Poem (Theodore Enslin)
Truth, Beauty, and the Remote Control (Anne Carson)
Still Diving the Mauberley Trench (John Matthias)
Dark Matters (Peter Gizzi and Rae Armantrout)
Ronald Johnson: Four Takes
1. Turkish Delight and Marrow-Bones
2. Notes and Numbers
3. Johnson’s American England
4. A Note on Johnson’s Anagram
The Piety of Terror (Ian Hamilton Finlay)
One Last Modernist: Guy Davenport

Shorter Takes

Mules and Drugs and R&B (Harryette Mullen)
Norman Finkelstein, Track
A New Negative Capability (Michael Heller)
“The Lighthouses” (George Oppen)
Sound and Vision (John Taggart)

Poetics

Queen Victoria’s Birthday Present (on writing biography)
A Fragmentary Poetics (on writing poems)

resurfacing

It's been altogether too long.

The big news – I just sent off a signed contract for a 100,000 word manuscript, Intricate Thicket: Some Late Modernist Poetries, to be published by the University of Alabama Press in their super-cool "Modern and Contemporary Poetics" series, edited by Hank Lazer and Charles Bernstein. It's a sweet moment for me; Alabama published my first real book, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge back in 1998, as one of the inaugural volumes of that same series.

At the time I thought, "okay, a new series for newbie scholars, let's hope it lasts a few years." But in the 15 years since, M&CP has become a real powerhouse – they've done books by Marjorie Perloff, Jerome McGann, Harryette Mullen, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and stacks and stacks of the best critics of my own and other generations.

The manuscript is pretty much done – it's clean & well-lighted. Both of the press readers had suggestions for possible (minor) revisions, but they were just that – suggestions to consider, rather than conditions for publication. So I'm in that wonderful penultimate phase of doing last-minute clean-ups: a final read-thru, and the infinitely painful process of inserting real-live scholarly-muster-passing citations into very long, rangy essays that quoted from all over the map with nary a thought of pointing readers back to the page numbers of those quotations. (Yes, the heart of the book is a series of big essays I wrote for Parnassus: Poetry in Review, whose editors don't really have much truck with stuffy academic convention.)

I've just spent an hour and a half with one essay, zipping in what seems like two score parenthetical citations, and hauling down about a linear foot and a half of books from my bookcases. By the time I get thru this entire manuscript, I expect my study will be about three feet deep in unshelved books.

Where the hell is Jeeves when you need him?

J. G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere

I always find reading great writers' juvenilia instructive. I revisited Eliot's Poems Written in Early Youth the other week, and found them remarkably unremarkable. I read straight thru Yeats's early books a while back, & found them strangely comforting – some lovely lyrics, but an awful lot of flatness and decorative imagery – the engine running, but the gears disengaged. It's good to know even the greats started out not so great.

I'd read a fair amount of '70s Ballard lately, so was pleased to come upon a copy (in a book club edition) of his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (bound with The Drowned World, his second and "breakthrough" book). Ballard later pretty much disavowed Wind, calling it a piece of "hack-work" done simply to break into the paperback market (previously he'd only published short stories). Apparently he had just turned 30, had a family to support, and felt that he'd never get out of his desk job unless he produced something novel-length. With a fortnight's holiday on his hands, he determined to crank out a 60,000-word novel in ten days of writing.

And he did – and boy does it show: paper-thin characters, reams and reams of far-fetched action sequences, and a basic plot mover (that the entire earth has been gripped by a high-speed wind that just keeps getting more & more devastating) that never even begins to get explained. It's a decent two hours' read, but one can't say anything more.

But then maybe I'm dismissing it too quickly, and out of hindsight: after all, it reads like a movie – like 2012, or The Towering Inferno, or The Day After Tomorrow, or any number of big-time disaster movies. And when it's compared to one of them – a team of scriptwriters, a zillion-dollar budget, etc. – it actually seems like a more than decent ten days' work.

Of course it's merely a dry run for Ballard's far more sociologically and psychologically interesting "disaster" novels (The Drowned World, The Crystal World, etc.). In those books he realized what he knows only in flashes in The Wind from Nowhere: that the big explosions and topographical changes of the disaster aren't nearly as interesting as the ways that characters react to them.

[5]

returning to Neal Stephenson

I read The Diamond Age (19950 and enjoyed it, then promptly forgot most of it. I read Snow Crash (1992) and enjoyed it very much indeed, and even retained a bit of it. And then I read the Baroque Cycle – Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World (2003-4) – and was blown away by Stephenson's crazy recreation of the 17th century, this crazy pivotal moment when alchemy turns into chemistry, when all of our modernity is a-borning. Not that the Cycle isn't too long; like everything Stephenson writes, it's immensely detailed, full of a – well – baroque proliferation of details & factoids. But it sprawls in quite an agreeable manner, or at least its sprawl somehow agrees with me.

I picked up a copy of NS's next novel, Anathem (2008), not too long after the paperback was released (& the hardcover remaindered). And it defeated me, at least twice. The novum, that differentium that set the novel's work apart from our "mundane" world, was just to hard to wrap my mind around. So I made a couple of starts, got maybe 75 pages in, and laid the brick-like volume aside.

And then the other week I happened on a copy of Stephenson's latest novel, Reamde (2011). And on a lark bought it. And started reading it, almost absently, only to find myself drawn head over heels into one of those "gripping" "action" stories. Yes, it's too long, by maybe 300 pages; sure, there's too much loving detail; and ultimately, there isn't enough of the conceptual quirkiness that I like about NS. But boy Reamde is a readable book. And what's not to love? A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that has found a way to actually harness and monetize gold farmers; a Chinese virus that ("REAMDE") that preys on players; Jihadist terrorists; Russian mafiosi; strangely likeable Christian survivalists; a cast of thousands.

At any rate, it sent me back to Anathem, and this time I stuck it out. By the time I was 150 pages in, I was loving it. By the time I'd slogged thru the entire 900+ volume, however, I was feeling pretty ambivalent. Ben – my Stephenson-reading buddy, with whom I talk thru the books on occasion – felt that there was too much philosophical talking over the course of the book. Indeed, the book's action (which takes its own sweet time getting off the ground) is repeatedly broken by long philosophical discussions, modeled quite obviously on Plato's Dialogues. (In fact, Stephenson includes as an appendix three "Calcas," or dialogic, graphed calculations, one of which is pinched directly from the Meno.) Now the philosophical discussions do indeed bear upon the convoluted plot of the novel, so they're not entirely extraneous: but they do indeed go on...

But my ambivalence wasn't quite that there was too much jaw and not enough event in Anathem. The amount of event, of actual action, in the end seemed about right. And while I was initially impatient with the philosophical disquisitions, by the end I found I was wishing for more of them, and at greater length. Stephenson seemed to rein himself in all too often – right when his characters were at the point where a discussion of Platonic Forms or something similar was about to break into something altogether profound, he'd break off the dialogue, and the next chapter would be something else altogether. One of two (or both of two) things was happening: 1) NS, a marvelous storyteller with a penchant for sidetracks, was consciously reining himself in before his readers went to sleep, jerking them back to some actual eventage; or 2) NS, very excited about philosophy but not a trained philosopher, was breaking off his dialogues before he got in over his head and embarrassed himself.

So I guess my disappointment in Anathem – which is still a pretty excellent book, better than Reamde or Diamond Age, not quite as great as the Baroque Cycle – is that the dialogues don't go on long or far enough, and that their ideas aren't quite as integrated into the conceptual structure of the novel as much as they should be.

[3-4]

shameless self-promotion

So even while I was away, the wheels of publication were slowly grinding. I have two new bits of writing out online:

•A review of Mike Heller's splendid collected poems, This Constellation Is a Name in Colorado Review

•A shortish poem, "Post-Tropical," in a relatively new online journal, Cloud Rodeo

Check 'em out.