Pound in the marketplace; Susan Stewart: Columbarium

When we first got into the city, I headed down to Union Square & the Strand to pick up a stack of Ruskin books I’d bought online. I didn’t really spend a lot of time there that evening; there were a lot of things I wanted to read thru on hand already, & I didn’t want to disperse my always tenuous attention. Anyway, t'other night I finally made the big pilgrimage & did some serious shopping, filling a bag (mostly) with slim volumes of contemporary poetry.

Do I need to say that decent poetry bookshops in South Florida are pretty much nonexistent? Well, there aren’t many anywhere, for that matter. I don’t know the midwest or the west coast, but on the east coast & south the only good new poetry bookshops I know are Bridge Street in DC, Talking Leaves in Buffalo, & St. Mark’s in NYC. And places that have consistently interesting used stock are even rarer – Rust Belt in Buffalo is the only one that springs to mind. But the Strand’s poetry section is so damned large, & I get up here so rarely, that there’re always at least a dozen things I end up buying. Indeed, semiannual trips to the city & the Strand seem to be the primary way recent works of poetry enter the house anymore. (But yes, I bought your book new, straight from the publisher.)

One of the few non-poetry books I picked up, however, was Gregory Barnhisel’s James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (U Massachusetts P, 2005). A very solid piece of scholarship. It’s weird to think of our distance from the modernists, which these days is approximately that of the modernists themselves from the late romantics. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to get histories of modernist writing that aren’t in the “heroic” mode of Hugh Kenner et al. What they called the “new historicism” in early modern studies when it hit modernism became the “new modernist studies,” & it’s not so much a “new” historicism as the first round of a real live critical history-writing.

At any rate, Barnhisel’s is one of those books whose thesis is so simple & unified & compelling that you wonder why the hell this book wasn’t written decades ago. After a very interesting examination of Pound’s publication history thru the 1930s, veering between trade publishers & small press coterie editions, Barnhisel traces how James Laughlin & ND published & promoted him in the postwar years – when Pound was a political pariah; Pound wanted to be Ruskin, the commentator on culture & society: ND promoted him as Pater, a mostly apolitical aesthete. Or rather, they promoted his poetry & his literary essays & downplayed precisely the public persona he most valued, that of political & economic gadfly.

In the process they implicitly supported & underwrote New Critical apoliticism, & a notion of aesthetic autonomy that went far beyond Pound’s own; for Pound, the poet was both the technician of a purified language and the prophet of corrected social structure: that latter role disappears in his public face, as presented in ND books, between 1946 & 1973 (the year of the Cookson-edited Selected Prose, which finally made many of his economic writings available).

I wish Barnhisel’s prose were a trifle more elegant, & I’d like to see a bit more Bourdieu brought to bear on these issues, but on the whole this is a very useful book indeed. (Not least, he confirms that at least one other reader has conceived the 1930s American publishing scene in much the same way I did in Poem of a Life.)
***
Columbarium, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2003)

A book of “first things” – between the bookends of four longish poems on the 4 Empedoclean elements – air, fire, water, earth – a series of shorter poems on various themes, arranged from A to Z. The elements of which we are made & among which we live, & the 26 glyphs by which we comprehend & express them. A curious blending of the pre-Sokratic & the high classical (Virgil’s Georgics one touchstone). As always in Stewart’s work, an almost obsessive, loving regard for the evidence of the senses. An impressive range of forms in the alphabetic section, most of them ad hoc & gracefully realized.

[76/100]

Donald Revell: Thief of Strings

Thief of Strings, Donald Revell (Alice James, 2007)

I read Revell in a kind of enraptured haze, I’m so taken with the odd combination of his poetry: a lovely, consistent lyricism, a mild, very American surrealism, an entraced eye for the unfolding details of the (especially natural) world, closely tied in with a genial piety. If Geoffrey Hill is a High Church Anglican Prophetic poet, & Susan Howe an Antinomian Calvinist poet, then Revell is a Franciscan poet. And that’s a compliment.

[75/100]

Susan Stewart: The Forest

I didn’t think I’d buy it when I saw it in Book Culture (used to be Labyrinth), but ultimately I couldn’t resist Robert Hewison’s John Ruskin, in the Oxford UP series “Very Interesting People.” The series itself seems a reductio ad absurdum of the “Very Short Introductions” series – 120 or so page lives of British worthies, small paperbacks in large type with ample margins & generous spacing.

A glance inside shows that what they’re doing essentially is marketing single lives from the big 2000 relaunch of the Dictionary of National Biography. I suppose with 55,000 entries to that monstrosity, along with the rumors I’d heard of less than stellar sales, OUP is trying to recoup some of what must have been an enormous investment. But Hewison is one of the biggest names in Ruskin studies, author of several important books, & the damn thing was only $3.98 – how could I lose? At any rate, it turns out to be a very nice compact biography indeed, managing to do justice to almost every aspect of JR’s life & career. A definite recommendation for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the man without investing in a full-length life.
***
The Forest, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 1995)

A kind of effortless mastery to much of this book, & a deep interest in interesting things quite apart from the poet’s own sensibility, which I appreciate – the embryology of “The Desert 1990-1993,” the Biblical rewriting of “Lamentations.” “Medusa Anthology,” which revolves around Gericault’s grand Raft of the Medusa, is the great set-piece, but for my tastes it ends on afar too lyrical, conclusive note – as do too many of the poems. I think I like the more ambiguous, fragmentary works of Part I, “Phantom,” better than the more accomplished longer pieces of “Cinder,” the 2nd part. But there’s much to admire thruout the book, even if Stewart in her more traditionally formalist moments isn’t my cuppa.

[74/100]

back on the air

The city has been considerably less muggy & unbearable than last summer – less, that is, like Florida. That hasn’t kept me from being in a state of almost savage torpor, sitting in the sun & reading book after book. I have now joined the 200 or so members of the Have Read All the Way Thru Fors Clavigera Club. The last half-volume or so rather sombre stuff; Ruskin returns from his penultimate bout of lunacy annoucing that from now on Fors will renounce its rage and contumely, that he’s going to clean up his act & stop digressing all over the planet, & that he’s generally going to be nice. Of course, he can’t keep any of those resolutions, but he tries to hold to them staunchly enough to quell much of the flame of the book. His mind is elsewhere, on the genial autobiography Praeterita which he’s already writing.

Far more fun are the 10 or 12 volumes of Guy Davenport’s I’ve brought along with me. He’s always a pleasure to revisit, if only on the basis of style (heaven knows he can be enormously off base when it comes to the fiddly business of facts). Even Objects on a Table, the book on still life, has paid off more this time around than the first time I read it.

Little Women, which I was reading (ashes of shame upon my head) for the first time, ended satisfactorily. If Alcott felt compelled to bow to readerly pressure & marry off Jo, rather than preserving her as an independent writing woman, then I approve of marrying her to a portly, bearded professor-type. Mark well: only portly, bearded professor-types can truly satisfy a thinking woman!
***
And the occasional bouts of “culture.” I went to see Godot on Broadway, in a production with brilliant Bill Irwin as Didi, Nathan Lane hamming it up as Gogo (one wonders what he’ll do when there aren’t any more Zero Mostel parts to reprise – if he doesn’t go on the South Florida borscht belt circuit with Fiddler on the Roof), & the hulking John Goodman as Pozzo. Surprisingly good, actually, tho I kept feeling like I was attending Old Home Day of my kids’ favorite actors (Irwin in “Mr. Noodle” on Elmo’s World, Goodman Sully in Monsters Inc., Lane the warthog in Lion King): audience members without small children no doubt had entirely different associations for each of those worthies.

The real prize was Krystian Lupa and the Narodowy Stary Teatr’s hour stage adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works, under its German title Kalkwerk & performed in Polish. Devastating. As I described it to J, it was a cross between Wozzeck and Endgame, only spread out over three & a half hours, and punctuated with ear-splitting dissonant music. Certainly a limit-text for traditional theater.

Oh yes, and Janet McTeer in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, a full-blown Romantic reinterpretation of the all the old Shakespearean dramatic moves – but nonetheless quite compelling.
***
Weeekends have been spent on Fire Island, where one kills mosquitoes at night and horseflies during the day (sorry, Buddhists), and the worst traffic noise comes from bicycle bells.

***

100 poem-books shortly (I hope) to recommence.

ad interim

Hi folks – he said shamefacedly. Well, I was pretty sanguine about keeping the blog updated over the summer this year, but obviously that hasn't happened. And I don't think this note is going to add up to anything more than a placeholder either. But we're still here in New York: we've been to scads of culture: Godot, Mary Stuart, Alan Ayckbourn on Broadway; the fantastic Polish adaptation on Thomas Bernhard's Lime Works at Lincoln Center. Seen some people, read some – well, read a lot of – books. I'm considering a resolution to restart regular blogging next week – when we get back from Fire Island, that is. Till then ––

interim

Here on the upper West Side; the weather is holding beautifully – little rain, low humidity, a veritable paradise after Florida. Alas, I packed precisely two books for the trip (still awaiting the various cartons we shipped) – Guy Davenport's Tatlin! and the last 2 vols of Fors Clavigera. And now I've finished Tatlin!, & fear that Fors will last until the rest of the books arrive. Or I may have to go out & buy more.... (Always a distinct possibility in NY)

(And yes, despite myself, I'm blogging from Starbucks – which beats blogging from my phone...)

lights out, for a bit

We're leaving this afternoon to spend much of the rest of the summer in New York; dunno how much sustained internet access I'll have, & don't fancy blogging from Starbucks. So the updates here will probably be even sparer than they've been lately. But for those who're interested, I'll no doubt be twittering, & I'll certainly be posting occasional Facebook updates.

Time to read some books, I guess, & get some actual writing done.

Would be nice to hook up with anyone who wants in the city; drop me a line.

Hunt on Ruskin

Just finished John Dixon Hunt's The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (Viking, 1982). A very good read, all told. It's maybe the 4th Ruskin biography I've read, in some ways the most likeable. Tim Hilton's 2-volume monster remains the book of record for me, but I can't imagine anyone who's not already addicted to JR launching out on the uncharted seas of Hilton's big 2nd volume. Wolfgang Kemp's The Desire of My Eyes – well, I read it while I was doing heavy research at the HRC in Austin, & don't remember a thing about it; might've been good. John Batchelor's John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life is still the one I recommend to beginners – very gracefully & sympathetically written, very strong on Ruskin's late political & economic obsessions.

But Hunt is very good indeed, in the 400-page compass of his life. A trifle more suggestive than explicit when it comes to critical & interpretive moments; me, I like my literary biography to be thoroughly "critical." Hunt does however throw out a couple of ideas that seize my imagination: The likeness of Ruskin's mind & work to a Kunst-und-Wunderkammer, a chamber of curios of the sort so beloved by the Victorians & Romantics, but blown up to an enormous scale; and the extent to which all the natural & cultural phenomena with which Ruskin was so fascinated were interconnected in his mind, & how the fragmentary & digressive forms of his late work are an attempt to forge literary form to embody those interconnections.

Hunt himself is a scholar for whom I have an enormous deal of respect, even awe. How did his generation – & here I'm thinking as well of Frank Kermode, Annabel Patterson, et al. – manage to be so prolific? I can't find a birth date, but Hunt's first book – on the Pre-Raphaelites – came out in 1968, so he was probably born sometime in the 1940s. In the purely literary field, he's published lives of Andrew Marvell & Ruskin, edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, & written a commentary on The Tempest. On the other side of the fence – garden history & theory – he absolutely dominates the field, having edited at least 4 books & written 8 of his own, including most recently a full-length study of Ian Hamilton Finlay. His bibliography makes me weary just looking at it.

***

I'm beginning to get a trifle nervous – we're leaving for New York this Friday, for the better part of the rest of the summer. So before then I need to get my book orders for the fall in, figure out what books to pack & ship, sort out my list of priorities, etc. All in the baking heat (broken for a bit yesterday by a line of torrential thunderstorms; welcome to hurricane season).

fish are jumpin'

Okay, so summer's here. I think it hit 95 or so today, with humidity at about 300% & the heat index up around 112 or so. Just amazing to step outdoors & feel the heat settle on you like a big fat hand o' God. There's a reason south Florida as a region didn't really get shaking until the invention of air conditioning.

Post-"season" – which ends at Easter or Passover, whichever comes later – is the ideal time to be down here: suddenly the roads clear up a bit (all of those Long Island drivers have gone back to Long Island), you can actually get into restaurants without waiting half an hour, lines in the supermarkets are bearable. It would be just grand – except for the bloody weather.

***

Here's a soflo phenom that puzzles & irks me not a little bit: South Florida is the world's capital – yes, I so assert, the world's capital – of valet parking. You can get valet parking not merely at restaurants, but at shopping malls, at concerts, hell, for all I know at church. Our Fair University is thinking of setting up a valet parking system.

But in most of the places I've lived (you know, the civilized world), valet parking works like this: You come up to your destination, you see that all the handy spots are taken, & you hand your car over to some spotty 17-year-old who drives it off somewhere in the next county & then sprints back. Sure, you have no idea where the car's gone – it's probably out back of the K-Mart down the street – but hell, you only shell out the money for a valet when all the obvious & handy spots are already taken.

In Florida, however, it works a bissle differently: Here, after the obligatory (& wholly rational) handicapped parking spaces, all of the prime parking – that is, everything within eyeshot of the restaurant – is reserved for valet parking: roped off, coned, razor-wired. So the valet drops the car into a spot about 12 feet from the entrance & is back at his desk before you've had a chance to give your name to the maitre d'. If you want to be so primitive as to park your own car, you wind up scrounging for space around the dumpsters two buildings down.

Is it like this everywhere these days? How out of it am I?

***

Okay, maybe it's not a good idea to be reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, & Modern Painters I at the same time. My head is in a kind of genial Protestant preacher-"did you ever notice the angles at which snow clings to the Jungfrau"-steampunk-slasher place right now.

father's day

A fine holiday, all told: breakfast in bed, lunch out, an afternoon movie, friends over for supper, a stack of lovely & unexpected presents (media of all sorts, a sheaf of the sort of coloring books Jessica S. loves, a striking illustrated version of Kingsley's Water-Babies). It all made me think of my own father, who died a little over 11 years ago, & whom I find myself missing more every year.

He came from a dirt-poor country family (Tennessee? Kentucky? I only know he was born in Arkansas), & was probably the first to go to college – who knows if there were any high school graduates in his family? They drafted him out of his senior year at the tail end of World War II – not the Pacific Theater, but the occupation forces in Austria – and the GI bill sent him to the university to study art. Which he abandoned, as he would abandon a number of pursuits over the years, taking degrees & graduate degrees (a master's in education, another in history, & yet another in English), reënlisting in the service when things didn't pan out & then going back to school.

Eventually, he settled down for the long haul, enduring assignment after assignment to a dreary listening post on the East German border (he was a Russian linguist – some of my earliest memories are of military housing at the army language institute in Monterey) before he retired. The military paid the bills, gave the family direction, kept us in healthcare (filled my mouth with second-rate fillings, which I'm now replacing one by one). But he hated the discipline, he hated the interminable paperwork & bureaucracy, & he hated the the pointless wastage of our Vietnam adventure.

I wouldn't quite call him an autodidact, but he filled cases & cases with books, the books he wanted to read & the books he thought he ought to read. And read them, probably more assiduously than I have (underlinings & marginal notes, notecards filled with references to look up, notebooks filled with reading notes). He came from the generation that believed in literary "greatness" – no library should be without sets of Kafka, of Proust, of Mann, of Joyce. He read them, & nodded to their majesty, & returned to what he really loved – Dickens & Tolstoy. During his last summer, in between bouts of his illness, he was working his way through War & Peace in Russian (again); when it became clear that his fall relapse would be his last, he turned to an English translation. I bought him a clutch of Ian Flemings at a library sale during that last stretch of illness. He turned them over, read some pages, & decided that he'd rather have another go at Great Expectations, for which I can't blame him.

the rankings game

Yes, it's true – every year J & I pick up a copy of the new US News & World Report "America's Best Colleges" issue. Yes, we know the rankings are largely subjective, perhaps even bogus – but it's always entertaining to see whether Our Fair University (of which we are both wage slaves) will pull itself out of the fourth (lowest) tier, & the issue does after all provide a wealth of interesting statistics about colleges around the country.

But how do they arrive at those rankings, a ladder so controversial that one non-profit organization has started a grass-roots movement for colleges to entirely opt out? Well, they ask college presidents to evaluate a list of peer institutions on a scale from "marginal" to "distinguished." These are meant of course to be confidential documents, but thanks to Florida's "sunshine" law, the Gainesville newspaper has obtained a copy of the survey submitted by Bernie Machen, president of the University of Florida. Eye-opening indeed, as the snippet below shows.

Hmmm. Well, I'm not surprised that Machen consigns Our Fair University – along with five other institutions – to the "marginal" category; nor am I surprised to see the U of Miami & Florida State in the "good"category. But what in the world was he thinking in rating the University of Florida – his own institution – "distinguished"?

To put this in perspective: Of course, Machen's out to pump up his own school's rating, no doubt about it. But who else made his "distinguished" list?: Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, & Yale. (He had to think twice about Stanford & Berkeley, which he originally marked "strong." You can see his entire list in PDF here.)

Which means that, in the mind of the president of the U of Florida, UF is better than: Cornell, Duke, Dartmouth, Georgetown, the U of Texas, Johns Hopkins, & the University of Chicago. In what bizarro universe could this possibly be the case?

Methinks there is a serious disconnection from reality happening in a presidential mansion in Gainesville these days.

[Our local paper, of course, is distressed that the prez of UF has been dissing our hometown school – even as the prez of OFU hastens to dismantle whatever shreds of credibility we have.]

***

UPDATE: Actually, Bernie Machen doesn't look quite so bad when compared to Clemson's president James Barker, who appears to have given his own institution the only "strong" score on the form, consigning the majority of the other universities in the country to the "marginal" category. Margaret Soltan's been following this one.

reading (around) Ruskin

Spent much of the day pitchforking thru great stacks of old mail around the house. My papercuts have papercuts. Must have opened 150 envelopes or more.

***

Taking a break from Modern Painters & reading some secondary texts on Ruskin. Giovanni Cianci & Peter Nicholls's Ruskin & Modernism (Palgrave 2001) seems to hit almost all of the obvious interesting points of JR's influence, direct & indirect, on the high modernists – except for (a) Pound, which has been covered in a number of articles over the years & (b) Joyce, which I'm not sure has received its due. Essays all a bit too short – they feel like conference papers, which I guess they are; but most of them quite solid.

Then turned to an oldie, George Landow's The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton UP 1971). They don't publish them like this anymore: solid 450+ pages, footnotes at the foot of the page where you can use them. The style is clear without being simplistic, the pace measured without being otiose (too often). Me, I need someone to say things like this, this clearly (part of a discussion of JR's version of ut pictura poesis, in the context of Romanticism):

As long as critics considered poetry a mimetic art, its natural analogue was painting; but once it became an art whose central operation and purpose were expressive, poetry's natural analogue became music.

That makes a lot of sense. How one gets from Sir Joshua Reynolds & Pope to Pater. (Note how Landow's sentence, clearly no grand shakes stylistically, derives a certain authoritativeness from the chiastic juggling of "poetry" and the pronominal substitution "it.")

***

Bloomsday – or pre-Bloomsday – last weekend went just fine: good time had by all. I venture to think my talk was actually "entertaining," as they kept billing it; entertaining enough for the pub to keep me fed and drinking for the rest of the evening, which was fine by me. We ran thru our scratch set of 3 songs, then played another three, then found ourselves in an actual session, with other (real!) musicians sitting in.

archive fever

Undine is doing archival research, & man am I jealous. Some observations she makes:

•I'm in Research City, spending long, concentrated days in the archives, enjoying hours spent seemingly inside the head of the authors whose letters I'm reading, and wondering if, with all this typing and transcribing, absorbing words and sentence structure, I'll start to sound like these authors once I'm done.

•It may be easier, on the whole, to be a tortured creative genius and fill notebooks with tiny handwriting in black ink than to decipher that handwriting years later.

•No matter how much energy I think I have, it is never as much as that of an author who likes to write letters.

Some of the most intellectually energetic weeks of my life were the three months I spent doing groundwork for the LZ biography at the HRC in Austin. One can intellectually accept, even endorse, all of the post-structuralist arguments about the death of the author, all the substitutions of an "author-effect" for the old-fashioned author, & still get swept away with a kind of immediacy when you're actually holding in your hands the letters, the drafts & notes, that a given poet wrote. (I've written about this before.)

As Undine's specific comments above: 1) Yes you will, at least in bits & pieces; part of what Leon Edel calls "transference" (tho I think he presents a severely emaciated version of the process); probably in the end not a good thing, so be aware. 2) Of course it's easier to write the notebooks than to read them; hell, I'm not even a "creative genius" & I can't decipher my own handwriting from six months ago. 3) I wonder if the species as a whole hasn't declined since the 19th century, energy-wise. God knows Ruskin seems to have churned out a couple dozen pages of manuscript & correspondence every day, & he didn't have to resort to heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, & amphetamines (like Sartre). Then again, I suspect the absence of radio, television, electronic media, & telephones – plus the fact that all cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. was done by others – added to his writing time.

***

Random LZ archival notes:

•A prominent LZ scholar once opined to me that Zukofsky's increasingly "crabbed" (LZ's own word) handwriting, beginning mostly in the 1950s, was due to the psychological constraints of his marriage. Interesting theory, but Occam's razor suggests something more prosaic: the invention of the ballpoint pen. LZ, you see, was a lefty, & in the days of fountain pens would perforce have to write rather slowly & carefully in order to avoid smearing the still-wet ink. Once a "dry" writing instrument was invented, he could follow his natural bent & write as microscopically as he pleased. (This is clearly evidenced in a long early letter to Carl Rakosi, written on a train from Chicago to Madison, where his pen runs out halfway thru & he finishes in pencil – in much smaller script.)

•One thing that hit me more & more as I read thru the correspondence – & not merely the HRC's collections, but various other collections around the continent, along with bales of photocopies sent from various hands – was the extent to which every letter is in some sense addressed: that is, every bit of "evidence" you glean from a writer's correspondence has to be weighed & calibrated on the basis of the writer's relationship with the addressee. Probably necessary to extent this to most notebooks & journals as well (as Claire Tomalin does in her brilliant Pepys biography): even if the journal is entirely private, somewhere in the writer's mind there's an intended or ideal audience, & the writing is to some degree addressed to that audience.

more B-day mishugas

I can't say I've gotten much substantive work done this week, what with a thousand piddly errands to run, the girls on a truly crazy summer camp schedule, & much of my mind dominated by the madness going on in the corridors of Our Fair University. So I haven't really thought much about the "entertaining" half-hour talk on Joyce I'm supposed to deliver tomorrow (in "Edwardian dress, if possible").

A quick Google search reveals almost no decent Joyce jokes on the internet. The closest to funny is an anticlimactic thing:

Charles Dickens walks into a bar.

CD: Give me a martini.

Bartender: Olive or Twist?

James Joyce walks in an hour later.

JJ: Give me a Guinness.*

Bartender: Hey, Charles Dickens was in an hour ago.

JJ: mmm.

B: He asked for a martini, so I said "Olive or twist?"

JJ: mmm

B: Because, you know, he wrote this book Oliver Twist...

JJ: What a shitty joke.

Okay, so no jokes. What I'm really worried about is nailing the fiddle break on Paul Brady's version of "Mary and the Soldier."

*Convicted Joyceans know, of course, that Joyce's spirit of choice was Swiss white wine, which he described as "drinking electricity" – as opposed to red wine, which was "drinking beef."

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.