Kafka-land, Florida (academics only), part 2

Well, the comments stream for the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on Our Fair University's peremptory firing of five tenured faculty members has metastasized, & some really ugly name-calling has started – no doubt simply reflecting the overall morale of faculty here. At a Board of Trustees meeting today, Our Maximum Leader (ie the President of OFU) gave us the short version: OFU

respects tenure as much as any other state university..... As president of this university I want that quote to be entered into the record in a way that cannot be misunderstood and shouldn't be accepted as anything but what I mean it to be. This university supports tenure. That's a fact.

Well, that's always nice to hear, but is it borne out by what's been going down? Five tenured faculty, all of them with more than 15 years' service here, given pink slips & told to clean out their offices by August – not even the one academic year's notice mandated by the collective bargaining agreement.

What really boggles me about all this is how it was done. The College of Engineering went thru a massive restructuring this spring (with one suspects absolutely minimal faculty input). Several departments were merged, among them Computer Science & Electrical Engineering. But on top of that fairly common merging activity, the following arcane horizontal structure was cross-cut over the three remaining departments ("Ocean/Mechanical," "Computer/Electrical/Computer Science," & "Civil/Environmental/Geomatica" –dig those snazzy names)*:

Yes, that's right: every faculty member, of every rank from instructor thru full professor, belongs not merely to a department but to a "Functional Unit" as well, based one assumes on her or his "function" within the college. (Those units, in case you can't read 'em, are "Pre-professional Program," "Innovation Leadership Honors Program" [huh?], "Undergraduate Programs," and "Graduate Programs/Research.")

If the administration wanted to lay off a handful of faculty from a given department, by the terms of the collective bargaining agreement they'd be obliged to lay them off in order of seniority, instructors & assistant professors first. But lo & behold, by some unaccountable fluke, it turns out that the "Functional Unit" devoted to "Undergraduate Programs" consists of nothing but tenured faculty. So they're slicing the pie, not in a traditional department-based direction, but on the basis of a set of "Functional Units" whose precedent I've never seen in the academy. (Feel free to enlighten me, by the way.)

If one were paranoid & distrustful of authority, one might suspect that the "Functional Units" were expressly established to rid the college of a handful of highly-paid tenured faculty.

But Maximum Leader has told us that "This university supports tenure." And I believe, just as I believe we have always been at war with Eurasia.

*If you're a glutton for punishment, the entire presentation from which this snippet is drawn can be yawned thru here.

***

UPDATE, via the Palm Beach Post education news blog:

The President's full statement (dig the 3rd person):

This president respects tenure as much as he did when he arrived. I need to go on the record saying that because I think if it will be a negative impact on this university it will be brought about by the rhetoric of those making the statement that this is an attack on tenure. The fact is it’s not, period. So the suspicions are misguided. FAU respects tenure as much as any other state university. As president of this university I want that quote entered into the record in a way that cannot be misunderstood and shouldn’t be accepted as anything but what I mean it to be. This university supports tenure. That’s a fact.

(Thas a fact, Jack.) Now I don't wanna get all Orwellian, but it's kinda fun (once you've sorted out the grammar) to parse the logic of that there 2nd sentence.

Kafka-land, Florida (academics only)

This brief piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on Our Fair University's bold new approaches to "efficiency," is worth a look. Especially interesting are the comments from those on the ground, especially #2 ("jonathon") & #6 ("FAU Prof"). If the administration spent half the time they used concocting such arcane reorganizational schemes on actually improving things around here, who knows where we'd be?

bloomsday countdown

Mission accomplished; Ulysses read in a week flat, & without eating my mind. I suspect it's a book I could read 4 or 5 times a year. This time, without the pressures of seriously teaching the thing, without worrying about reading all of my marginal notes & making those various connections – well, actually making the connections is one of the great pleasures of the book, but this time thru I didn't feel compelled to follow thru with everything – the reading process was pretty much an unmitigated pleasure. Tho frankly, the older I get, the less patience I have with that tiresome, pretentious prat Stephen D.

A limbering-up session on the stringed instruments last night. We sounded pretty good, I thought, tho perhaps that was only thru the alcohol-earphones. Now I just need some Joyce jokes, of which there seem to be surprisingly few good ones out there.

***

Louisiana State University Press is having a humongous summer sale. I went there on a colleague's recommendation – Evelyn Scott's The Wave, a mostly forgotten cinematic-modernist epic novel on the Civil War (with the bonus that Scott & I share a Tennessee hometown) – & discovered that Jay Wright's big collected poems, Transfigurations, is on sale for a song. A book every serious poetry bookshelf should include: let's see if we can't buy it out of stock, okay?

***

Midway thru the first volume of Modern Painters again, & disinclined to go over (blogging, that is) ground I've already covered. But also working my way thru an extraordinarily rich collection of essays, Ruskin and Modernism (ed. Giovanni Cianci & Peter Nicholls), that rather deftly makes a lot of the basic connections I've been thinking about.

***

Did I mention LeFanu's Uncle Silas? That one's a grand read indeed.

Ulysses, at speed

I haven't read Ulysses in a couple of years, after several years of reading the novel at least once, sometimes twice annually. Then I got a call a couple weeks back from someone doing publicity for a brand new Irish pub up the road – "Tim Finnegans," of all things, & proudly without an apostrophe – wanting me to come in this coming weekend & give a half-hour "entertaining" talk about things Joycean as part of their grand opening Bloomsday celebration.

Now I view Bloomsday parties about as seriously as J, who's an early modern drama scholar, does the Renaissance Fair. But I've started jotting down my best Joyce jokes, & various "deep" thoughts about this ungainly novel that no doubt 9/10s of the people present haven't made their way thru. (After all, why should they?) Anyone who wants to contribute "entertaining" things I should say is welcome to.*

Unfortunately, my OCD side led me to pick up the novel itself again last week. Tuesday, to be precise: in part to test out a little theory I'd nursed for some time. That is, the last few times I've read Ulysses have been in conjunction with teaching Ulysses, so I've spaced the 18 chapters out over 9 or 10 weeks. But for goodness' sake, I read Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Uncle Silas in 3 days the other week out of sheer page-turnability: wouldn't it be possible to read Ulysses in the course of a week, without feeling that the novel had entirely taken over one's brain?

At any rate, it's Saturday night & I'm at the very end of "Oxen of the Sun." The early chapters tripped by at the rate of 3 or 4 a sitting; a flying visit to Tennessee over the past couple of days gave me airplane time to read thru a chapter on each leg of the flight (even counting inevitable dozing off). What's ahead is all downhill: "Circe," despite its imposing length, has always been one of my favorites, a very fast & funny gallop, & the 3 chapters of the Nostos section ("Eumaeus," "Ithaca," & "Penelope") are probably my favorite bits of the book. So I expect to have finished Ulysses in just about a week, & comfortably.

Rereading the book reminds me of just how radical it gets in its second half – or rather, beginning with its 11th chapter, "Sirens." Everything that comes before (save perhaps the newspaper headlines of "Aeolus" – which as Michael Groden shows Joyce actually went back & added late in the compositional process) is strictly realistic, a painstaking attempt to chart the internal monologues of his characters. It's only with the "fugal" form of "Sirens," followed by the various stylistic shenanigans of the later chapters, that the novel plunges off the diving board of realism into a kind of heaven of textuality.

*What's really daunting is that my old friend & musical partner OB volunteered us to play a mini-set of Irish tunes after the talk, & my bouzouki fingers are far rustier than my toastmaster skills.

Jenny Boully: The Body

The Body, Jenny Boully (Slope Editions, 2002)

The Body is subtitled "An Essay," a gesture I didn't give much thought to until I heard Dinty Moore, in a lecture on the unfolding wonders & potentialities of creative nonfiction, hailed Boully's book as being on the cutting edge of this institutionally emergent genre. And then I noted that Boully in her acknowledgments thanks not only the poets John Matthias & Robert Kelly, but the doyen of the "lyrical essay," John D'Agata. So maybe, I begin to think, there's something important going on in this generic gesture.

The Body consists of a series of footnotes to an absent text. A large part of how the book works is the reader's ongoing attempt to figure out precisely what that text might consist of: is it a memoir (as many of the 1st person notes seem to indicate)? is it a slightly salacious literary biography? is it a work of linguistic philosophy (references to Levinas & Derrida)? is it the history of a particular play (notes about varying "productions")? is it some combination of all of these things, & a great deal more?

Ultimately, the "text" to which The Body furnishes the footnotes must be as fragmentary, non-linear, & wide-ranging as those footnotes themselves. (The notes section of Nabokov's Pale Fire, & even the notes to The Waste Land, make documents far more coherent than The Body.) I like this book. I like its sense of mystery & inconsequence, its flashes of humor & raw emotion – but I find myself reading it not as an essay, but as poetry. That is, if one places The Body among the works of post-avant written in the past 30 years, even in its most radical formal gestures it seems to be working within a clear tradition. If one reads it among essays, however, it seems quite blindingly radical, out on the very limits of the genre. And I wonder if that isn't precisely the position the writer (the poet? the essayist?) wanted to claim in the subtitle.

[The Body is being released in a new edition by – you guessed it – Essay Press. It's worth looking at Craig Dworkin's learned & subtle reading of the book here.]

[73/100]

zeitgeist-tracking

My friend & colleague A. Papatya Bucak has a great little piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on the experience of getting tenure; I find my feelings on promotion are pretty much the same (tho I can't say I share her enthusiasm for Anthropologie).

It seemed that Eric Selinger was (alas!) deep-sixing his consistently lively & thought-provoking (if not consistently updated) blog Say Something Wonderful, but happily he's reconsidered & has resurrected the blog as what it was at its best, a sandbox for his own ideas-in-progress & reactions to the books & scholarship he's reading. Latest post is a read-thru of Eric Keenaghan's essay on Robert Duncan in the latest Contemporary Literature.

I realize now that I ought to read Ralph Maud's bio of Olson, if only as counterweight to Tom Clark's. See Alan Casline's assessment here.

Steve Evans's annual core sample of what people are reading, the "Attention Span," has taken shape on Third Factory. I'm delighted to see that four people reported reading The Poem of a Life, & two of them were generous enough to say write nice comments about it.

***

The poetry blogosphere all a-buzz at Stephen Burt's latest attempt at capturing the Zeitgeist in the Boston Review, "The New Thing: The object lessons of recent American poetry." (Many reactions, including this by Bob Archambeau & this by John Latta.) I was pleased to see the attention Burt pays to the press Flood Editions, & the Zach Barocas's consistently excellent website Cultural Society. (Also nice to see my own name appear, if only as a member of a list...)

What do I make of Burt's essay as a whole? Well, I'm not sure yet. I admire the impulse to try to make sense of the shifts in poetry that one feels around one, the sense one gets that the social organization of the art, & the art itself, is evolving as one ages. I've watched the "scene" changing over the past 2 decades with some interest – from my own callow youth, when the most visible insurgency on the scene was the highly vocal (& now largely forgotten, I guess) "new formalists" (the Language Poets, far more radical, were only an ugly rumor in academic & official verse culture circles), to my grad school years when I learned of an entirely new generation of poets (my own generation, I guess) who'd been reading the things I thought I was the only person alive reading, to the general dissemination of certain post-avant gestures thruout both academic & OFC circles (what Burt in an earlier essay calls "elliptical poetry), to Flarf & the new conceptual writing.

Once or twice along the way I've tried to conceptualize or theorize why people started writing in ways different from the ways they'd been writing in – or rather, why presses & journals were publishing things different from what they'd published – or rather, why critical & popular attention was being paid to the latest "new thing," so that suddenly yesterday's status quo seemed altogether, er, yesterday. But I've always given up after throwing out a half dozen hypotheses & outlines of ideas. This is I guess what I admire about Burt – that he's willing to set stakes into recent poetic movements & try to write real literary history, just as it's happening.

The problem of course is that when one tries to assess where we are – especially in a literary landscape as astonishingly varied, lively, & just plain densely populated as the first decade of the 21st century – one invariably ends up seeing only part of the picture. Literary shifts, shifts in writerly fashion, are incredibly overdetermined, & many of the causes contributing to the trends in poetry writing probably won't be evident for decades to come – if then.

That's not to say that one needs to just sit by George Bush-ly and let history be written by those who come after us. Literary histories written on the spot & for the first few decades after tend to be markedly partisan, devoted to establishing the legitimacy of a particular poetics or cluster of writers. Roy Harvey's Pearce's Continuity of American Poetry, for all its acute readings, really aims to establish American poetry as a long prelude to Wallace Stevens; Marjorie Perloff's "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" is in part a brief on behalf of the post-Poundian Language Poets; and heaven knows how many books were written between 1930 & 1955 showing anglophone poetry's hegelian evolution up to TS Eliot.

Perhaps more to the point, I'm not convinced that literary histories written decades after the fact are all that more insightful than on-the-spot assessments like Burt's. The historian's choice of which among an overdetermining variety of factors are most important shifts with intellectual fashion, & we never really get more than a partial view of what was going on at any given point, or what's going on now.

At times, I wanna say hey, it's really simple – poets get bored with what they're reading & writing, & decide to do something different. Other poets like what the first group's doing, & do something similar. Voila! A shift in the Zeitgeist. But that sounds like the School of Larkin Criticism, doesn't it? Kudos to Stephen Burt for trying to do something more, as Quixotic as the attempt may be; and wholly unreserved kudos to him for drawing attention to some very interesting poets & presses.

x-roads

We got back from Oberlin (& a side trip to Cleveland) Tuesday, J. with a howling respiratory infection, me just plain exhausted (what else is new?). The reunion, & the whole "college town" experience, was rather nice. I'd forgotten, in the many years since I've lived in an isolated place where higher education is the principal "industry," how cool it is to be in a community where liberal – nay, leftist, even ultra-leftist – is more or less the default political-cultural stance. Oberlin's recently appointed president, whom we ran into a half-dozen times over the weekend, bikes from his home to campus, & sometimes forgets to take leg of his suit trousers out of the sock into which he's tucked it (ie to avoid the cycle chain). I suspect the president of Our Fair University drives his block-long SUV the quarter-mile from his extravagant mansion (Barbie's Dream House, we call it) to his office.

The dorm in which we stayed was emblematic. Dating back I think to the 1880s; fronted by a striking monument to the Underground Railroad (on which Oberlin was an important stop); fitted with a fascinating "Dorm Orb" – a glowing sphere fixed into the second floor wall, which tracks the energy use of the entire dorm (green everybody's cool, red you're overusing the microwave & the hot water). Plastered everywhere there were signs letting you know that if you'd traveled a long distance to the reunion, you could conveniently buy carbon offsets on campus to compensate for all the jet fuel you'd burned. The dorm was equipped with "All-Gender" bathrooms; this wasn't especially a problem (tho it didn't create the kind of thrill I probably would have felt back in my own undergraduate days, when VA Tech dorms were still strictly single-sex & overnight stays were officially verboten) – what was a problem was getting access to one of the three, count 'em, three shower stalls serving the entire floor.

And heaven knows Obies know how to party, even when they've been away from the alma mater for over two decades. Which made for noise problems, given that party central seemed to be right under our feet.
***
I finally made it to the end of Volume II of the Ruskin Library Edition, the poems. I oughtn't to deprecate them too much: they're competent, sometimes even musical. Clearly, JR had saturated himself in the rhythms & tricks of Romantic English verse: he does quite a competent "funny" Byron, & at times even approaches the majesty of Wordsworth's blank verse. But the poems never quite catch fire, & serve mostly as teasers for the prose that he'll later come to write.

I'm a bit torn about Volume III, the first volume of Modern Painters. I'm direly tempted to plunge right in, even despite its 650+ page bulk, & report my findings as I go. But I've already blogged Modern Painters I, almost two years ago, it seems. For blogging purposes – ie for the 4 people out there who might conceivably be interested in a 20th-century poetry scholar's reading thru Ruskin – it would be best for me simply to read the ancillary materials (the long & rich introductions, the appendices, all the wonderful textual variations) of the next (chronologically) four volumes (MP I & II, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice I), then resume real blogging with The Stones of Venice II. But I'm not sure I can resist re-reading the volumes I read over the last 2 years, now in their sumptuous, ideal settings. Stay tuned.

***

On the other hand, I just acquired Dinah Birch's 2004 edition of Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford World's Classics). A solid & well-annotated smattering of every period & almost every genre of his writing, it seems. Methinks one could even teach a Ruskin seminar one of these days, given Birch's & Wilmer's anthologies, plus whatever other paperbacks & online editions one could scrounge up.

***

One of these days I'll take up reading poetry again.

off the air, temporarily

We're off to Oberlin for J's college reunion tomorrow, & won't be back until Tuesday. I'm actually on the verge of looking forward to the trip: all physical systems very much on the mend & so forth. No Library Edition Ruskins coming with me, I'm afraid; the books are just too damned big to schlepp around. Instead, I'll probably pack Kenneth Clark's little anthology of juicy bits, along with a few dryly academic things. I thought of packing a sketchbook & trying to capture some landscapes, Ruskinianly, but J tells me it's just as flat there as it is here, alas.

A stack of Ray Monk-related articles has revived my interest in doing a book on biography, but I see gleams of a large study of Ruskin & modernism somewhere down the line.

end of an era

[Shane MacGowan – what's wrong with this picture?]

After who knows how many years of trademark toothlessness, it seems that Shane MacGowan has finally done a Martin Amis & gotten his choppers fixed. As the writer in the Daily Mail notes, perhaps now even the famously fastidious Americans will approve of his dental hygiene.

rain; torpor

So the "rainy season" is upon us here in the vast paved suburb that is south Florida. Which means, in effect, that after an hour or two of sunshine, or mixed sunshine in the morning, come the early afternoon the clouds bank in & begin emptying themselves, sometimes with brutal intensity. At best, it's overcast all afternoon & begin raining in the evening.

I've discovered over the past few years that my moods are appalling linked to the weather; if I lived in Norway, I would probably have killed myself years ago – how in the world did I survive those years in Ithaca? At any rate, the rainy season always slows me down, physically & mentally, & the coincidence of its arrival with a rather nasty set of infections (pinkeye, chest cold) has rendered me practically comatose over the past week or so. Here's hoping that the wonders of modern medical technology, in the form of massive does of antibiotics, will pull me out by the weekend.

But there's still the rain.

***

David Rich of Gloucester has been carrying on the Olson legacy with aplomb. The first issue of his journal Process hit the shelves last year, featuring work by Nathaniel Tarn, Pierre Joris, Alan Davies, Jerome Rothenberg, & a host of others (including some fascinating unpublished pieces by Edward Dahlberg, including letters to Fanny Howe, a letter to Louis Zukofsky, and a poem addressed to LZ).

Over the next couple of years, Process will be appearing not as a perfect-bound journal but as a series of chapbooks. The first one, Process: The Basement Tapes, is out now, printing work by James Cook, Donald Wellman, Craig Stormont, Ewa Chrusciel, and David Rich. There're also three small pieces by yr. humble blogger – 3 excerpts from a long project, Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles: "Blood Is Thin," "Demon Sanctuary," & "Thrash Jazz Assassin."

The Basement Tapes is available for $5; Process #1 for $14: contact David at process[dot]journal[at]gmail[dot]com.

daubage

So here's one that I "finished" last week. It's acrylic on canvas board; obviously, the unabashed figure is unabashedly stolen from the Edward Burne-Jones Perseus & Andromeda that I commented on the other day. I make no claims for the technique I'm slowly trying to "master" (or recover? – I painted better at 17, I fear), but the photo doesn't capture the background, which really does glow after 12 or 13 coats of glazed blue & a very thick varnish.

Obviously, this & the various other things I've bunged onto the Flickr page are mostly attempts at coming to terms with the medium, rather than real "art." But I have biggish plans burbling somewhere for a series of big canvases. First, tho, I need to get comfortable with painting real stuff in the background, rather than fun geometries.

et cetera

Okay, so I thought I was getting better – the eye clearing up, the mucus fading from kelly green to a less alarming sandpaper beige, the cough no longer rattling the windows in their frames – but then I woke up Saturday almost literally dead. Okay, not that bad, but I felt seriously rough; Sunday was just as bad, & the conjunctivitis was back as well. Sigh. Methinks I need to get ahold of some serious antibiotics & get this business under control before loading the family up for Oberlin & J.'s college reunion this coming weekend.

***

Ruskin's poems burble along comfortably enough, if unmemorably. I've gotten about halfway thru the 550-page 2nd volume of the Library Edition; I've finished, that is, all the poems he formally published & collected during his lifetime (the collection of record, which more or less signalled the close of Ruskin's already negelected poetic career, came out in 1850, when he was 31), & have just embarked on the real live "juvenilia," starting with the bits of precocious doggerel he was cranking out at 7 or so. What's striking about the –er – mature poetry (he really pretty much gave up poetry when he got deeply into the 1st volume of Modern Painters, published when he was 24) is that Ruskin's much-admired descriptive "eloquence" – what many would call his "purple prose" – is already very much in place. Indeed, the stuff comes absolutely naturally to him, simply flows off his pen. What makes the difference is that in Modern Painters that descriptive gift will be harnessed to a coherent moral aesthetic; later, things'll get even more interesting, when that moral aesthetic is imbricated with a social & political vision.

It's hard not to agree with Kenneth Clark in his introduction to the Penguin anthology Ruskin Today, who regrets "the sheer nonsense which occupies a great part of his later work." On the other hand, Clark presents an interesting meditation upon his choice of particularly "beautifully written" passages – the "purple" bits, precisely:

There are good reasons why this kind of writing [a "highly coloured prose style"] is no longer admired and, by younger critics, actively despised. It introduces an emotional appeal into matters which should be the concern of reason, and even the emotions it arouses are inflated by the pressure of words. It is commonly used to conceal the truth,to stir up hatred, and to promote war. A rhetorical style intoxicates the writer and seems to generate a particular state of mind, so that Ruskin will suddenly indulge in a tub-thumping justification of the Crimean War or a violent incitement to go out and seize colonies (although in his quieter moments he knew that both war and colonialism were wrong), simply because the mounting rhythm of his style carried him in that direction. Today the suspicion we feel for degraded language rhetoric extends to elaborate writings of all kinds. We find it hard to believe that anyone who is sincerely anxious to tell the truth will do so in long and well-contrived sentences, rather than in a series of monosyllables and grunts. [Compare the inexplicably popular Matt Taibbi's neanderthal attack on Terry Eagleton, or the American right wing's promotion of the "rhetoric" of Joe the Plumber & Sarah Palin against Obama during the last election.] And so the marvellous eloquence which, to his contemporaries, seemed to guarantee Ruskin's immortality, has become one of the principal reasons why he remains unread.

***

Gay Daly's Pre-Raphaelites in Love continues to amuse & engross. I called it a "pot-boiler with academic pretensions," which was perhaps a trifle harsh but on balance fair enough. The material itself is fascinating, & presented gracefully – the erotic relationship between painters & models, the collision of Victorian moral strictures & hard-wired human desires, the place of the "fine arts" in Victorian political economy, the process of a new "avant-garde" assimilating itself into the structures of official culture, etc. – but I'm continually hankering for Daly to dig a bit deeper, to indulge in a bit more hard analysis. But that, of course, might well push the book out of the "popular audience" category into the "academic" world. (Precisely the wall I found myself walking atop while writing The Poem of a Life, & I'm not sure which side I kept falling onto. [Perhaps, given that the book is still available, & a bargain, you should pick up your own copy & decide for yourself?])

***

Is it too obvious that I'm avoiding writing what I ought to be writing?

bitchiness

I never saw the movie of The Da Vinci Code, tho I do regret the few hours I wasted reading the novel; & I think it's fair to say that I'll never, ever, ever open a copy of Angels & Demons. But there's a delicious, if somewhat trashy, thrill in reading the kind of savagery A. O. Scott dishes out for the new film version of Dan Brown's opus in today's New York Times. What's not to love in such sentences?:

I have not read the novel by Dan Brown on which this film (directed, like its predecessor, “The Da Vinci Code,” by Ron Howard) is based. I have come to believe that to do so would be a sin against my faith, not in the Church of Rome but in the English language, a noble and beleaguered institution against which Mr. Brown practices vile and unspeakable blasphemy.

Its preposterous narrative, efficiently rendered by the blue-chip screenwriting team of Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, unfolds with the locomotive elegance of a Tintin comic or an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” Mr. Howard’s direction combines the visual charm of mass-produced postcards with the mental stimulation of an easy Monday crossword puzzle. It could be worse.

[T]he Harvard symbologist [sic]* Robert Langdon..., no favorite of the Holy See and long denied access to the Vatican archives, is summoned to Rome to assess, and then defuse, a deadly threat involving antimatter, papal succession and the ancient pro-science terrorist underground known as the Illuminati. You didn’t suspect the Illuminati? Nobody suspects the Illuminati. Except Robert Langdon of course.

The high-minded shop talk, half buttressed by real historical information, half floating in the ether of cocktail party nonsense, seems to be a crucial feature of a Robert Langdon adventure, and you can only be charmed when the symbologist says things like: “An obelisk! A kind of pyramid adopted by the Illuminati! If he’s going to kill, he’ll do it here.”

Why, I can't help wondering, aren't more poetry reviews this much fun?

*Like, where does Brown get the idea that there's an academic discipline of "symbology"? And where do I sign up?

ruskinizing, with summer approaching

The house has returned to some semblance of health. I'm always the last one at healing, & still have a bit of a sniffle & an irritating cough, but for the most part am feeling around 75%, if not better. The Florida summer is close at hand, I can tell: we've begun the daily round of drenching thunderstorms, & the heat & humidity (after a long rather mild spell) are starting to kick in in their usual unbearability.

***

Well, I'm deep into the 2nd volume of the Library Edition of Ruskin, the one consisting entirely of his poetry. Sigh. For a chap who figured out by his mid-20s that he was a poet only in prose, it seems a damned shame that JR managed to crank out over 500 pages of the stuff.

Volume I, Early Prose Writings, proved unexpectedly pleasurable. Really very much a ragbag of juvenilia. Aside from The Poetry of Architecture, the volume includes a number of occasional notes & essays (including a school theme stoutly defending Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, & Byron as not morally depraving to young minds & an essay on the comparative merits of painting & music, written to impress a young woman), a longish run of letters to an Oxford chum, & the whole of Ruskin's fictional oeuvre: the perennially popular – & actually rather good – fairy tale "The King of the Golden River"; "Leoni," a dreadful short story written in abject imitation of Sir Walter; and the abortive beginnings of a novel, if anything more in thrall to the Laird of Abbotsford – and to his worst aspects, I fear. Scott's novels have infamously slow starts, leisurely-unfolded frame narratives within frame narratives, so that it's sometimes 30 or 40 pages before the actual story gets underway. The frame narrative of The Chronicle of St. Bernard is really the only bit of his own novel that Ruskin manages to finish. (The title, like Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate, refers to the frame narrative – the Alpine hostel where the story proper, which is set in Venice, gets told.) As soon as he's a chapter into the actual narrative, Ruskin seems to have abandoned the whole thing as a bad job.

The poetry – well, what to say about the poetry? It's very competent, in its relentless but tame aping of Keats, Byron, Shelley. It's very earnest, & not very funny. Ruskin, it seems, had by his early 20s made a name for himself as one of the most popular "annual" poets of the nation – you know, those gigantic coffee-table volumes, chock-full of poems, essays, & stories, all carefully calibrated not to offend the most morally sensitive members of the family, which were marketed as Christmas presents on a yearly basis. I'm not sure I'll have a lot to say about Ruskin's verse; the 120 pages or so I've traversed have yet to yield a single line that sticks in my head.

***

Turning over the pages of Gay Daly's potboiler-with-academic-pretensions, Pre-Raphaelites in Love, & eagerly awaiting books in the mail: a scholarly study of P-R painting techniques, a collection of Jeff Jones artwork, & an illustrated biography of Jane Morris, she of all those Rossetti paintings. Oh, what hair!

[Jane Morris]

daubs

Here perhaps the apotheosis of my "comic book" style, a portrait of LZ in pen & ink & gouache, based on a 1941 studio photograph. Probably did this one five or six years ago, when I was first contemplating picking up brushes again. It's fairly small, maybe 8" x 5".

daubs

Yes, I've been painting this Spring. Above is acrylic & collage (the last page of Scott's Fortunes of Nigel) on canvas. I've started a Flickr page for photos of my daubs, tho as useless as I am as a visual artist, I'm even worse as a visual arts photographer.

I'll probably post more on Culture Industry in the weeks to come.

krankhaus

This was meant to be the week I got on top of everything – paying the bills, sorting thru some of the sifts of papers in the common areas of the house, getting a running start at some of the summer's writing projects. Then some malignant deity intervened: I woke up Sunday with a dreadful case of conjunctivitis in the right eye – glued shut with goop, redder than Joshua Clover's diapers. Like a good Protestant, however, I sucked it up & suffered in passive-aggressive silence.

Daphne had been rubbing an eye for a day or day or two & had been nursing a cough for much of the Spring (but generally feeling pretty decent), & Pippa was moving slowly; both of them wanted to stay home from school yesterday, so why not? A trip to the veterinarian – oops, I meant pediatrician – confirmed that both of them had eye infections, ear infections, & throat infections. On a hunch, I swung by my own G.P., to have my diagnosis confirmed & pick up a prescription for a run of drops.

Last night, however, D. took a turn for the worse, a spiking fever & a hacking cough, which woke her sister up at 15-minute intervals. Problem is, I didn't want to move P into the "guest room" (read: playroom), as I'd been sleeping there myself & the bedclothes were already saturated with my own bacteria, which on an off chance might be a different family from hers. So I ended up spending the night on the floor next to D.'s lower bunk, roused at 15-minute intervals from a non-sleep by her coughs, hysterical sobbing, & feverish delirium. (Hands me a sippy cup: "Use it on the cat!" Me: "Huh?" "Get the cat away from me!" Poor cat is of course slumbering happily somewhere downstairs, entirely oblivious. "Hold my hand, Daddy!") Not a happy evening.

Everyone markedly better today. A bit more Ruskin read, a new canvas gridded in & sketched out for underpainting. Writing projects – well, they're still waiting, their eyes glinting evilly in the corner.

Cole Swensen: Ours

Norman comments on that last scattered post:

it seems odd that the distinguished biographer of Louis Zukofsky [who? – oh, me – "distinguished"?!?] has overlooked Z's emphasis on pleasure, as in "the test of poetry is the pleasure it affords..." Is all this concern about getting everything listened to or read some sort of post-Protestant guilt? Some sense that one's dealings with the arts mandates strenuous labor? Related to this, I am reminded that somewhere in the tomes of Harold Bloom, he talks about poets (and by extension, critics) sacrificing lesser pleasures for greater (more severe, more harassing) ones. Well, OK--but only up to a point. I mean, I need to finish reading Proust, but I think I'm going to reread all of William Gibson first.

(Amen to that last, tho I suppose I'd substitute something even trashier for Gibson...) Yes, it is all about pleasure, on some level, & I guess what I'm lamenting is that in pitchforking thru "cultural overproduction" (Tyrone's term), in reading thru scores of books or listening to hundreds of hours of music, I find myself losing immediate pleasure, perhaps even losing the capacity for immediate pleasure.

There is a big element of Puritan guilt here, the sense that "I own it, I've got to listen to/read it, whether I want to or not at the moment" – my own particular fundamentalist heritage (which I learned to my delight recently, I share with Evie Shockley) is still a far-too-big element of my mindset in general. But I'm not sure it has much todo with Bloom's "more severe, more harassing" pleasures: that's the pleasure of reading Bruce Andrews rather than Billy Collins, & I'm up for that any day. Bloom would quite rightly put my "read it all" passion down to simple anality.

***

Ours, Cole Swensen (U of California P, 2008)

I was drawn to this one by its very subject matter – 17th-century French formal gardening, particularly the work of the landscape architect André Le Nôtre (from whose name Swensen gets her punning title). I know relatively little about the French formal tradition of landscapes, exemplified by Le Nôtre's work at Versailles & Vaux-le-Vicomte; I've been more interested in the transition between formal & "picturesque" styles that takes place in England over the 18th century, & gets thematized in Pope & others.

But I'm a sucker for gardening poems, & Swensen's evocations of Le Nôtre are rich with history, pondering deeply the implications of shaping the landscape, its plants & watercourses, along strictly geometric lines. What I increasingly found fascinating in Swensen's poem-sequence, however, was her sense of the sentence. Her sentences, that is, unforld with deceptively straightforward syntax, often enriched by internal rhymes & sound repetition. But as they unwind over multiple lines, they shift direction, rhetoric, & blossom out into something quite different from what they began as – often, something larger, more "metaphysical."

Much of the time, I think it's fair to say, Swensen's addressing a strict and neoclassical art (the formal garden, which owes more to Euclid than it does to Longinus, more to geometry than to the sublime) in an interestingly post-Romantic register. Where Marvell's Mower laments the sterility of those evenly demarcated parterres, Swensen lets her imagination move over them until they become the source of a different sublime from that which the Romantics shivered at as they contemplated the Alps or the ocean – a geometric sublime, comparable to what the advanced metaphysician sees in a well-formed equation or proof.

[72/100]

anality & available canons

Tinkering with iTunes today; somehow, in shifting my music library from one hard drive to another, the program lost the "connections" with about a third of my ripped & downloaded mp3s, so that I'm having to go thru, track by track, repairing those connections. Tedious. Someone's about to tell me that I can just delete the albums, then re-import them to iTunes – yes, that would work just fine. The problem is that it would lose the all-important "play counts." You see, as another evidence of my overriding anality – perhaps some mild OCD? – I'm in the process of systematically listening thru every track I own. No small task: there're something like 13,000 tracks in my iTunes library; I've gotten it down to a mere 1100 unlistened to "songs" (a category which includes poetry readings, lectures, podcasts, & other stuff).

It makes me think, perhaps not oddly at all, about literary canons. Someone whom I can't bother to look up distinguished between the "canon" – that always hegemonic, nasty-bad list of great dead men – a canon which no-one has really believed in since the early 1970s, so far as I'm concerned – and the "available canon," the pieces of writing which are more or less easily accessible for reading & teaching (canon-perpetuating?) practices. Which is to say that literary works end up on our syllabi (speaking as a professor, now) do so in large part because they're available in affordable anothologies, online, or in paperbacks we can in good conscience make our students buy. Lyn Hejinian's My Life is probably a canonical text to a lot of readers of this blog; but when I went to teach it this past semester, I found that it was in some "not out of print but unavailable indefinitely" limbo. (Get your finger out, Doug!) I'd have no such problem with Gulliver's Travels, or The Awakening, or Three Lives, all of which are available in a variety of editions, ranging from cheap Dover Thrift editions to lavishly annotated scholarly things.

So I was thinking about (was it) Milton, the last writer for whom it was possible to have read everything – every significant text in Western literature. (And who said that? And of course it's not really true – he couldn't have read all of those early modern plays, even the ones that managed to get published, or the whole of the Church Fathers...) But the range of books he had available to him was so unimaginably more curtailed than what we have today, even in the most dreary Waldenbooks suburb. And my iPod, with its 13,000 songs – does that represent more music, of a wider range, than Mozart (or Robert Johnson) heard over the course of his life?

I'm feeling, that is, overwhelmed by riches, to the point of being at a loss. I have probably a couple thousand volumes of poetry, most of it American, most of it published over the last 30 years, on my shelves & in stacks on my floor; and several hundred of those volumes I haven't yet read. As with my "unplayed" iPod playlist, I'm assiduously trying to work my way thru it all, trying to sift the gems from the – well, from everything else. But sometimes it seems like sheer volume of cultural production works to dull the ear & eye. When I listen thru the Pogues box set, for instance, I hear live versions & demo versions of songs that are interestingly different from the versions with which I'm familiar; but those differences don't register with the same impact they would have when I was in my early 20s, & played every new album four times over as soon as I got it out of the shrink-wrap. Too many books of poetry in a row & the genre itself seems to hover into a blur of disjunction, image, & musical line. When I bought my hot-off-the-press copy of Leslie Scalapino's that they were at the beach back in 1985, I read it till the spine broke. Now, even the most impressive new book is hard-pressed to provoke more than a 2nd or 3rd reading.

Perhaps the cure is to restrict one's reading, one's listening, for a while. There's something to be said for Christopher Ricks's Bob Dylan fixation (in conversation, it becomes pretty abundantly clear that Ricksie isn't particularly interested in rock music, or in popular songwriting in general – he just loves, & knows in microcopic detail, Dylan). But I'm not ready to cut back my reading list just yet. Perhaps I just need a season of slow reading.

***

Looks like I'll be teaching, come next Spring, a grad seminar in Postwar American Poetry. But golly, I'm disinclined to put together a syllabus of 13 or 14 volumes by people I like. I'd rather do something that tries to give a sense of the shapes & directions of American poetry since 1945, a bit of – for want of a better word – literary history. Anybody got any suggestions for useful anthologies, histories, approaches, etc.?

[Professional arse-covering: Of course, anything you suggest, I'll already be familiar with (wink wink, nudge nudge); I just need – er – reminding.]

oh my ["a pale peach at sunrise"]

[Edward Burne-Jones, Perseus Slaying the Sea Serpent, ca. 1875-1877]

As someone who's thought about, & even dabbled in, the genre of literary biography, I yield to no-one in my admiration for Tim Hilton's enormous two-volume biography of Ruskin, John Ruskin: The Early Years (Yale UP, 1985) & John Ruskin: The Later Years (Yale UP, 2000). It really does seem one of those books "unlikely to be superceded" – Hilton seems to capture every last significant detail of Ruskin's doings, at the same time keeping up a running & very perspicacious commentary on his writings. I've read some 4 or 5 lives of Ruskin now – more than anyone except Pound & Shakespeare, I think – & Hilton's is by far the best (tho John Batchelor's much more manageable life has much to recommend it, & John Dixon Hunt's The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin is 150 pages in a rather extraordinary book – of which more anon).

But I turned the other day back to the first Hilton book I'd ever read, The Pre-Raphaelites, a 1970 monograph now available in the usually excellent Thames & Hudson "World of Art" series. After you've read Hilton's biography, his book on the P-Rs seems very much a footnote to his later work on Ruskin – The Pre-Raphaelites is saturated with references to Ruskin, takes Ruskin as a pivot around which Hilton's entire assessment of the movement revolves.

And the book, while it's beautifully written & full of strongly & wittily stated opinions, hasn't aged particularly well in some respects. Take sexual politics, for instance. It's difficult to imagine an art historian getting away with a passage like this these days:

Perseus Slaying the Sea Serpent [see above] has a fine slimy monster, and the added advantage of an extremely fetching naked girl. Here is an aspect of Burne-Jones's art which deserves manly [!] commendation, for even if he did it with something of a sly, voyeuristic quality, Burne-Jones did put an end to the latitancy of the mid-Victorian nude.... It is always nice to see a breast in a painting, or as delicately glorious a bottom as Andromeda's, like a pale peach at sunrise [!!]. There are many such pleasantnesses in Burne-Jones's painting. The historical point is that he painted nudes at a time when naturalism could be combined with idealism, and it is the idealism that makes his nudes so much more shapely than those of [William] Etty, but at the same time less tangible. That, of course, is the trouble with ideal girls.

Of course.

***

In re/ Ed's question as to writing instruments: the metal dip pen began to be mass-produced in 1822 (when Ruskin was 3), & by the middle of the century had rendered the quill pen entirely obsolete. Ruskin & Dickens, & all those prolific Victorians, used Manchester-made steel pens. You still have to periodically re-dip, of course, but it obviates the need for the periodical re-trimming of the nib that one suffers thru with the quill. Ruskin really didn't live long enough to enter the fountain pen era, tho if he had I'm sure he would've jumped on that bandwagon enthusiastically. (Note for future blog post: Influence of pen technology on poets' handwriting, with special reference to Zukofsky.)

why Ruskin?

I'm a great fan of LibraryThing, the online book-cataloguing site. In heroic bursts of data-entry activity over the past few years, I've managed to get the bulk of my books online – I estimate between 1/3 & 2/5 remains uncatalogued, but I'm working on it – & it's enabled me to get some kind of handle on the shape of the metastasizing collection. The widget down on the right is a cute lagniappe: it throws up a random (?) selection of books from my library, linking them to Amazon.com. This morning's selection [captured above] struck me as a nice encapsulation of my books: Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping, Camille Guthrie's The Master Thief, Gregory Kavka's Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Henry Weinfield's Without Mythologies, Andreas Huyssens's After the Great Divide, Romana Huk's collection Assembling Alternatives, & Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (tho mine is the old Anchor edition, rather than the shiny thing pictured). And yes, The Poem of a Life.

***

A commentor on my last Ruskin post asks, quite rightly, "You mention Ruskin a lot; why Ruskin? I've never read him in school or out, and don't know if he's some Victorian stuffed-shirt or some wild creative genius. What do you recommend for starters?" (Vance replies that it shouldn't be "or" but "and.") I'm not entirely sure why I've become so obsessed with Ruskin over the past few years. My records show I started reading Ruskin back in 2001 or so. Heaven knows I never heard his name as an undergraduate, tho I took at least two or 3 Victorian lit courses. And he never popped up in my graduate career, either, even tho I did a course on Victorian poetry with Paul Sawyer, the author of one of the finer critical books on the man. (I do recall during my undergrad years reading the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark's A Ruskin Notebook, but I guess I wasn't prompted to look up the source-texts of his poem.)

I think, frankly, it was Guy Davenport who put me onto the man, as he put me onto so much us, both false trails & true. I'd been reading Guy for maybe 15 years when I noticed that he was talking about Ruskin all the time on the occasions we met, & then I noticed and got very excited by his essay "The House that Jack Built" (in The Geography of the Imagination) – yes, the one that posits Fors Clavigera as a kind of Victorian Cantos, & that argues that the symbol of the labyrinth is central to Ruskin & inherited by Joyce, Pound, & practically everyone else. That made me sit up and take notice.

I entered Ruskin rather randomly, by way of an Everyman edition of To this Last (collected with other essays on political economy), & found myself riveted by the man's voice – this eloquent, sometimes indeed "purple," rhetoric furiously excoriating Victorian capitalism & philistinism. It was obvious that Ruskin was not someone whose political solutions I could accept – if he hated capitalism as deeply as Marx or Engels, his solution was not a kind of socialism but a return to something like paternalistic feudalism – but the subtlety and underlying fury of his rhetoric proved intoxicating, ultimately addictive.

And from To this Last I found myself dipping into every sort of Ruskin I could lay my hands on: art criticism, architecture, literary criticism (there's an analysis of a passage from "Lycidas" in Sesame and Lilies that stands as perhaps the best bit of "close reading" before Empson), ecclesiastical criticism, & the wild & wooly digression-upon-digressions of Fors itself. Sometimes you can hear the machinery of his prose creaking, the rhetoric straining at the end of an exhausted essay or lecture to rise up to the expected peak of eloquence at the close – but there's always something there to reward the reading: an unexpected bon mot, a savage stretch of angry criticism, or an extended stretch of utterly insightful interpretation. Yeah, Ruskin is wrong – politically, morally, aesthetically – an astonishingly high percentage of the time. But he's very rarely dull for very long, at least to my ears.*

But what continues to awe me is the range of Ruskin's interests – you name it, he wrote on it: geology, meteorology, political economy, fiction, poetry, ecclesiology, philosophy, painting, ornithology, sculpture, engraving, iconography (a clear line of descent from JR to Panofsky), mythology, the illustration of children's books, architecture both practical & theoretical, the theory of landscape painting, music, and so on. Like Pound, Ruskin felt qualified to express an opinion on everything; unlike Pound, Ruskin's opinions are almost always worth considering. I'm beginning to suspect that a Ruskinian cast of mind – if not Ruskin's ideas directly, those ideas as diffused thru anglophone culture as a whole – is a central backdrop to the whole modernist enterprise, in ways that go well beyond Proust's translating Ruskin or Pound's name-dropping his works in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. (This may end up being a very big book.)

Joe asked the other week where to begin with Ruskin. I stick by my answer, tho I suppose that modernistic/postmodernistically-inclined folks might conceivably want to jump right into Fors: Kenneth Clark's old (but widely available) Penguin anthology, Ruskin Today, is a nice collection of high points; Phaidon still has an excellent selection of his art criticism, The Lamp of Beauty; both Oxford and Penguin have current selections available, and The Stones of Venice (abridged) and The Seven Lamps of Architecture are both available in nice paperbacks. Perhaps the loveliest way to get acquainted with this often unlovely & prickly man is his autobiography, Praeterita. Yes, start with Praeterita, then The Lamp of Beauty, and when your appetite is whetted, go on to the Penguin To this Last for a taste of the angry Ruskin.

*I will confess the first volume The Stones of Venice, after the virtuoso opening, is largely an ultra-technical yawn, & I've only cast my eyes over the disspiriting bulk of Vol. II of the Library Edition, which is devoted to his poetry; I suspect that one will be something of an ordeal.

so it's official...

Checked my departmental mailbox today, & lo & behold there was "that letter" from the Provost of Our Fair University (dated the 24th, so I guess I might have overlooked it earlier this week), informing me that on the basis of yadda yadda yadda I'd been recommended for promotion, & that the President had concurred with the Provost's recommendation: so look at me now, a real live Full Professor. (You can still call me "Mark.")

Ruskin: The Poetry of Architecture

So I've taken the plunge, tho heaven knows I don't have the time right now: I'm deep into the first volume of the Library Edition of Ruskin, Early Prose Writings. First things first: it's an immense pleasure, on a purely sensual level, to read Ruskin in this edition. The book is big, maybe 6 1/2" x 10", and a good 2 1/2" thick; the paper is delightfully heavy (specially laid for the Library Edition, with Ruskin's crest and initials as watermark), & to my eye as bright as when it came off the press over a century ago. The margins are ample, and the text is clearly & beautifully printed. Best of all are the illustrations, most of them photogravures of Ruskin's own drawings, in perhaps the clearest reproductions I've ever seen. And of course the annotations are delightful, in the best tradition of late-Victorian scholarship – every allusion accounted for, every connection with Ruskin's other works drawn.

This volume, as befits the first volume of the set, is for the most part juvenalia. Cook & Wedderburn have opted to organize their edition mostly chronologically, with a few exceptions: multi-volume works (Modern Painters, Stones of Venice) appear in consecutive volumes; within volumes, more important large works come before odds & sods. That's the case here. The first & largest piece in Early Prose Writings is The Poetry of Architecture, which Ruskin published as a series of articles in The Architectural Magazine in 1837-8, & which was only collected as a book much later.

It's very much a young man's book – Ruskin was 18 & 19 when he wrote it (tho he'd been publishing poems, & the occasional essay or note, for several years) & trying his best to do well at Oxford, which wasn't easy: his strong suits, as he laid them out around this time, were imaginative writing (read: sub-Byronic verse), drawing, & the study of geology & architecture – none of which were on the curriculum at the University. Indeed, while he was stoked to the gills on Sir Walter Scott & the Authorized Version, his Latin & Greek were pretty shaky, which put him at a distinct disadvantage among the Etonians & Harrovians around him. The Poetry of Architecture is a bit of rag-bag, an attempt to argue for the relationship of architecture to national scenery/topography on the one hand and "national character" on the other. Mostly it's JR recounting what he saw on his various family visits to the Continent, & compare it to what he knew from the family's annual wine-selling tours of Great Britain (Ruskin's father was a sherry merchant, in partnership with the Dolmecq family, whose sherries one can still pick up at the supermarket). Lots of descriptions of what characteristic English, Swiss, & Italian cottages look like, & how they best harmonize with the surroundings.

What I'm most struck by in this apprentice work – for JR has yet to formulate a coherent aesthetic in any self-conscious fashion, tho he's already got a good start on his aureate prose – is how astonishingly self-assured he is in his pronouncements. This is the work of a young man whose parents had been telling everyone he was a genius for a decade or more, & he's perfectly aware of it, & perfectly happy to live up to the label. The vast majority of the dissertations I've read, & the vast majority of the first books, have nothing like the consistent sense Ruskin's prose shows of inherent rightness. It gets oppressive after a while – as does the work of any 19-year-old jackanapes, no matter how brilliant – but there's also something rather intoxicating about it, even as he hands down Moses's tablets on matters I couldn't care less about (the proper form of a chimney, the proper angle a roof should make to its supporting wall).

Janet Holmes: Humanophone

So we're back from a wedding at of all places Orange, Virginia, midway between Fredricksburg & Charlottesville. Old stomping grounds, in part. Lovely country, rolling hills & farms & horses & kine. A visit to Montpelier, home of James & Dolley (with an "e") Madison, recently renovated from some DuPont's hideous "upgrade" back to its early 19th-c. state. An elegant formal garden, endless hiking trails back into the woods. My calves ache. Surprisingly, my head doesn't, given the endless potations at the wedding last night. The dog's nose – one of Basil Bunting's favorite drinks: beer + gin – is a wonderful thing, but probably too dangerous for extended bouts.

I don't like bed & breakfasts. Something creepy about that "welcome to our house" business, when I'd frankly prefer the anonymity of a hotel, the more aseptic & non-Victorian the better: give me Swisshotel any day.

***

Humanophone, Janet Holmes (U of Notre Dame P, 2001)

Various poems in various forms here: a number of quite personal lyrics (some very moving); some confrontations with literary texts (Dante, Keats); meditations on place. The centerpieces are 3 sequences on musical material: "Celebration on the Planet Mars," which explores the life & work of jazzman Raymond Scott; "Humanophone," on Charles Ives's father George, a Civil War bandleader & as much a visionary as his more famous son; & "Partch Stations," on the incomparable composer & instrument-maker Harry Partch – all three men who heard music that no one before had ever imagined, & sought new instruments to make it real.

I'm reminded in these 3 sequences of one of the modes of John Matthias (& Matthias's student Bob Archambeau): a poetic hearkening back to certains strains of the high modernist, in which the poet's goal is to hold up & display the shiny, odd byways of cultural history. Poems like these, at their best, stand alone – but they always seize the reader by the shirt: here's something you might not know, might never have heard of, but it could change your life, were you to follow this trace – read these books, listen these recordings, look at these pictures! Something fundamentally generous there.

[71/100]

sloppy annotation, part 438

I highly recommend Clive Wilmer's 1985 Penguin edition of Ruskin's Unto this Last and Other Writings; it's a more than solid cross-section of 30 years of Ruskin's social criticism, from the early fairy tale The King of the Golden River thru the whole of Unto this Last down to a couple of letters of Fors Clavigera. At the start of his Select Bibliography, Wilmer (like every Ruskinian) pays homage to the Cook/Wedderburn "Library Edition," "a masterpiece of editorial scholarship and very easy to use. The introductions to each volume are unusually long, well-written and informative; it is beautifully illustrated, mainly with Ruskin's drawings; the notes are incomparable."

That last bit of italics is mine, because I'm thinking of Wilmer's own notes to the Penguin Unto this Last – over 40 closely printed pages to 250-odd pages of Ruskin's text. Wilmer sets out with the editor's usual brief: to fill in contemporary contexts with which 20th-century readers might be unfamiliar, and, since "Ruskin was an exceptionally allusive writer," to identify his quotations and allusions. For the most part Wilmer does a better than fine job; if anything, the book is over-annotated – but the notes are at the end, so they can be conveniently ignored. But what to make of the following?:

In Fors Clavigera 10 (7 September 1871), after having identified himself as "a violent Tory of the old school (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's)," Ruskin goes on to describe the ideal of monarchy that he formed from such childhood reading:

I perceived that both the author of the Iliad and the author of Waverley made their kings, or king-loving persons, do harder work than anybody else. Tydides or Idomeneus always killed twenty Trojans to other people's one, and Redgauntlet speared more salmon than any of the Solway fishermen...

To the latter reference, Wilmer appends this note:

Redgauntlet: the hero of Scott's novel of the same name, a courageous young knight who undergoes many adventures in eighteenth-century Scotland. Scott's life and works are among the recurrent minor themes of Fors.

Where to begin with this? Redgauntlet (1824) is the last of Scott's novels to deal with the theme of Jacobite rebellion. In his first novel, Waverley, he had written about the 1745 Jacobite rising on behalf of Bonnie Prince Charlie (the "Young Pretender"); in Rob Roy (1817), he treated the 1715 rising on behalf of Charles's father James Stuart (the "Old Pretender"). Redgauntlet, set in the 1760s, imagines a final abortive Jacobite uprising, in which Prince Charles returns to Scotland (not so young anymore, & dissipated from his years of drinking & womanizing on the continent) & is swiftly more or less shoo'd off by the English military.

Hugh Redgauntlet personifies a kind of superannuated Jacobitism, a fierce loyalty to the Stuart cause & disdain for the Hanoverian monarchy. He is in short a man born too late, & when Charles returns to his continental exile, Redgauntlet, knowing that there will be no further Jacobite risings, turns his back on Scotland and leaves with him, making way – as is so often the case with Scott's novels – for a new, less romantic, bourgeois order. Jacobitism, in the late 18th-century, becomes a kind of sentimental conservatism, rather like Archie & Edith singing "Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again."

And Redgauntlet, whatever he may be, is most definitely not "a courageous young knight who undergoes many adventures." He's in late middle age, a grizzled laird best known for his prowess at fishing. So where in god's name did Wilmer get this annotation? Is this a joke? Did he just make it up?

Wilmer shows similar distance from other Scott references; rather than describe characters & situations, he throws out brief overviews ("Ruskin refers to characters and places in the two novels named, both of which are by Scott"). We all have blind spots: I suspect Sir Walter is one of Wilmer's, a writer he can't bring himself to read, even though he knows how important Scott was to the formation of Ruskin's imagination. But if you're out to fully annotate an allusive writer, for better or worse you need to have read everything the writer has read. No small order with Ruskin (or Pound, or...).

This is why the best annotated editions are the products of several hands, rather than a single editor, however devoted he may be.

[Cook & Wedderburn – as I find out from consulting my own lovely copy – don't annotate the Redgauntlet reference at all – I guess they assume it's a part of any educated reader's cultural vocabulary.]

kunst für alle

[Ruskin, from Fors Clavigera 7 (1 July 1871), on a report that the Louvre had been set afire in the fighting over the Paris Commune:]

For, indeed, I am myself a Communist of the old school – reddest also of the red; and was on the very point of saying so at the end of my last letter; only the telegram about the Louvre's being on fire stopped me, because I though the Communists of the new school, as I could not at all understand them, might not quite understand me. For we Communists of the old school think that our property belongs to everybody, and everybody's property to us; so of course I thought the Louvre belonged to me as much as to the Parisians, and expected they would have sent word over to me, being an Art Professor, to ask whether I wanted it burnt down. But no message or intimation to that effect ever reached me.

misc.

I may, however, anticipate future conclusions, so far as to state that in a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply, but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person.

–Ruskin, Unto this Last (italics mine)

We hear Major Brisbin's voice again in the so-called DeRudio narrative. The narrator, concealed in a ravine, listens to "the silvery, but to me diabolical voices of several squaws" who are scalping an unfortunate soldier. "Two of the ladies were cutting away, while two others performed a sort of war dance...." This must be the major at work. Truth, no matter how startling, customarily rings with a distinctive note, rather like the hard ring of a silver coin dropped on a table, but this clinks like a potmetal counterfeit.

–Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star

"Don't be so hide-bound, Simon. The name of the Recording Angel was Raduriel, and he wasn't just a book-keeper; he was the Angel of Poetry, and Master of the Muses. He also had a staff."

"Wound with serpents, like the caduceus of Hermes, I suppose."

"Not that kind of staff; a civil service staff. One of its important members was the Angel of Biography, and his name was the Lesser Zadkiel. He was the angel who interfered when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, so he is an angel of mercy, though a lot of biographers aren't."

–Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone

wild rumpus

In honor of National You-Know-What Month, the online culture magazine The Rumpus is posting a new poem (that is, an unpublished poem by an actual living poet) every day. Go there and read mine for today, "Dumbfoundry."

accounting

Last night at a lecture by Dinty Moore of Ohio University, who's doing a visiting gig this week at Our Fair University and leading a creative nonfiction workshop. The talk was all about the difficulties of defining this new "genre" – difficulties which I suspect have more to do with the disciplinary demands of creative writing programs in the academy than with anything intrinsic to the nebula of sorts of writing that one could plausibly call "creative nonfiction," both now & historically. But this is a discussion that Bradley & I have been having for 3 years now, & will probably continue when our partners have strapped on the drool cups & checked us into the same wing of the long-term care facility.

***

The upstairs bathroom reading these days is Robinson Crusoe, which I haven't been thru in 2 decades or more. A slow start, as is Defoe's wont, but once things get going – once RC's on the island, that is – things pick up amazingly. As the last time I read it, I'm fascinated by the degree to which Crusoe structures his life as a balance sheet, reckoning up credits & debits, blessings & curses, counting days & pounds of gunpowder & all manner of items. A commonplace of Defoe criticism how Crusoe embodies the Protestant/Capitalist ethic.

And of course today's tax day, a day of summing up accounts. I'm beginning to think Jonathan Mayhew is the Crusoe of the blogosphere, continually counting & self-examining & laying out self-improving plans. Salutary, but probably only to the degree that the plans get followed thru on (Jonathan seems remarkably efficient in that regard). Which makes me want to cast my own accounts, & try to make some medium & long-range plans (ignoring for convenience's sake more or less immediate obligations – finishing the semester's teaching & grading, writing the 3 essays I've committed to over the next few months):

Self-Improvement:

•force some kind of order upon the midden of papers, books, CDs, musical instruments, & just plain shit that is my study

•come to grips, really come to grips, with Hegel

•read my way thru Ruskin, all 37 volumes

•along those lines, tackle some of the writers whose works I know a just a bit of – Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, Thomas Middleton

•acquire a real knowledge of music – learn to read, that is, maybe take up a classical instrument (this was supposed to happen this January, but...); learn jazz, learn to hear Romantic period "classical" music

•shore up my knowledge of Victorian literature (I've read maybe 40 Victorian novels, but half of them are by Wilkie Collins – there's bunches of Dickens & Eliot I don't know at all)

•continue to paint, learn new techniques & "tricks"

Writing:

•blog smarter – figure out the relationship between my blogging, my obsessive notebook-keeping, & my "real" writing

•start getting that poetry manuscript out there

•short book on biography, theory & practice

•possible project: Ian Hamilton Finlay garden theory/poetics book

•possible project: Ruskin & the modernists book (has anyone already done this, aside from the collection of essays that came out a few years ago?)

This kind of dopey resolution-making is usually reserved for New Year's, I guess. Tax day seems just as convenient.

Pre-Raphaelite impermanence

[William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, 1854-6]

[Jerome Buckley, in The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (1951):]

Most of the Pre-Raphaelites worked patiently with a medium over which they had little technical control; they painted, repainted, and overpainted layer upon layer of pigment; and in so doing they frequently altered their whole design after a long-pondered picture had been well begun. By blending a slow-drying varnish into their oils, they were able to match colors over protracted periods during which they could proceed deliberately with their innumerable revisions. They paid little heed to the fact that, with the darkening of the resin mixed into the very colors, their pictures so produced would eventually deteriorate beyond reclaim; for they were enabled by slow painting to attain, for a time at least, the illusion of a carefully transcribed reality.

Kevin Killian on biography

In conversation with Joseph Bradshaw at Rain Taxi, Kevin Killian, biographer & editor of Jack Spicer, says nice things about The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, & smart things about biography in general:

My experience has changed over the years, and this I think of primarily in terms of having written (with Lew [Ellingham]) that biography, and following helplessly what I subsequently learned were the three stages of biography. Stage one, you love your subject, and everyone else is wrong in some way. A lot of biographies seem to be of this booster sort. Then there's stage two, in which at a certain point you realize, uh-oh, he was just human after all, and he was filled with faults, and this comes as a giant shock—a shock which freezes some biographers into adopting a position in which their books become evidence for the prosecution. I don't know of course, but that's the feeling one gets, isn't it, when one reads Ekbert Fass's book on the young Robert Creeley or Tom Clark's life of Charles Olson, a book I admire a good deal but one that seems needlessly contestatory, like Olson was not the great Oz and everyone should know it. And then there's the third stage of biography, where you seek the balance between the good and the evil in your subject and find the actual person somewhere in there. I don't know, maybe that's how friendship works in regular life? Anyway that's why I came away loving the new life of Zukofsky, because Mark Scroggins had every right to stay in stage one and he didn't—he moved on to the dangerous shoals of stage two and pushed right on through to the bay of stage three.

Bell on Ruskin

Quentin Bell, from the Preface to the 1978 reissue of his Ruskin (1963):

Ruskin, early decorated, luxurious Ruskin, complete with crockets and crenellations is I am convinced, a model which all those of us who are learning to write should study, imitate, and learn to love. I say this despite the fact that in doing so I shall find that, amongst teacher of English eyebrows will be raised, lips will probably be pursed and a variety of clucking noises will be clearly audible. 'What', you will say: 'is that gold and purple prose that cloying sweetness of language to be considered wholesome fare for the young? We live in the late Twentieth Century and what style could possibly be less appropriate for us than that of the eighteen forties? The suggestion is absurd, it is as though some girder-bending, concrete-mixing, polyvinylurinated art student were told to copy Bernini.'

This of course is just what such an art student ought to do (and is saying this I am looking straight at you Jane Doe and at you, Richard Roe, both of you now majoring in creative writing at the University of Labrador). Ruskin can help you, he cannot harm you. The authors who can do you a mischief are those whom you would naturally admire, those whose writings 'make sense' within the context of your own age, those who are still new and smart and popular and 'relevant'. These you copy at your peril for they are saying the kind of things that you want to say, in using their phrases you may be cozened into believing that they are your own, their style is so close to yours that yours may become infected by theirs. Then indeed you may grow into a sedulous ape, a wind bag blown tight with the stale phrases of other people and then indeed you will be damned.

weekend

The long solo-parenting weekend almost over – J returns tomorrow noonish from DC (the Shaxspere Association). No children have been visibly harmed since she left at the crack of dawn Thursday; that's my story, & I'm sticking to it.

Lovely seder Wednesday night, my first at the (kitchen, if not ceremonial) helm. A real live shank bone, which I collected from a handy "take your own" box of frozen shanks at the local mega-grocery. (Me to woman beside me: "Are you supposed to cook this thing?" She: "How should I know? I've been making a fake shank out of tin foil for 30 years; my daughter insisted I get a real one this time around.") Easter menu: Passover leftovers. (Religious parable there somewhere...)

Even as the semester winds down & thoughts begin to turn towards such exotica as vacations, business at the factory (Our Fair University) continues in tangles of nail-biting budget cuts & bureaucratic shuffling. Will I, should I, could I sleep with myself if I did, volunteer to teach an extra course? For a board of Trustees who had to be hauled in front of an arbitration lawyer to be told they could afford to give faculty a 2.5% raise (they were offering 1%, against the union's 5% demand – & this after what, 3 years without a cost-of-living adjustment) even as they handed the president a cool 10%. Talk about executive compensation. But one counts one's blessings, I suppose, or so my mother always used to counsel me.

A perfectly good B&N gift certificate frittered away on 3 volumes of the latest omnibus collections of Michael Moorcock's Elric books. And my my, they're still as dreadfully written as they were 30 years ago, when I was too callow to notice. I still keep insisting MM's important, somehow (a great biographical subject, I bet...). Elric doubtless the first & greatest Goth anti-hero – if you don't count Byron, Solomon Kane, Milton's Satan, & heaven knows how many others. Anybody got an unneeded copy of Colin Greenland's Entropy Exhibition?

Ruskin, in spades

In the home stretch of the semester, which may account for the slackness of blogging around here. One class is in the midst of Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (this week) and Muse & Drudge (next). The graduate seminar is watching Samuel Beckett whittle his characters down: week before last, we watched the progressive burial of Winnie in Happy Days; this week, we regaled ourselves with talking canopic urns in Play; next week, the disembodied mouth of Not I. Reading (my own) has almost ground to a halt, save for a few novels. Paul Auster's latest, Man in the Dark, last weekend (perhaps a trifle better than the dire Travels in the Scriptorium, but still a very very weak effort); Michel Houellebecq's Platform this week.

Much of my spare time seems to have gone into painting. Alas, I'm pretty sure that I'm no better a painter than I was 25 years ago, when I spent far more time with pencils, canvases, & paints. But one learns new things every time around: (1) don't do your canvas sketching in pencil: graphite is oily, refuses to be erased from the gesso ground, & leaches up thru your paints; (2) blue underpainting produces wonderfully cool shadows in flesh; & (3) glazing medium is da shit.

***

I don't call myself, in any sense Walter Benjamin would recognize, a book collector – I'm rather a book accumulator. Mine is for the most part a working library, with lots of second-hand editions, & things I've read rather tatty & marked-up. Only occasionally do I go over the edge & invest in a scholarly "complete works," like year before last when I took the plunge with the Gary Taylor Thomas Middleton from Oxford UP, 3000-odd pages of plays, poems, pamphlets, entertainments, & whatnot that I've yet to really scratch the surface of.

But now I've done it. Now I have to become a full-time John Ruskin scholar. Yes, it's true – I've acquired a set of the impossible-to-find, bank-account-breaking, second-mortage-requiring Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), edited by Cook & Wedderburn, in 39 volumes (1903-1912). I have set myself up to become the object of death threats, assassination attempts, & general black envy on the part of real Ruskinians everywhere – you know, those folks whose library carrells have been groaning under the weight of these books for years (since the library won't check them out), or whose interlibrary loan fines (since most libraries don't own the set) are outpacing their car payments.

[The set pictured here, by the way, is in the super-fancy leather binding; the one the UPS person delivered yesterday – in 4 huge cartons, approximately 150 pounds total – is in a far more modest morocco cloth – but this gives you some idea of the sheer mass of the thing: those books are approximately 10 inches tall.]

The Library Edition, compiled after Ruskin's death by his followers Edward Tyas Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, is by all accounts one of the glories of scholarly editing. C&W, with full backing of George Allen & Co., Ruskin's own publishers, set out to gather pretty much everything Ruskin had ever written; and like a true Victorian, he'd written an awful lot. (They didn't get every last piece, but they came close.) Each of the 38 volumes (the final volume is an astonishingly lengthy & comprehensive index) has a large introduction & copious running footnotes. They're illustrated thruout – over 800 wood blocks, almost a thousand color plates, & over 100 facsimiles of Ruskin's manuscripts, all beautifully reproduced: none of the muddy pictures you encounter in too many contemporary books. (Guy Davenport used to complain how various publishers had reduced his painstakingly cross-hatched drawings to "burnt toast.")

These are beautiful books. That's really all I can say. And the editing is beautifully done, as well. It's a testament to Cook & Wedderburn's labors that the Library Edition, a century after its publication, remains the gold standard for Ruskin scholarship. Sure, there've been a zillion paperback selections, & a handful of his books keep getting reprinted in Penguin editions, but nobody's attempted a new Collected Ruskin. (Edinburgh UP seemed to have started one back in the 1990s, but it didn't get past Praeterita and a selected Fors Clavigera.) If you write on Ruskin, you rely on the Library Edition: and if you don't have access to the Library Edition, then you're at a distinct disadvantage in your Ruskinizing.

So, don't ask me what I paid for this leviathan (it was a bargain, but I'm still not telling). And expect more – much more – 39 volumes' worth – Ruskin blogging in the future.

finish (continued)

Not dead yet, merely snowed under with various responsibilities. Not so much that I haven't continued thinking about the issue of "finish" in art. Indeed, I started a canvas – a representational one no less, a nude even – & decided I would pursue it in the old masters' manner: underpainting (en grisaille, this time – not brave enough for the green, somehow), followed by glazing: multiple layers of thinned color. Titian claimed he would go thru 30 layers or more in painting flesh – which is a pretty lengthy proposition, considering the drying time for oils. Me, I'm using acrylics, so after underpainting over the last couple days, then blocking in shadows in blue & burnt sienna, rosy bits in diluted crimson, & highlights in white, I've spent part of today glazing in flesh tones. Six layers so far, & maybe as many to go. I dunno if they were always right about suffering, but the old masters were damned patient.