dark alphabet

The weather, which has been horrendous for the last few days – torrential rains, kid-waking 3am thunderstorms – turned unexpected lovely today, just in time (as of twenty or thirty minutes ago) for me to face my least favorite of anniversaries: my birthday. My ophthalmologist used to tell me that I was his "pediatric patient," given the average 75+ age of his other clients; but there comes a time when only very old people still call you "young man,"and even then with a trace of irony.

I have not entered middle age gracefully, but kicking & screaming against the loss of a youth which was, in retrospect, not really wasted but enjoyed rather copiously. But more & more I hear "time's winged chariot" & all that. I find myself ruefully sympathizing with Woolf's otherwise maddening Mr Ramsay, who, if thought is like a piano keyboard divided into twenty-six alphabetical notes, has reached Q, & is somehow stuck there:

But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q – R – Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R..." He braced himself. He clenched himself...R is then – what is R?

A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying – he was a failure – that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R –

So better to leave behind the alphabet of thought, set aside the Phenomenology of Spirit for a day or two, & concentrate on what makes Mrs Ramsay & Mrs Dalloway happy: a successful dinner party. On the menu for this weekend: jasmine rice with saffron, a red lentil dal, palak paneer, and a brazenly spicy vindaloo, washed down with whatever potables the guests bring.
***
For the other Pete Cosey fans out there – watch yesterday's video, & tell me if the man isn't a deity! – there's a fascinating in-depth interview with public radio station KJZZ here. Well worth 45 minutes of your time.
***
And a shout out to my oldest friend Th., who has just celebrated his own only slightly less numerous birthday.

Pete Cosey is God

My sense is that it's a little more respectable these days to admire Miles Davis's mid-70s "electric" phase, even if the true jazz connoisseurs still pooh-pooh the period during which the man forsook sharp-edged bop for a funky noise stew derived in equal parts from Hendrix, Sly Stone, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. I love Birth of the Cool & Sketches of Spain as much as the next don't-really-know-nuthin-about-music guy, but I'm happy to admit that Agharta, a five-track double album recording a February 1975 matinee in Osaka, is my favorite Miles album.

Even after listening to the record for decades (and more recently digging its companions, Pangaea & Dark Magus), I'm still amazed by the solos and fills of Davis's big-bearded, slouch-seated, bearish guitarist Pete Cosey. Here he is from 1973, playing an extended solo on what looks to be a Vox Phantom 12-string, but which sounds like it's been tuned to some Martian scale:

culinary

I first read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse over 20 years ago in a class taught by the late Hopkins & Austen scholar Allison Sulloway, one of the most dedicated & literally inspiring scholars I've ever met – one of the people who taught me what little I know about writing, & who made me know what I wanted to do with myself. (Her first book, Gerard Manly Hopkins and the Victorian Temper, was dedicated to the Turkish poet & occasional sojourner in the alt-poetry world Murat Nemet-Nejat, a connection I never got around to figuring out.)

And now once again, as I do every couple of years, I'm rereading To the Lighthouse, & finding my stomach rumbling as I read Woolf's astonishing description of the triumphal main course at Mrs Ramsay's dinner party, the boeuf en daube, a "French recipe of my grandmother's":

And she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought.

"Boeuf en daube," of course, means no more or less than "beef stew." The recipes I've been looking at – Julia Childs & so forth – make this clear, & frankly I suspect that whatever the dish's attractions for the poor spice-starved early 20th-c. Britons of Woolf's novel, it doesn't hold a candle in terms of complexity to my own labor-intensive gumbo or multiple-meat chili (based on Ron Johnson's recipe): more akin, I suspect, to my modest but comforting Hannukah potroast.

But everybody's got – pardon me – a beef: Buce points out that Woolf (or, more charitably, her character Mrs Ramsay) has gotten it all wrong about the preparation process & serving time of the boeuf en daube, merely a symptom of Woolf's general lack of sympathy for the servant classes in her novels: "The point is not that To the Lighthouse is a bad book. It's actually quite a good book; or at least it is a book full of good paragraphs, and Virginia Woolf seemingly cannot write a bad paragraph. It is a bad novel, because Virginia Woolf has little of the capacity for imaginative empathy that makes a really good novelist." I dunno about "imaginative empathy" – it strikes me that the range of empathies required to depict Mrs R, her overbearing husband, the artist Lily Briscoe, the scientist William Bankes, & the half-dozen other vividly rendered characters is more than most novelists can generate over a career – but she can certainly write food.

John Baker offers a delicious-seeming recipe for Boeuf en daube à la Virginia Woolf, as long as you don't mind converting those kilos & grams into more old-fashioned measures.

When I read a post like "The Complete Language Game,"* I wish I were Jonathan Mayhew.
***
My ideal critic/historian of contemporary poetry would combine the aesthetic subtlety and political ferocity of Adorno, the historical & iconographical learning of Panofsky, & the broad and powerful sociological vision of Bourdieu. And the prose style of Guy Davenport. If the Goddess gives me another 40 years compos mentis, I will be that critic/historian.
***
I've given up looking for my ideal contemporary poet. I write the poems I can write: "ich kann nicht anders."

*As Steven points out in the comments box, that should read "The Complete Sentence Game." Oops.

Various

Nada Gordon has posted a set of "Anti-Rules of Poetry Blogging" – things, that is, one should probably avoid doing – &, by golly, I seem to have been guilty of late of a whole bunch of them:

Avoid any mention of poetry altogether.

There is no such thing as irrelevant content: found text, recipes, videos, random observations – all good.

Especially, do not ever ever “engage current debate.”

Use gimmicks: a flickr badge and a label cloud are signs of a “quality blog.”

Don't set yourself up as an authority on anything.

Blog as frequently or as infrequently as you please: you owe no one anything.

You may use your blog as a catalogue of pet peeves if you like.

So I'll try to be a trifle more "on task" (as we used to say of the sighthound who was best at following the "rabbit" at the coursing events) in the future. Like, maybe even actually writing about poetry for a change, rather than the irritations of sloppy editing or the outrages of textbook publishers. But not quite yet...
***
I suppose you lucky souls in more northerly latitudes (something redundant there) are beginning to enjoy the symptoms of fall in the air. Here we've had 4 days of more or less constant, desperate rain, which has only stopped today: visually, a beautiful day, tho it bodes to hit the high 80s, & the mosquitos are out like Eliot's hooded hordes.
***
Like everybody else, I keep reading Ron S day after day, & my naturally phlegmatic temperament only gets me het up when I read something like this:

asking for source data on a 900 page manuscript like The Alphabet is not so far from inviting a 2,000 page response. I suppose some day some enterprising grad student is going to comb through Ketjak and identify just how many sentences there were lifted directly from Quine – it could be done. But I’m not in the slightest inclined to think that doing so would tell you any more about the poem. In that same vein, the various annotations for works like Ulysses, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake always strike me as telling me a little about what the author may have been thinking about around the time of composition, but they are almost mute on what the works themselves actually say. Annotating, reading & interpreting are, after all, three different acts. Everyone who has ever written about 2197 has done so with a sense of a science fiction framework & what that might mean to those texts. I can’t think of anyone who has as yet noticed that the number is 13 cubed, which means that it represents the total of sentences in the work. From the perspective of reading, does that matter? I suspect not.

Leaving aside the stunningly presumptious anticipation of some "enterprising grad student"'s future attentions, the lumping together of the very different annotative enterprises directed at Ulysses, The Cantos, & Finnegans Wake strikes me as just plain sloppy. What's being annotated in each case is strikingly different (for Ulysses, there're great stretches that simply explain 1904 Dublin culture & geography for a 21st-c. reader; for The Cantos, it's mostly sourcing of quotations & translating of foreign phrases, as well as – not yet nearly enough – background historical context; for Finnegans Wake, it's largely philology). And while everybody's entitled to read however they see fit, & while I'd never downplay the value of a "cold" reading of a difficult, referential text (that was what got me into, & thru, Maximus the first time around), any reader who values authorial intention (old-fashioned, yes, but take it or leave it) is going to have to come around to the annotations at some point. Sure, "annotating, reading & interpreting are, after all, three different acts," but it's pretty damned theoretically slippery to separate the latter two in such a briskly cavalier fashion. (Plug here for Jeff Twitchell's Zukofsky exemplary annotations site.)
***
A fascinating piece in the Times' Magazine's "College" issue on New St. Andrews College in Idaho, a experiment in turning out "medieval Protestants" – hardcore evangelicals with rigorous classical educations. Aside from the rigors of Latin & Greek (the latter of which I regret never having undergone), it's just as wingnut as the next evangelical institution. Still, you gotta love that the coffeehouse is called "Bucer's."
***
From John Latta's "Rag-bag islet" yesterday, a graceful & exemplary meditation (aided by André Furlani) on Lu Chi, Guy Davenport, & wasps. (John, how the hell do you get permalinks for single entries??)
***
Two additions to the blogroll: Nada Gordon (long overdue) & Mark Wallace, an old interlocutor from my DC days – another life, it seems, but grand to see him taking up the weblog medium.

Ghost essay

On the syllabus for tomorrow:

Week 5: 26 September
Eliot, The Waste Land continued; Leavis, “The Significance of the Modern Waste Land” (Norton Critical Ed. 173-85; Bush, “Unknown Terror and Mystery” (Norton Critical Ed. 246-58; Froula, “Corpse, Monument, Hypocrite Lecteur: Text and Transference in the Reception of The Waste Land” (Norton Critical Ed. 275-86).

This just in from WW Norton, after a fairly heated e-mail on my part:

Dear Professor Scroggins,

Your comments regarding the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land were passed along to me today. The book is not [a] revised edition and we do not have one planned for the foreseeable future.

Professor Froula required that her essay "Corpse, Monument, Hypocrite Lecteur: Text and Transference in the Reception of The Waste Land" be removed from the book after the tenth printing. The essay was deleted per her request in 2006 and any reference to her was removed from the book. This was an exceptional case; deletions between printings are in no way a typical practice for Norton Critical Editions. To avoid further confusion, any mention of Professor Froula's inclusion in the book will be removed from the website- many thanks for notifying us to this oversight.

Again, we regret any problems and frustration that Professor Froula's request caused.

Many thanks,

––––––––
Editorial Assistant

Caveat lector – & lecturer!

Stardust / The Historical Record

Stardust. What's not to like? Stunning visual effects; Claire Danes transformed over the years since the last thing I saw her in – Romeo + Juliet – into a grown-up actor more lambently beautiful for her utter lack of conventional beauty, & able to turn in a convincing imitation of Gwyneth Paltrow; Michelle Pfeiffer reprising her role in Witches of Eastwick & Peter O'Toole his in Caligula; Robert DeNiro as a cross-dressing, can-can-dancing aerial pirate. The Princess Bride on special effects steroids. Yes, as we're told, a great "date film."

An exercise in both nostalgia & "world elsewhere" wish-fulfillment. Tristan makes it to the way interesting fantasy realm of Stormhold, defeats the witches & the ineffectual but nasty princes, gets the girl – a "star" in every sense – & discovers to boot (in a Shakespearean Romance-like turn) that he's the heir to the throne.

But what's he left behind? Nothing more onerous or constraining that a filmmaker's fantasy of a turn-of-the-century English agrarian town, a kind of Shire, where his object object of desire has the hots for the local Flashman (closeted, we learn). The contemporary fairy-tale, in which not merely the realm of faery but the realm of "reality" has been emptied of all true discomfort or social conflict. At least the dire film version of CS Lewis's dire Christian screed The Lion etc. had the decent idea of showing its children in flight from the Blitz.
***
The splendid British poet & bookdealer Peter Riley posts the following on the UK Poetry Listserv under the title "The Historical Record (I hope he doesn't mind me copying him):

After a small amount of rather scrappy research, I am beginning to think that possibly all or most of the poetry books published by print-on-demand presses since about 2000, are not getting into the copyright libraries. (It is a statutory obligation for all publishers to deliver six free copies of all books on publication to the British Library, [the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, and the Oxford, Cambridge, & Trinity College libraries]).

It's difficult to be certain because it can take libraries a long time to get a book catalogued and sometimes some (e.g. poetry) items are classed as "secondary" and do not show in the main catalogue . But I've looked for about 25 books published between 1999 and 2002 in the on-line catalogue of Cambridge University Library and I've only found two of them. The books not there included two entitled "Collected Poems". For comparison I looked up five books published by Carcanet post 2002, and they were all there.

I tried to compare this with the British Library, and they do seem to have more, but their on-line catalogue is such hell I had to abandon the search.

I find this rather worrying. They really should be there, it is the historical record of our activity. The print-on-demand "boom" has been in many ways a saviour of the situation for poets, able at last to get real books out without submitting themselves to the "big" publishing machine. But many of these books are probably produced in small quantities and the copyright system is some kind of guarantee that they won't disappear for ever. I know from my experience as a bookseller that it is quite possible for a book published in, say, 1870 in several hundred copies, to have vanished without trace by 1990.

There's a similar provision in place under US copyright law, tho many of us seem unaware of its provision requiring that two copies of each book published in the US be deposited with the Library of Congress. And while Riley speaks of the print-on-demand phenomenon, I think this is a problem endemic to all small press publishing. A spotcheck reveals no copies of Jessica Smith's Organic Furniture Cellar, nor of Henry Gould's most recent books, nor of either of the two excellent Cultural Society books – Zach Barocas's Among Other Things and Joel Bettridge's That Abrupt Here – but their holdings of Bruce Andrews's books seem remarkably spotty, as well (at least four titles missing, including I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up), & Tina Darragh has published far more than the three titles they hold.

Perhaps the LOC is a kind of time-capsule, a last-ditch stand against oblivion. But I wonder that we aren't taking more care of our legacy in the alt-poetry world. Send your books to the Library of Congress; make your university (or public) library order your books, & books by the poets you admire; donate your books to collections that ought to have them (Buffalo, San Diego, etc.).

Git yerself some kulchur

There's a brand new update at Zach Barocas's always excellent Cultural Society, including work by Joseph Bradshaw, Derrick Buisch, Cary Conover, Jon Curley, Tom Fisher, Roberto Harrison, Philip Jenks, Joseph Massey & Jess Mynes, Amanda Nadelberg, Peter O'Leary, Gregory J. Ott, John Phillips, Christopher Rizzo, Cindy Savett, Kate Schapira, Melissa Severin, Sandra Simonds, Shannon Tharp, Bronwen Tate, Jen Tynes, & Tyrone Williams. (Click on "texts.")

And a (longish) poem by me, "Of Systems Subject, Political, and Private." Do go read; tokenish prize to whoever can first identify the source of the title.

Nit-pickery

Just finished Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (OUP, 1999). Not bad at all; does a fine if uninspiring job of putting the grand warhorses of 1922 (Ulysses, The Waste Land, etc.) back into their contemporary context, pulls some interesting threads together. Provocative rebuttals of Huyssen's high culture/low culture "great divide" & Jameson's modernism/postmodernism schematizations. But doesn't have the same satisfyingly chewy theoretical density of Marc Manganaro's Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton UP, 2002), which is one of those critical books that enables you (as somebody at Cornell, acc. to the dire David Lehmann, said of de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality") to save yr dope money for a week.

But the book immediately at hand is North's Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land (2001), which I keep assigning to classes largely for its critical essays (& of course to support independent publishing). Problem with these Critical Editions – & here I include every Norton CE I've ever used – is that you can't really trust the explanatory notes. Not TS Eliot's notes – everybody knows they're whacked – but North's notes: you know, the ones at the foot of the page, the ones most students take as gospel truth. (After all, they were written by this UCLA professor, he knows so much more than I do...)

I can't claim to have checked every note, but here's a few flyspecks in the notes to the poem itself:

•In a note to the Petronius epigraph ("NAM Sibyllam quiden Cumis" etc.), we're told that the quotation is "(Greek)." Well, 5 words of it are; but obviously the rest is in Latin.

•The battle of Mylae (1st Punic War) took place in 260BCE, not "206" as the note has it. (Okay, that's a typo – but who's reading proof here?)

•Headnote to "A Game of Chess": "Eliot takes the title of this section from a satirical play of the same name by Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627). First produced in 1625, A Game of Chess was suppressed because of the way in which it allegorized English conflict with Spain as a chess match." How many howlers can North fit into one note? Middleton was born in 1580, not "1570?"; the title of his play is A Game at Chess, not A Game of Chess; and the play was first produced in 1624, not 1625. These are well-documented matters.

•Headnote to "What the Thunder Said": "Eliot's headnote to this section helps us to see these lines as a description of the betrayal, arrest, interrogation, and crucifixion of Christ..." Eliot's headnote – "In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book) and the present decay of eastern Europe" – does nothing of the sort.

Everybody thinks they're an editor, I guess; but who's editing the editors?

Culture Industry's 400th Post...

simply marks Culture Industry's 400th post.

All of Beckett (almost)

So far as I can tell, there's no European equivalent to Grove Press's 4-volume Centenary Edition of Samuel Beckett's works (published last year, & which I have been carrying about, reading thru, & generally caressing ever since I received my copy for Christmas). No Pleiade Beckett in French, as one might expect, nor has Calder, his English publisher, issued a set analogous or identical to Grove's American enterprise.

Mind you, this is a lovely edition. It brings together almost everything (I'll get back to that "almost") that Beckett ever published in English, or translated into English himself. (A very few of his translations, early on, were done in collaboration with other translators, I assume before Beckett realized the aesthetic potential in the act of self-translation.) The omission of works existing only in French is quite deliberate, according to Paul Auster, the Grove Centenary Edition's (henceforward GCE's) series editor, & he concedes that this means that, however definitive it may be in presenting the works upon which Beckett's vast reputation rests, the edition "does not constitute a Collected Works."

Auster has for the most part chosen wisely in assigning superstar writers to introduce each volume: Colm Tóibín's introduction to the 1st volume of "Irish" novels is excellent; Salman Rushdie's introduction to the 2nd volume of novels – the Trilogy and How It Is – is luminous; & JM Coetze's introduction to the final volume of poetry, short fiction, & criticism is wonderfully hard-nosed & critically uncompromising. (Only Edward Albee's introduction to the Dramatic Works falls short, amounting to a page & a half of noting how really cool Beckett's plays are. Was Harold Pinter, Wole Soyinka, or Tom Stoppard otherwise occupied?)

But I fear, with my own obsessive anality coming to the fore, that I'm still dissatisfied with this edition, despite its lovely design & really wonderful typography – such an improvement over the hodge-podge of mostly dreadfully designed Grove paperbacks in my office. It's about the text, in part. The Grove website claims that "Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior Grove editions of Beckett's work have been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C.J. Ackerley and S E. Gontarski," but the books themselves make no note of textual matters save for the following: "Design and textual supervision by Laura Lindgren." She's done a lovely job of the design, for sure: but I'd feel much better about the texts – Watt is almost legendary for its longstanding corruption – if I'd been at least assured somewhere in the books themselves that real textual editors were on the job. (Ideally, of course, there'd be 20 or 30 pages of textual notes at the end of each volume detailing corrections & variations, but perhaps that's asking too much.)

And then there's the contents themselves: I can entirely understand the GCE's leaving out Beckett's posthumously published works, the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women & the play Eleuthéria (which was written in French, & which SB himself didn't translate). But Auster is a trifle disingenuous when he claims that all that has been omitted from the 4 volumes are "a number of untranslated French poems and short critical essays." "Those with a knowledge of French," he continues helpfully, "can find them in Collected Poems in English and French and Disjecta, both available from Grove Press." (My inner copyeditor adds that those without a knowledge of French can find them there as well, tho they won't be able to read them.)

A glance at the contents of Disjecta, however, shows one that more than just a few French-language essays have been omitted from the GCE. (For the record, the GCE's "criticism" section consists of precisely 3 items: the Finnegans Wake essay "Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce," the book Proust, & the "Three Dialogues" with Georges Duthuit.) Leaving aside the Disjecta pieces in French & German, & leaving aside the various excerpts from letters, there remain almost 20 reviews & notes on writers, poets, & painters – all in English – that for some reason passed thru the GCE's editorial sieve. Reviews & notes on Mörike, on Rilke, on Ezra Pound; on such Irish modernists as Denis Devlin & Thomas McGreevy; on painters Jack B. Yeats & Avigdor Arikha. And finally, a 12-page fragment of Human Wishes, SB's play about Samuel Johnson.

I'm all in favor of honoring authors' posthumous desires about what to publish & what to leave unpublished (tho I suspect Grove's decision not to include Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Eleuthéria had more to do with the fact that they're in print from other publishers than with Beckett's wishes). But these pieces in Disjecta – written in English or translated into English by SB, published in his lifetime with his (grudging) permission – seem to meet all possible criteria for inclusion in the big 4-volume set. It would be silly to claim they're essential bits of the Beckett oeuvre, but I for one would like their exclusion to be explained a bit more clearly.

But enough grousing. Despite its teeny omissions, & despite the "black box" nature of its textual editing, this is my working Beckett from here on out: an extraordinary collection, beautifully produced & wonderfully readable to boot. Nothing like being brought face to face with the emptiness & inanity of human existence thru a nice piece of bibliographic art.

1st Review!

So I learn, from Bob Archambeau, Charles Bernstein, & various others in far-flung places, that The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, has gotten its first review – by Marjorie Perloff in the 7 September TLS. Well, I'm chuffed, even tho I haven't seen the thing yet, having gooberishly let my subscription lapse.

An appeal then: any of you out there who get the TLS & wouldn't mind passing the issue – or the clipped review therefrom – along to me when you're done? [There are at least 6 nail parlors & 4 posh gyms within a five-mile radius of Culture Industry central, but I've phoned every bookshop & newstand in the book, & nobody carries the damned thing.]

unlikely source

Happened upon this bit of sub-Kipling schoolboy good cheer, as writen in an autograph book:

When a bit of sunshine hits you
After passing of a cloud,
And a bit of laughter gets you
And your spine is feeling proud,
Don't forget to up and fling it
At a soul that's feeling blue,
For the moment that you sling it
It's a boomerang to you.

The author? Samuel Beckett. As biographer Anthony Cronin comments, the boy in whose book Beckett inscribed these lines "thought that they were an accurate reflection of his attitude. It is fairly safe to say that no one would ever think so again."

Hamm: Go and see is she dead.
[Clov goes to bins, raises the lid of Nell's, stoops, looks into it. Pause.]
Clov: Looks like it.
[He closes the lid, straightens up. Hamm raises his toque. Pause. He puts it on again.]
Hamm: [with his hand to his toque] And Nagg?
[Clov raises lid of Nagg's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.]
Clov: Doesn't look like it.
[He closes the lid, straightens up.]
Hamm: [letting go his toque] What's he doing?
[Clov raises lid of Nagg's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.]
Clov: He's crying.
[He closes lid, straightens up.]
Hamm: Then he's living.

Poetics of the pause.

Shax?

Now that I'm just pissing blood & tiny pointy shards, as opposed to writhing prostrate in full-flank agony, I can get back to actual blogging. I'm pleased to see my colleague Emily over at Incertus getting exercised by the silliness of the anti-Stratfordians again – always a healthy workout for the cardio-vascular system, I think. Like 6-day Creationists & Holocaust deniers, those who deny Wm Shakespeare's (or as they style it, thinking they're saying something significant, "Shakespere's") authorship of "Shakespeare" will always be with us – indeed, I encourage Creationists & Holocaust deniers to look into the authorship "controversy," since they're liable to do a great deal less harm in that little wing of the grand crank factory than in the world at large.

The whole business is only irritating when celebrities get involved – as with this latest Derek Jacobi/Mark Rylance business, or earlier with John Gielgud & Kenneth Branagh, or Walt Whitman & Charlie Chaplin – because then public attention starts getting drawn to the whole non-question. The problem, of course, is that if there were any real controversy over who wrote Shakespeare, the people capable of solving it would be clear-sighted scholars with an encyclopedic knowledge of Renaissance literature & a firm grasp of early modern culture – the culture of the playhouse, of the literary marketplace, of the publishing industry, & so forth.

It's pretty hard to find such animals among actors & creative writers, I'm afraid. Indeed, a 1st-rate analytical mind, tho it never hurts, is far from necessary equipment for acting well or writing well: Do you want Johnny Depp to do your taxes? To edit your term paper? I adore Yeats & Whitman as poets, but I'm the 1st to admit that their intellects were serious effing muddles. So, frankly, who gives a rat's ass what Derek Jacobi or Mark Rylance think about the authorship question?

Culture Industry has visited the authorship "controversy" at least once before, in connection with an Oxfordian book; it sprang to my mind the other day, when I was googling Henry Peachum & anagrams (don't ask) & fell afoul of a whole nest of mind-bendingly obtuse websites on the subject. In my random moments, I keep coming up with lists of questions to ask the anti-Stratfordians:

1) Since you wonder at the fact that Shax of Straford didn't leave any books in his will, what's the data on books in the wills of other dramatists of the period: Middleton, Chapman, Heywood?

2) No letters in Shax's hand? How many letters do we have from Middleton, Chapman, Fletcher, Ford?

[The problem with demanding of Shakespeare the whole written trail that characterizes someone like Goethe or Wordsworth – autographs in people's notebooks, recounted table-talk, laundry-lists, etc. – is that Shax lived before the author became a celebrity. The William Shakespeare who wrote the plays was not the deified Shakespeare of the 19th & 20th centuries, or even the proto-deified Shakespeare of the 18th. He was simply WS, a player & playwright, a script doctor & collaborator, a guy who worked up old stories into playable scripts & rolfed antiquated plays for a contemporary audience.]

3) If there is really such a paucity of information about Shakespeare – a fairly prolific early modern playwright, though by no means among the most prolific – then name one other early modern playwright (other than Ben Jonson, an indefatigable self-promotional machine) about whom we know as much. Thomas Heywood, who claimed to have had a hand in over 200 plays, but whose birth date we don't know? George Chapman? Thomas Middleton?

4) If, as Derek Jacobi is so convinced, "an author writes about his own experience" – a simple-minded equation essential to the thought-processes (generously so-called) of at least the Oxfordians – please explain Sir Walter Scott's 27 novels, not one of which is based on events of his life. Then explain the personal roots of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, & Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene.

Unlike Amy & Emily, I'm not inclined to get worked up over the elitism inherent in claiming that a person of Shakespeare's social background couldn't have written the plays. The elitism's certainly there, & just as ugly as such elitism always is. But everyone who knows literature knows that social elitism simply has no force in the world of letters, that far too many great writers came from the working or middling classes (John Clare, Ben Jonson, Louis Zukofsky, James Joyce) for class origin to be an ultimate bar to the imagination.

Instead, I sympathize and pity the anti-Stratfordians. They love their "Shakespeare" – or some plaster Jesus of a Shakespeare: I've yet to read an anti-Stratfordian book (& I've read way too many of them) that goes beyond a kind of muzzy high-school-level affectionate appreciation of the dramas – so much that they want to know everything about his life. But there is just so little to know about him. So they spend their time constructing Dumas-like conspiracy theories that give the man who wrote the plays an existence as exciting as Lawrence of Arabia's. If they need a new thrill, maybe they should try reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
***
The real scandal in the BBC story, by the way, comes in the last section, where we learn that a copy of the Jacobi/Rylance declaration has been "presented to Dr William Leahy, head of English at London's Brunel University and convenor of the first MA in Shakespeare authorship studies, to be launched later this month." This is, mind you, the equivalent of Georgia Tech announcing that they will be offering an MA in Intelligent Design studies; or MIT announcing a chair in Phlogiston Theory. Isambard Kingdom Brunel – great architect of suspension bridges, chief engineer of the Great Western Railway, builder of the Thames Tunnel – is spinning in his railway-gauge grave.

Embodiment, ii

[Guy Davenport, from the introduction to Montaigne's Travel Journal:]

He is, in a surprisingly modern sense, a tourist, with a tourist's interest in the amenities of the table and the bedroom. He is also, as we are never allowed to forget, a man in pain looking for a cure. His body cannot use certain minerals, such as calcium, which accumulate as pellets in his kidneys and bladder. The pain of a kidney stone is fierce, and in a male can be comparable to a woman's labor. The frequent "colic" in this journal (assuming that to be Montaigne's word for an attack of the stone) is a severe nausea in combination with the feeling that one's back is broken and that one's bowels need to move. Montaigne was fortunate in being able to pass his kidney stones. Another sufferer, Sir Walter Scott, could not, and abided pain of excruciating intensity for as long as two weeks at a time, helplessly screaming and hearing the New Testament read to him. Montaigne's constant scrutiny of his urine in a chamber pot, his colics and dizzy spells, his ability to drink heroic amounts of hot sulfurous water, locate his journal in a time when the body was still part of personality. Later, it would disappear. Dickens' characters, for instance, have no kidney stones because they have no kidneys. From Smollett to Ulysses, there is not a kidney in English literature.

Embodiment

My own relationship with my body is at best an equivocal one – & by body I mean the whole apparatus, from fallen-arched feet to mostly-bald head, including my face, the only aspect of my embodiment to make a regular appearance at this address in cyberspace. Even when I was young, thin, & by some accounts not actively ugly, I regarded my physical body as less me than as a kind of container or sheath by which I presented myself to others.

I suspect such residual Cartesianism is fairly widespread among those in the scribbling trades or doing other intellectual labor. We identify our selves with our minds, with our words. We have no trouble identifying Mikhail Baryshnikov squarely with his physique, with an exquisite overall coordination among brain, talents, skills, & toning. But who would associate the agile graces of Wallace Stevens's lyrics with the portly, hypertensive animal from which they emanated?

And the virtual community of the blogosphere, where one can circulate for years without attaching a face even to the bloggers whose writing you most admire, conduces to a kind of self-disembodiment even as one blogs.

This particular Labor Day Weekend, however, will go down for me as The Weekend Of The Kidney Stone; & nothing about it – save for a few rather pleasant but unfortunately brief opiate-fuelled reveries – has been remotely disembodied.

This is pain, my friends – in long, dull stretches; in concentrated, savage waves; sometimes easily quelled with Percocet or prescription-strength doses of Aleve; sometimes entirely ignoring all pharmacologies – this is pain like I've never experienced. And it make me aware of my dear old flabby, greying, obtuse body with a kind of horrifying intensity.

Cambridge Companion!

After the usual delays, I'm happy to announce that the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry – edited by the estimable Alex Davis & Lee M. Jenkins – has just turned up in my mailbox. It's a substantial volume, covering poetic modernisms of all stripes, British, American, Irish, African American, and post-colonial. The contributors' list, which reads like a who's who of modernist poetry scholarship, includes Peter Nicholls, Christanne Miller, Lawrence Rainey, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Drew Milne, Bonnie Costello, & Jahan Ramazani.

And surprisingly enough, yr. humble blogger has an essay in there as well, bearing the snappy (?) title "US modernism II. The other tradition: Williams, Zukofsky, Olson." (It's odd to see one's prose in British clothing – punctuation, capitalization, etc.; but still gratifying.) American shoppers can buy this terrifically valuable volume here.

Yellow Zukofsky

Or, another set of artist's supplies down the tubes...

L'Affaire Finkelstein

I too have suffered from being an homonymous author. There is a Mark Scroggins out there who is the author of a biography of Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln's first running mate. For a while the Library of Congress was convinced we were the same person, & apparently the other MS's publisher has no better idea of where he is than I do, since they've been sending me correspondence relating to Hannibal: The Life of Abraham Lincoln's First Vice President. & this is not to mention the Mark Scrogginses out there who are lawyers, professional bowlers, Baptist ministers, & deer hunters.

My discomfort is nothing compared to that of my old friend Norman Finkelstein, poet, literary scholar, and professor of English at Xavier University in Cinncinnati. Norman's sorrow is that he is always in danger of being mistaken for Norman G. Finkelstein, the ragingly controversial political scientist who until recently has taught at DePaul University in Chicago. My Norman Finkelstein – henceforward "the uncontroversial NF" – and I have been friends & co-conspirators for many years now, & in the days to come I will blog his newest book of poems, the limpid Passing Over. (Please go buy it, nu?)

[On the left: the poet Norman Finkelstein]

I don't want to cause my NF – the "uncontroversial NF" – any further discomfort (he's gone so far as to post a "disambiguation page" on A Big Jewish Blog, the wonderful conversation on matters Jewish & poetic that Eric Selinger started some time ago). But the latest turn in Norman G.'s tenure battle at DePaul has gotten me so riled up this morning that I'm unable to concentrate on my syllabi, to answer my e-mails, to do anything but splenetically blog.

The story is long and complex – Wikipedia has a not unfair summary of its earlier twists & turns on its NF page, & here, & a comprehensive collection of documents from both sides can be bound on Norman G's own website. Suffice it to say that Norman G. has written forcefully & at length about Palestinean/Israeli relations, about what he sees as the "exploitation" of the Holocaust for self-serving reasons by various groups, & about the Israel lobby in Washington. His work is controversial in its arguments & premises, & even moreso in its modes of argument, which combine withering sarcasm, angry invective, & even occasional ad hominem attacks.

His first four books drew accusations of Holocaust denial & anti-Semitism (both rather silly, I think); his critics were more accurate in finding Finkelstein a fair representative of a kind of left-leaning anti-Zionism. The fat truly hit the flame, however, when Norman G. tangled with Alan Dershowitz, who, when he's not defending celebrity clients like OJ Simpson & Claus von Bulow or figuring out circumstances under which torture is actually okay ("get a warrant"), is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Norman G. attacked Dershowitz's 2003 book The Case for Israel, calling it "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense." Dershowitz responded by attempting to stop the publication of Finkelstein's next book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Dershowitz went so far as to send a letter to Arnold "the Governator" Schwartzenegger asking him to intervene & get the University of California Press to kill the book).

This past academic year Norman G. went up for tenure in the Poly Sci department at DePaul. In September 2006, Dershowitz sent a weighty "dossier" of anti-Finkelstein material to DePaul poly sci & law faculty members & DePaul administrators (and, by some accounts, to DePaul boosters), urging them to deny Finkelstein tenure. The case bounced back & forth; his department voted 9-3 in favor of tenuring NGF; the college personnel committee voted 5-0 in favor of tenuring him; this past June, by a 4-3 vote, a university committee voted to deny him tenure. The University's president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, affirmed the decision, & held out no possibility of appeal.

In one of the more spectacular displays of disingenuousness I've encountered, Holtschneider & others in the DePaul administration have repeatedly denied that Dershowitz's campaign against Finkelstein had anything to do with his denial of tenure. (The stated reason was that Finkelstein's scholarly work, while largely unimpeachable in terms of content and scholarly methodology, was just plain not very nice to those who disagreed with him – a violation of "Vincentian ethics," whatever those may be.) Let's be serious: Finkelstein is right on the money when he notes wearily that the validity of his work has nothing to do with the tenure decision: since he's become a target of one of the most prominent "centrist" talking heads in the country, he's become a liability to DePaul, someone who's unfortunately apt to get in the way of the University President's primary job – fundraising.

The final indignity has just come down the pike: After one is denied tenure, one usually has what's known as a "terminal year," a final academic year in which to teach, to wind up one's affairs, & to look for work. DePaul is paying Norman G. for a terminal year – but they've cancelled his classes & locked him out of his office. Shame on DePaul; shame on Fr. Holtschneider. Of all of the shabby tenure tales I've heard over the years, this is the shabbiest.

[On the right, Norman G. Finkelstein, man without an office]

Summer reading, 2007

Summer break is officially over tomorrow, tho I've a couple more days before my first classes. A moment to recap some of the highlights of the summer reading (none of it, alas, at the beach):

•Great bales of Virginia Woolf, early late & middle. Of the early ones (the ones I knew least), it's safe to say that I found The Voyage Out very moving, & beautifully written – Woolf finding her way to a modernist idiom, not quite getting there, but forging something quite lovely sui generis. Night and Day, on the other hand, seems a step back: a Victorian novel about 20th century problems, but structurally still a Victorian novel, with all the attendant bric-a-brac (& very little of the humor).

•Of the various wee books of poetry, Myung Mi Kim's Commons (U California P, 2002) & Erica Carpenter's Perspective Would Have Us (Burning Deck, 2006) grabbed me by the lapels & shook me. Carpenter, especially, has a wonderful lyric gift.

I'm in the middle of Benjamin Friedlander's The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress, 2007), which is more good short poems than anybody has a right to have written. Somehow I'd missed his last big collection, A Knot Is Not a Tangle, & The Missing Occasion reminds me just how wry & simultaneously moving Ben's poems can be. (More later on this one...)

•Joseph Donahue's Incidental Eclipse (Talisman House, 2003) has one of those blurbs from John Ashbery – you know what I mean, "one of the major American poets of this time" etc. But y'know what? – while I'm not a race-horse kinda guy (my father-in-law used to try seriously to rank the top 10 writers of the 20th century), & I find myself just as keen on the fascinating "minor" as the imposing "major," Incidental Eclipse is a fascinating, incredibly moving book. I've stopped to read Joe's work whenever I've come upon it for some time now; this is the moment where he turns into something big.

•Things Davenportian: On the one hand, the Guy Davenport / James Laughlin letters. Frankly, I didn't understand why these got published – okay, Guy was one of the great letter-writers, but Laughlin was kind of a late friend for him, the publisher who stepped into the gap when North Point went down, but who only put out 4 or so of 20+ books. Then it hit me – of course, Norton has a series of volumes of selected Laughlin correspondences (Pound, WCW, Delmore Schwartz, Rexroth, etc.). Lots of discussions of book publishing. Too many anecdotes, too much Laughlinian skirt-chasing.

On the other hand, a bare beginning into Andre Furlani's Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After. I'll be damned – a critical book that approaches its subject with nothing less than admiration. How quaint! Furlani writes forthright sentences, & strives to knit his subjects together in an echt Davenportian manner. We'll see how well he keeps it up over the long haul of this study.

Our Fair University on the blogosphere, again

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has a knack for picking up on the most embarassing news items relating to Our Fair University. Today she's fastened upon the proposed new "fitness center"; I think she's a bit savage, at least in the comments box, but you decide.

marketing modernism

Somewhere in my mother's house in Tennessee are great stashes of 40s- & 50s-era paperbacks of modern classics – Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley – with lurid, ripped-bodice paintings on the covers. But they don't come anywhere near the cheekiness of this Russian item stumbled upon on eBay. Yes, that's a Virginia Woolf omnibus volume, including Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Funny thing, I've read all of those books, & I don't remember the illustrated scene taking place in any of them. (Tho there's a Tilda Swinton moment in the movie of Orlando that comes close.)
***
By all means scroll down to the last entry & take the informal poll. I've got the itch to buy books, even if only on the library's dime.

informal poll

My mind these days, as so often at this end-of-summer, feels like an unmoving swamp. I hanker for new things, new sounds, new poets. So, an informal poll: who, among that vast sea of talented & interesting writers out there, is exciting you these days? Let's leave the honored dead out of the reckoning; send me – backchannel or in the comments box – a list of the dozen or half-dozen contemporaries whose poetry seems most alive to you at the moment. Help MS jumpstart his joie de vivre.

housekeeping

In the interests of keeping visitors provided with diverting reading, I've done some pretty significant beefing-up of the blogroll – a number of the poetry-ish sites I visit regularly, but also a few academic blogs that I've been dropping by lately. By "academic blogs," I don't mean blogs on which folks who happen to be in the academy spend serious time discussing issues within their discipline (tho that happens, as well), but blogs by people (usually graduate students, adjuncts, untenured faculty, & other members of the vast exploited brain-proletariat) who're thinking about & tracking the experience of living within the academy. How do you recognize such a blog? Well, it's usually got an at least semi-clever, often ironical title ("Academic Wasteland," "Not of General Interest"); the author is usually anonymous (no doubt in acknowledgment of the various "blog & you won't get hired/get tenure" scares across the web over the past couple of years); and the blogger tends to do a good deal of agonizing these days over syllabi, class numbers, & room assignments. Like I'm doing right now.

And reading Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy, which is damned fine stuff. More fun than Henry Roth, any day of the week.

Jessie Sheeler: Little Sparta

When we honeymooned in Scotland, J. & I visited Sir Walter Scott's Abbottsford, we walked the Castle battlements, we saw Hugh MacDiarmid's stomping grounds in Biggar. But we didn't make it to Ian Hamilton Finlay's astonishingly rich poet's garden, Little Sparta. Gael Turnbull gave us Alec Finlay's number, counselling us that it would be better to contact Eck than to phone his father directly, but it turned out the younger Finlay was out of the country, and one thing succeeded another in the usual flurry of touristing.

So my "experience" of the garden has been limited to illustrated articles in places like Architectural Digest & various books on contemporary landscape architecture, & to Yves Abrioux's sumptuous and indispensible Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer. Jessie Sheeler & Andrew Lawson's Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay, then, is a welcome & enlightening guide to Finlay's major life-work.

Like no other text I've yet seen, Sheeler & Lawson's coffee-table book manages to give one a sense of what it might be like to walk thru the garden, to experience it in situ, rather than as a series of snapshots. The pictures – Lawson, I gather, is a top-notch garden photographer – are uniformly beautiful, everything in eye-popping color and crisp focus. And Sheeler's text is doggedly informative, translating every Latin inscription into English & explaining every classical reference in the patient voice of a young person's Latin teacher (which, it turns out, she is*).

If anything, it's the coffee-table book aspect of Little Sparta that I find a trifle off-putting. On the one hand, among Lawson's beautiful photographs of various aspects of the garden – columns, inscriptions, statues, bridges – are a number of very pretty pictures of foliage & flowers: nice enough, but the sort of thing that could be slotted into pretty much any book about any garden in the British Isles. I'd have appreciated a few more close-ups of IHF's inscribed plaques. And Sheeler's text, while it's thoroughly informed & always informative (if sometimes irritatingly basic for this overeducated reader – I suppose somebody out there needs to have the story of Apollo & Daphne, or of Aeneas & Dido's cave, retold them), tends to render anodyne the more troubling aspects of IHF's ideological art. We're told time & again how Robespierre & Saint-Just were apostles of purity & order; there's all too little mention of how the primary agent of that order was the guillotine. IHF is not interested in aestheticizing the guillotine when he compares it to the classical column or the birch tree: rather, he underlines by shocking juxtaposition the coexistence, the imbrication of terror & the pastoral.

Sheeler's Little Sparta is Sparta as order apotheosized, drained of its concomitant terror. (For a dose of the latter, go watch 300 – which one of my students last semester called his "favorite movie," sending a chill down this 4-eyed wimp's spine.) Dig Sheeler's last sentence:

Those who come prepared to find in Little Sparta works whose essence is poetic, not decorative or horticultural, will find find subsequently that the way they see the world is changed and made more wonderful.

The only word I would quibble with here is the last (& most important): Little Sparta changes the world, and makes it more unsettled, more terrible.

But the heart of this book is its wonderful photographs & interpretive commentary. Anyone interested in landscape architecture, in concrete & conceptual poetry, & in their intersection, should buy this volume posthaste.

*Keen eyes might recognize Sheeler as the Jessie McGuffie who was Finlay's companion in the early 1960s, & who co-founded the Wild Hawthorn Press with him. "Sheeler" is the surname of one of Zukofsky's Brooklyn Polytech students, who visited Finlay & McGuffie in Edinburgh at LZ's suggestion – but therein hangs a painful tale whose outlines can be read in my The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky.

whom you ought to be reading

I sense my blogging has become sclerotic lately, that I'm giving in to my tendency to wait until I have almost the beginnings of an essay on hand before writing anything. (Or I post continual promotional snippets for forthcoming things – nothing wrong with that of course, but not the best reading...) I got no desire to turn Culture Industry into a diary (resounding yawns from potential former readers), but I hanker for something a trifle more off-the-cuff, casual. Like, for instance, Jonathan Mayhew's consistently casual, consistently rivetting Bemsha Swing. You might argue with JM, but it's rare that what's passing across his mind isn't interesting.

Or you could check out the lively discussion – Alicia Ostriker, Charles Bernstein, Norman Finkelstein (the other NF), Eric Selinger – on "What Is a Jew" over at A Big Jewish Blog.

Maybe it's just the end-of-summer blues/blahs.

Cold Pastoral: Camouflage

The Pastoral: the realm of the shepherd, his sheep; idealized love & longing, played out in a setting deliberately removed from the city, the polis in which trade & politics are carried out, the realm of urbanism, urbanity. Why begin Some Versions of Pastoral, as Empson does, thusly: "It is hard for an Englishman to talk definitely about proletarian art, because in England it has never been a genre with settled principles, and such as there is of it, that I have seen, is bad"? "I think good proletarian art," the maker of the ambiguities continues, "is usually Covert Pastoral."

Pastoral, in Empson's sense, is any work about the people but not by or for them. A literature, in some sense – by no means necessarily Marxian – of exploitation. For Empson, the Pastoral is always bound up with the political, with the relationships between classes, & therefore the question of proletarian literature ("socialist realism" as Gorki called it) & the whole issue of what was to become of literature under the Soviet experiment, color his entire discussion of the Pastoral in English writing. The Pastoral is written, at least proleptically, under the sign of the hammer & sickle (especially, one supposes, the sickle.)
***
[Dr Johnson, on Lycidas: "Its form is that of a pastoral; easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting."]
***
Ian Hamilton Finlay's 1978 "Some Versions of Pastoral: Homage to William Empson" (with Gary Hincks) is on its face a series of variations on the cover design of the 1960 New Directions paperback of Some Versions of Pastoral. That latter book's design is a prime example of the flaccid abstractionism into which ND's designers so often fell when at a loss for a proper image: grey blobs on a black ground on the top half, black blobs on a grey ground on the bottom. Finlay seizes those blobs for what they most immediately resemble to a post-war eye: camouflage patterns.

"Some Versions" is of a piece with Finlay's other two-sided, superimposed works, from the 1989 print "Two Landscapes of the Sublime" (a waterfall & a guillotine, of identical shapes & dimensions) to the 1984 "Terror/Virtue" medal, whose face (a classical column) is mirrored on its reverse (a guillotine). These works present hard but not unfamiliar truths about 18th-century thought & history: that the mechanized terror of the guillotine is implied both within the proto-Romantic theories of the Sublime & within the cult of neo-classical, "Roman" virtue. (For more, see my "Piety of Terror.")

The pastoral is still very much alive for Finlay, but it is not the truth of fields, trees, sheep, nymphs & shepherds that compels him; nor is it the classic allegory of pastoral, by which the poet may comment upon current events (cf. Spenser's Shepheardes Calender). Rather, it is the sense in which history has rendered all nature camouflage, a deceptive surface behind which lurk post-modern killing machines, cloaked in the finest products of abstract expressionism.
***
In Manhattan, people dress with a utilitarian flair – clothes for comfort, clothes in which one can walk from place to place even in the baking heat, but still show the form to advantage. (The great fashion faux pas of Summer 2006 – clam-diggers for men – was still in evidence, but more often on tourists than natives.) In Boca Raton, the fashion is for camouflage. (I'm reminded of the first camouflage moment at the turn of the 1970s/80s, largely inspired by Joe Strummer & co.) Standard olive jungle camouflage, of course – though that is usually worn by laborers & small children of the affluent – and the various "desert" and "urban" varieties developed over the past three decades, but more often in the glittering malls & arcades one sees young women in camouflage patterns of eye-popping turquoise & pink. There is no overt commentary being pursued – when one wore camouflage pants in 1981, one was practically overtly calling for the downfall of the Reagan monarchy – as likely as not, these are Bush voters. A semiotic I have yet to decipher.

Virginia Woolf & life-writing

Today, "working up" VW, happen'd upon these sentences from her fragmentary memoir, "A Sketch of the Past," dabbled at while she was writing a formal biography of her friend Roger Fry:

this throws light not merely on my own case, but upon the problem that I touched on the first page; why it is so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen. The person is evidently immensely complicated. Witness the incident of the looking-glass. Though I have done my best to explain why I was ashamed of looking at my own face I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others; I do not suppose that I have got at the truth; yet this is a simple incident; and it happened to me personally; and I have no motive for lying about it. In spite of all this, people write what they call 'lives' of other people; that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown. [...]

[My mother] was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. This influence, by which I mean the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves; public opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that; has never been analyzed in any of those Lives which I so much enjoy reading, or very superficially.

Yet it is by such invisible presences that the 'subject of this memoir' is tugged this way and that every day of his life; it is they that keep him in position. Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.

How neatly, yet how despairingly, Woolf pinpoints the deepest problems of the memoirist, & shows how that biographer's problems are the same – only multiplied, for the biographer does not have the autobiographer's access to her subject's memory.

Thinking about my own biography seminar this coming spring, determined to do some of my own genre policing: ie, this will be a seminar on biography, deliberately excluding autobiography & memoir. Reasoning?:

•sheer incompetence, for starters: I have never written memoir/autobiography for anyone but my desk drawer, as a personal aide-memoire, & I've never made a close study of the genre.

•picking one's struggles: over the years, I've come to see one of the biographer's central tasks as that of sorting, ranking, weighing, prioritizing evidence (once, of course, evidence has been scrupulously gathered); memory, conventional wisdom has it, trumps all other sorts of evidence. (& this is certainly true of memoir-writing as it's practiced by writers more scrupulous than James Frey.) But in biographical writing, memory – as presented in after-the-fact letters, in interviews, in – yes – memoirs – becomes one among many other sorts of evidences, & in my experience not the most reliable.

If I were to allow memoir's foot into the door, I'd be attracting a bunch of folks who'd be much better served by working with my colleague Bradley, who's worked with & thought about the genre in much greater depth than I; & I'd be opening cans of worms that I don't particularly want to sort thru – as they'd distract from the very particular cans of worms I do want to untangle.

But Woolf's words haunt me with a sense of the ultimate inadequacy of any life-writing. What she's lamenting here, surprisingly enough, isn't the accuracy or inaccuracy of memory, but the incompleteness of memory – and by implication the incompleteness of any view of the past we might construct. (Striking, as well, her shift from the personal – the importance of her mother to her formation – to the social: our inadequacy at sorting out the influences on a life of society, of class, of public opinion, etc. The biographer is perhaps better equipped to address the latter class of influences [ie the social], while memoirist is best at addressing the former [the personal], tho at the same time may perforce may be more blinkered as to the latter.)

[Woolf's own "solution," for those who want to know how the struggle "comes out," lies in casting memory into a fictive artifact (specifically the portrait of her own family life in To the Lighthouse); the biographer's – having to tread the shaking line betweeen invention & "truth" – is rather more complicated.]
***
Latest bit of self-promotion: if you care to see what yr humble blogger looks like among much more distinguished company, check me out on Shoemaker & Hoard's authors page.

William Bronk: Metaphor of Trees; Claire Tomalin: Samuel Pepys

When I was a pup in grad school & working on the staff of Epoch magazine, my one epistolary encounter with William Bronk taught me a little something about literary politics. I was reading Bronk's collected poems, Life Supports (1981), and his Manifest; and Furthermore (1987), & enjoying them very much. I thought Epoch ought to publish him, & with the permission of CS Giscombe (then the head editor) I wrote Bronk asking for poems. Since he might not know Epoch, I sent along a copy of one of my favorite issues, featuring a clutch of cool poems by John Taggart.

I don't remember the precise wording of his chilly reply, something like I don't think Epoch would be interested in anything of mine. It was several years later that someone gave me the heads-up that Taggart & Bronk, tho they might be living in roughly in the same neighborhood of the alt-poetry cosmopolis, had been little short of actual enemies, since Taggart's 1978 Ironwood essay "Reading William Bronk." In other words, I had chosen precisely the wrong issue of Epoch to send my potential contributor.

There's lots of praise in Taggart's essay on Bronk (reprinted in Songs of Degrees, U Alabama P 1994), but also a good deal of honest reserve (something in too short supply among poets writing about their peers). One conclusion one might draw from Taggart's analysis is that Bronk has built his career on an exploration of a set of epistemological themes – "reality" & the "imagination," the role of the poet in constructing the poet's world, etc. – that have "Wallace Stevens" written all over them, & that as he has delved more deeply into those themes (sometimes in remarkably powerful & moving ways), his focus has become more narrow, his voice more cynical and cranky.

I've read a number of Bronk's books over the past two decades, tho I'm by no means a huge fan (as some of my friends are), & his last collection – Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems (Talisman House, 1999) – hasn't won me over. I admire these poems, admire their clean & spare phrasing, their occasional mordant wit. But the book as a whole is a remarkably monochromatic collection. Open at any point and you find a grim meditation on our place in the world: a world which is not "real," but which we must behave as if it were. For instance (at random):

Information

The forms of gods are not God nor the forms
of men, man. Studying the forms
of the world won't find the world anywhere.

or:

Fleshing Out

None of us is; and those people who thought
they were never were. They made out
to be and some of us were fooled who
wanted to be too and pretended to be
hoping to be believed. Something is.

There is much to admire in this lapidary idiom. Over 140 pages, with few poems reaching beyond 8 or 10 lines, I find it ultimately wearying, like a 500-page collection of haikus. Stevens without the "gaiety" of language; Beckett without the outrageous humor.
***
While there's so much else that needs to be read, I can't keep myself away from Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Knopf, 2002) – it seems to fly by in fascinating 40- or 50-page chunks. She makes a very good case for the inherent interest of Pepys's life, the importance of his role in reforming & administering the British Navy, his closeness to some of the great intellectual fire-sources of his day (Hooke, Wilkins, Newton). Of course, Pepys would be only a footnote to history, a half-column in the DNB, were it not for his Diary, the 10-year shorthand record of the 1660s, which traces both Pepys's public & professional accomplishments & the most embarassing details of his private life – his rocky but on the whole satisfactory marriage, his career-related hopes & fears, his relentless busy-handed philandering.

I'm about 2/3 thru Tomalin's not overlong account of Pepys's life, but I've become so assured of her biographical skill that I'm confident she'll be able to surmount the greatest challenge before her: the 100 pages of The Unequalled Self that cover the last 33 years of Pepys's life – the years after he ceased keeping the Diary. It's the Diary of course that makes Pepys a great figure in English literature, & it's the diary that makes him the first subject susceptible to a truly modern biography, one that aims to tell both the external & the internal facts of its subject's life.

Yes, I've been thinking about biography as genre again. For a rather mordant perspective, fuelled by two recent books on the practice of biography, check out Louis Menand's "Lives of Others: The Biography Business" in the New Yorker. (Does Menand have a small child? I note a Sesame Street reference in his discussion of John Coltrane.)

housekeeping

I've spent a little bit of time, not actually blogging, but cleaning up the blogroll & list of links on the right. So everything should work these days – no more listings of blogs that haven't been up for months & months, no more outdated URLs. At least I hope. Let me know if you click on some duds.

I also pumped up the "Scroggins online" links list, even as I scratched my head (still sticky with sunscreen) & wondered if these things are worth the trouble. Of course they are! Random visitors* will bounce in droves from this weblog straight over to Amazon.com to buy The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. (Did I mention that it's available for preorder? & at a huge discount?)

Yeah. right. But who knows? And for my 7 readers who might actually be interested, I think I now have a fairly comprehensive set of links to my poems online.

*I am proud to announce that Culture Industry is at present the #1 Google hit for the search "nipple portraiture." Now how in hell do you beat that?

self-promotional department

It's nice to find one's own face staring out at one from the internets, particularly in as astonishingly flattering a photograph as Shannon O'Brien's. Shoemaker & Hoard, in short, have put up a page for the forthcoming The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. (Note handy link to the amazon.com page for the book, in case you have $20 burning a hole in your pocket.)

Policing the Fourth Genre

Okay, so enough ribbing – yes, I’ve spent (wasted? consumed?) a number of hours that could have been devoted to more serious activities to reading Harry Potter & the Healthy Fellows, & of course I couldn’t put it down, & of course I won’t remember a single detail of the plot a week from now. Which says nothing about the book’s merits or lack thereof – it’s just one of my own hardwired shortcomings, being unable to remember what happens in a work of fiction. I have to reread effing Moby-Dick every time I teach it, after all.

I won’t add anything to Josh Corey’s (congratulations, Josh! – welcome to the great world of the sleep-deprived) kind words about the Potter phenomenon, except to note that these are books that draw you in by the force of what happens, rather than by the strength of their prose. I read a stack of novels in New York – Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out & Night and Day, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, The Great Gatsby, Paul Auster’s Oracle Night. It’s hard to admire any else’s prose after reading Woolf, who’s incapable of writing an intentionally graceless sentence, & Rhys is almost as good. Fitzgerald looks rather thin & tawdry beside them, & Auster little better than sturdy, workmanlike. In all this company, JKR comes across as a engineer rather than an artist, a maker of intricate contraptions that amuse and intrigue, but which in the end don’t really resonate very deeply. Each to his or her own – the HP industry has gotten my money, & my time, & now back to Jacob’s Room.
***
My chums at Incertus, which has swollen into an almost Kos-like group blog, are posting so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up. I was taken by a recent triad of posts (scroll & scroll again) by my colleague & Lucius Malvoy-lookalike William Bradley, venting much spleen at James Frey & his fictionalized “memoir” A Million Little Pieces, a controversy whose 15 minutes I’d thought had passed long since. At the time, I’d thought this was a tempest in a teapost. Of course one expects a memoirist to tell the truth in his work, or at least the truth as he remembers it or – & this is a crucial distinction – wants it remembered. And when somebody deliberately alters details & sexes up his story, as Frey did, then it’s perfectly appropriate to yank off the codpiece & reveal the true dimensions of the organ. (And to have a good laugh, & to ostracize the malefactor, etc.)

There’s always a spectrum of truth-telling in memoir. Ruskin’s Praeterita, which is one of his most beautiful & affecting books, sort of manages to leave out any mention of Ruskin’s first, ill-fated marriage; William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography is chock-full of inaccuracies and downright distortions, most of them due to WCW’s failing memory; & one can rest assured that most political autobiographies, from Richard Nixon’s down to Bill Clinton’s, are full of outright lies. We forgive all of those omissions & distortions (save for the last category), because we’ve entered into a readerly contract that the memoirist will be trying to give us a narrative which dovetails with reality.

Now I’m one of those tiresome people who likes to read the fine print on contracts before signing them, & when I’m told that a writer is going to give me the “truth” – or as William puts it, “Truth” – I’m inclined to quote Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” Or to recall the sentence from Aristotle’s Poetics on how poetry (read “fiction”) is “graver and of more philosophical import” than history. Which doesn’t mean that William & I don’t agree that James Frey is a knave for trying to pass off an embellished narrative as literal fact. But I read this as a single case – among many other cases – of a writer on the make. It’s not an affront to the genre of the memoir, any more than the Milli Vanilli scandal undermined the “foundations” of dance-pop music or Ted Kooser’s being named poet laureate means the end of American poetry.

In short, I find one of William’s sentences particularly interesting:

Here's a man who got caught lying in a piece of creative nonfiction, but rather than admitting his wrong-doing, he tried to destroy an entire genre of literature by claiming that "everyone else is doing it"; anyone who claims to be writing about his or her own life is just as big a liar as James Frey.

Okay, so this is part of the intro to an “open letter” to Oprah Winfrey, & we ought to allow room for hyperbole. But how do you “destroy an entire genre of literature”? The logic is inescapable, & William argues it eloquently: there’s this genre of literature – call it “memoir,” call it more broadly “creative nonfiction” – & it has a single differentium that sets it apart from the other genres: it tells the truth (Truth).

I read an awful lot of things that aren’t fiction or poetry, & that have definite “literary value.” But I don’t know a hell of a lot about Creative Nonfiction as an academic discipline. I taught an undergraduate course in it 7-8 years ago & used maybe the 2nd edition of that anthology The Fourth Genre (plus a hell of a lot of supplemental stuff, since I found most of the pieces in the anthology pretty thin), but I’m pretty ignorant of the critical discourse that’s grown up around it. I’m not even quite sure what gets included & what doesn’t. The ad copy for the latest edition of The Fourth Genre describes “the full range of contemporary creative nonfiction” as “personal narrative, essay, memoir, literary journalism, and personal cultural criticism.” Is biography CNF? (guess not) Essayist book reviews? (that must be “literary journalism” – maybe?) Event history? (probably not – but what if it’s beautifully written, like Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties?) As with most genres, there seem to be things that are near the center of the genre – in this case, memoir and the personal essay – but the fringes are less well defined. (The Wikipedia entry on Creative Nonfiction, as one might expect, is a model of incoherence. I suspect I ought to trot to the library & read the latest issue of Creative Nonfiction, where this stuff is no doubt being thrashed out as we speak.)

Genres are notoriously difficult to define, in part because writers are always pushing at limits (prose poetry, anyone? the nonfiction novel? some of Beckett’s late drama, without characters, action, or speech?) & in part because the recognized genres haven’t grown up in logical, philosophically coherent ways. They’re not logical categories, but what Wittgenstein called “family resemblance” categories, “network[s] of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” of affinities shared among some members and not others. (What does Tender Buttons have in common with the Odyssey, or the Odyssey in common with a Shakespeare sonnet – save that they’re all “poetry”?)

In the case of CNF, what one has is a fairly young generic classification. People have been writing things for centuries that one could retroactively call CNF, but it’s only in the last few decades that it’s been given a name – or, more crucially, that it’s been given a place in the academy: and with that place in the academy comes the obligation to define and defend one’s practice.

William’s emphasis on the truth-value of CNF is a clear instance of genre-defining, & genre-policing. (And as usual, whenever a writer starts defining his own genre, what’s he’s really doing is defining his ideal view of his own writing.) For my part, I’m as little fond of the genre police as I am of the dream police, the canon police, or any other police force. Pronouncing what is & what isn’t a member of X genre smacks of weeding out the Mudbloods & the Muggle-borns, & I’ve always found the most interesting spots of writing are where the genres get blurred & start to overlap. And while I whole-heartedly agree with William’s scorn for standards of accuracy & decency in the contemporary political & cultural climate, I fear that I’ve imbibed way too much post-structuralism (not to mention good old fashioned American Pragmatism) over the years to take a call for “transcendental Truth” without more than a dash of salt & suspicion.