shameless self-promotion

Okay, the latest issue of Lou Rowan's excellent Golden Handcuffs Review hasn't got its picture online quite, but if you go to the website & PayPal'd them some money they'll send it your way pronto. (Better yet, subscribe!) It's got new poetry, prose, & reviews from a whole bunch of cool people: David Antin, Louis Armand, Andrea Augé, John Baldessari, Kenneth Bernard, Amanda Berenguer, Joshua Cohen, Rikki Ducornet, Kristin Dykstra, Ken Edwards, Andrew Ervin, Paul Griffiths, Hank Lazer, Stacey Levine, Brian Marley, David Miller, Paul Naylor, Paul Perry, Joe Ashby Porter, Peter Quartermain, Marthine Satris, Kyle Schlesinger, Maurice Scully, Keith Waldrop, & Rosmarie Waldrop.

And I have a piece too, on the anagram in Ronald Johnson. It begins like this:

1] The anagram – a “name or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another” – although a feat of undeniable ingenuity, has gotten little respect over the history of English poetry. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham dismissed the anagram as “a thing if it be done for pastime and exercise of the wit without superstition commendable inough and mete study for Ladies, neither bringing them any great gayne nor any great losse unlesse it be of idle time…” The anagram’s “pleasure” lies in the “grateful newes or matter” that can be wrung from the transposition of the letters of one phrase into another: Pilate’s question "Quid est veritas?" (What is truth?) can be answered "Est vir qui adest" (It is the man who is here); Puttenham’s own happy anagrammatizing finds in “Elissabet Anglorum Regina” “Multa regnabis ense gloria” (By thy sword shalt thou raigne in great renowne) and “Multa regnabis sene gloria” (Aged and in much glorie shall ye raigne). “[B]icause there is much difficulty in it, and altogether standeth upon hap hazard,” Puttenham concedes, the anagram “is compted for a courtly conceit no lesse than” the emblem. A “courtly conceit,” but something less than true poetry: Puttenham’s discussions of both the emblem and the anagram were cancelled from most copies of The Arte of English Poesie.

It goes on, thru Dryden's Mac Flecknoe and Addison on true & false wit, and ends up in Johnson's interstellar spaces. Check it out.

John Clute: Appleseed

Appleseed, John Clute (2001; Tor Books, 2003)

John Clute's known as perhaps the most learned and intelligent critic of SF/fantasy alive; he's sorta like Northrop Frye with a passionate love of the space opera form, an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire speculative canon, and a prose style that sometimes rivals RP Blackmur's for knotty insight. So you perhaps can imagine what Appleseed, his second venture into actually writing SF, is like. Or maybe not – the vision of the future here, the sheer technological and social otherness of Clute's world is so fantastically imagined that it's hard for a reader to get a grip of anything like the whole. I'm used to being off-balance for the obligatory opening 50-75 pages of an SF novel, getting used to its novum (or nova); Clute keeps you off-balance for pretty much all of this medium-sized book, not least in his astonishingly various prose, which shimmies from the technologically gritty to the lyrically visionary to the weirdest yee-haw vernacular, often in the course of a single sentence.

Appleseed, alas, is way short on fully realized characters – it's really a kind of verbally and conceptually souped-up space opera, after all – but its mind-blowing imagination of a future of cybernetically "augmented" human beings, shimmering artificial intelligences, and vast metaphysical / theological forces almost makes up for that. At the very least, it's worth reading just for the relentless baroque energy of its dialogue & descriptive prose.

[2]

Jena Osman: Public Figures

Public Figures, Jena Osman (Wesleyan UP, 2012)

Is it an essay? (even a "lyric" essay?) or is it a longish poem? Who cares; it's writing, smart and engaging, impassioned. Public Figures begins as a conceptual-art kinda thang – check out the statues in the public spaces of Philadelphia, rig up a camera to snap images of precisely what their stoney/bronzey eyes are gazing upon, then meditate upon those gazes. So far so good: there's lots to think about there – the tradition of memorial statuary in the New World and the Old, urban development growth and decay, the ironies of history. But something else emerges over the course of this meditation. The poem-essay-commentary, which begins in a plainspoken this is what my idea was and this is how I started doing it register, shifts into the ultra-contemporary now, as transcribed drone observations – from the Iraq theater of operations, one assumes – start running along the bottom of the page like the "crawl" on the CNN screen; and the poem becomes not just a meditation on statuary (paging Dr. Ozymandias) but a larger consideration of the decline of the "heroic" "ideal" in the age of remote-controlled war.

[120]

michael moorcock: the chinese agent

Michael Moorcock, The Chinese Agent (1970; Mayflower, 1979)

I must've read this one about 30 years ago, probably in a library copy, because I didn't own a copy until I found one in a 2nd-hand shop a few months back. An enjoyable two or three hours, given that MM probably devoted all of a couple weeks to writing it. There are some passages of pretty evocative description – devoted mostly to the more sordid districts of London, to the old Notting Hill and Portobello Road – and gratifying few of the terrifically sloppy passages one finds in so much of his work of the 60s and 70s.

This is non-fantasy, non-SF Moorcock – a clear precursor of the "serious" city books of later years, Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). Gosh he loves London, and that affection suffuses the passages of urban description. Plotwise it's nominally a spy thriller – well, actually a spy farce, the sort of thing that got filmed so delightfully in all those Peter Sellers movies of the day. The protagonist is Jerry Cornell, who is a kind of down-at-the-heels, bourgeois version of Jerry Cornelius; he's working, improbably, for the British secret service. The novel has him revisiting the bosom of his disgusting Cockney family (rather more outrageously gross than the other Jerry C's), falling into bed with a shy receptionist and a Mata Hari-like femme fatale, and blundering his way thru a highly improbable comedy of mistaken identities, stolen secret documents, and time-bombs.

A bit of literary popcorn, in the final analysis – but it never aspires to be anything higher than light entertainment, and that's sometimes refreshing from a writer who can get all too "heavy" when he furrows his brow and becomes serious.

[1]

expanding the base

So I've been thinking about my own "knowledge base," a concept I've borrowed & modified from Jonathan Mayhew's very useful idea of the "scholarly base." There's this stack of poets whose work I know very well indeed, whom I've studied and studied hard, whose work I've read pretty much from one end to the other: LZ, Ronald Johnson, Milton, Niedecker, WCW, John Matthias, etc. And there's a somewhat larger group of poets whose work I've read in its entirely, but of whom I have a somewhat more casual grasp: John Peck, Michael Palmer, Moore, Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe, Creeley, etc.

And then there's the contemporaries. There are probably a half dozen poets whose every work I'll buy; and there are probably twenty or thirty poets whose book I'll pick up in the second-hand shop on the strength of their name alone. I've got lots of books of poetry waiting to be read: every year I seem to discover between twenty and forty new poets.

I've got a hankering, however, to get to grips with some contemporaries on a deeper level. To that end, I posted on Facebook this morning the following: "Looking for a new focus: who's the one poet -- between 30 & 50 -- besides yourself -- whom you think I ought to immerse myself in?" I got a bunch of responses, and here's the list:

Noah Eli Gordon
Graham Foust
Michael Cross
Elizabeth Treadwell
Jena Osman
Stacy Kidd
Peter O'Leary
Joshua Harmon
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
GC Waldrep
Harold Schweizer
Andrea Brady
Keston Sutherland
Dan Beachy-Quick
Joanna Klink
Nate Klug
Austin Smith
Michael Robbins
Ange Mlinko
Kevin Prufer
Laura Kasischke
Sean Bonney
Rory Waterman
Buck Downs
Andrew Zawacki
Julie Carr
Julie Doxsee
Juliana Leslie
Joshua Corey

(Points off, Mike Theune, for not reading instructions – one poet.) 29 poets in all – with Kevin Prufer recommended twice. If nothing else, the list shows me that I'm perhaps not as out of touch as I'd feared: only maybe four of these names are entirely new to me, and I've read books by about half of them. (I seem to have actually met about 2/5 of them – which means it's a small world.) Indeed, a few of them fall into my "know pretty well" category. I think the "pick up whatever looks interesting, then read other books by the good ones" method is working out alright.

What I decided this afternoon, however, was that I would indeed work to expand my "knowledge base," but not necessarily by changing my consumption/study of 30-50-year-olds. Instead, I'd focus on a few slightly older – boomer generation, really – poets who've written both poetry and essays, and whose work has always compelled me even if I haven't given it quite the time it deserves. So one of my ancillary reading projects over the next few months will be an in-depth reading of Rachel Blau DuPlessis (whose Drafts I've followed since they started appearing, but which I've never given the kind of concentrated reading they deserve); Norma Cole, every word of whose I've read I've been compelled by, but whom I've never quite been able to see whole; and Marjorie Welish, whose work – or at least the four or five books I've read – has both sensuality and really dazzling conceptual rigor.

That should keep me off the streets for a while.

"I have wasted my life"

It's one of those lines that echo in my mind, even if I have to resort to Google to make sure that I remember its source – James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," a poem about which I remember nothing else. (I rather prefer Lorine Niedecker's "I've spent my life on nothing," from a poem which begins "What horror to awake at night.")

It's a feeling I get around this time every year, after I've turned in what Our Fair University calls the "Annual Report," in which I gather up all the things I've done over the previous year – the theses directed & served on, the classes taught along with their student evaluations, the committees reluctantly served on, and – most ominously – the things published. I always do just fine on these things: a few poems here and there (last year was a banner year – two collections of poems published, but that won't happen for another decade), a book review, a couple of essays.

But what does it add up to? I'll admit to being unhealthily obsessed with looking over the bibliographies of scholars-critics-poets, counting how many things they'd published by the time they were my age, calculating their rate of production – mostly of books. And boy mine doesn't look very impressing next to Terry E., or Marjorie P., or Norman F., or any number of others.

Over the last few, I find, my (prose) energies have gone in three directions (this is leaving aside all the work that went into The Poem of a Life, which I realize [gulp] was published a full SIX years ago): book reviews and short pieces that usually began as conference papers; large-scale literary-historical articles for Cambridge Companions and suchlike volumes; and rangy multiple-book-topic review essays for Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Now things in the first category obviously are publications, but they aren't publications that add up to much. Things in the second category, as useful as they may be – and some of the things I've done for such volumes are to my mind quite good indeed – can't really be reused for my own books because of copyright restraints: Cambridge, Oxford, Blackwell, etc. make you sign away your reprint rights.

Then there's the Parnassus pieces. I'm terrifically proud of them: I've written on everyone from Guy Davenport to Anne Carson to Ron Johnson and Rae Armantrout, and in every case Herb Leibowitz and Ben Downing's ferocious line-editing has pulled my prose to levels of smartness and readability that I didn't know I could attain. The problem is that the resulting pieces are rather in-betwixt-and-between: they're all on fairly hipster poets, but they're written for a "general audience," whoever that might be – not a scholarly readership, or a band of ferocious partisans. Clearly, this probably isn't a book that an academic press is going to snap up. But on the other hand, the very obscurity of most of the folks I write about (when have you ever seen anything about Ted Enslin in a journal of more than 750 copies circulation?) is likely to make this collection a losing proposition for an independent.

So I've got 95,000 words of essays, reviews, and essay-reviews on my hands (mind you, that's only about half of what I culled thru), a title, and the beginnings of a lively introduction. All I need (sigh, and that's what we all need) is a publisher.

operatics

So I'm feeling a bit more sanguine about the fantasy/sf conference, which is coming up next week. I finished (a draft of) my paper, and managed somehow to steer myself into something I know pretty well – high modernism, that is – by the end. The thing is probably short on theory – lamentably short on theory – the only really theoretical moment is some ideas lifted from one of Samuel Delany's essays from ages & ages ago – but I'm hoping it's ballasted enough with careful close readings & bibliographical observations that that doesn't really matter. And I've talked to some colleagues who are pretty deeply into this scene in a professional way, & they tell me it's a good conference: plenty of intellectual rigor if you look for it, but the old pros aren't totally sadistic assholes to us newbies. I might be singing a different tune in a week's time; we'll see.

I'm continuing to read Ruskin, or at least around Ruskin. A hole seems to have formed in my life since I finished the Library Edition some weeks ago, and I've been trying to block it by reading ancillary texts, some of the many volumes of Ruskin letters I've accumulated. Fascinating stuff, for the most part, tho lots of thank-you notes and scheduling dithering as well. 

We exhausted ourselves last weekend by taking the girls to Orlando & doing a pair of Disney parks. The less said about that perhaps the better.

Tonight I went to see Salome at the Palm Beach Opera. A decent performance, but no better than decent. The orchestra at least was excellent, which made up for many deficiencies; I'm very fond of Strauss, and this is one of my favorite operas. The magnificent Denyse Graves, playing Herodias, had some hip emergency right before the opening; she sang her part in full costume in a wheelchair downstage right, while an actress in a very modern sheath dress mimed her part among the other actors. It was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Erika Sunnegardh  played Salome as a perverse 14-year-old, which makes a certain amount of sense; she's the only Salome I've seen who could dance a lick.

Alas, the audience.... Opening night, but the hall was only half full. It's odd to sit among such well-heeled folks, shelling out real money for tickets, who seemed so innocent of the classical repertoire. Murmurs around me: Is she really going to take off her clothes? Will she kiss him? And afterward: "Well, I didn't expect that!" "That was a strange one, wasn't it?"

I shouldn't rag on the poor snowbirds. They want their culture, after all. And the funniest such moment I can remember was actually on Broadway, at the end of Janet McTeer's stunning rendention of Nora in Doll's House maybe 12 or 13 years ago. Nora has left her husband, has gone "downstairs"; Thorvald is brooding alone on stage, hoping she'll return. And then, as the play's final moment, you hear a resounding door-slam. From in front of me, a quavering voice wonders, "What happened? Did she shoot herself?"

comfort zone

[MS at the Florida Renaissance Festival, photo by Patrick Farrell of the Miami Herald]

Okay, perhaps you wonder whether the fellow in the photo above is ever outside of his comfort zone. You'd be surprised – this was taken at the Renaissance Festival, where it's perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to put on a top hat, a figured waistcoat, and a set of home made goggles and to get one's steampunk on. When it comes to intellectual pursuits, however, I'm acutely aware when I've ventured beyond my areas of "expertise," or at least the places where I'm comfortable.

Two short narratives about what I'm getting at: 1) Last year I went to the Blackfriars Conference, which mainly centers around Shakespeare and performance. I'd submitted a paper on The Tempest as adapted by Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books) and Michael Nyman (Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs). My basic thesis was that as much as I enjoyed Greenaway's film & Nyman's composition (opera? oratorio?), they were both in one sense failures in that their effect was to empty Shax's play of agency, of character, & recast a polyvocal original into a particular sort of British postmodern monologue. In the commenting process of the conference, I got my butt kicked in a particularly stinging manner, mostly over my general ineptitude when talking about music. I'd overlooked a number of details about Nyman's soundtrack for the Prospero's Books, and I was deploying a lamentably impoverished vocabulary for musical commentary. When I wrote the paper, I felt I was venturing outside of my comfort zone, & I ended up regretting it.

2) Last month at the Louisville conference on 20th- & 21st-c. culture, I attended a two-person panel in which the clear star attraction was Full Professor X, an old chum of mine delivering another delightful installment of his ongoing commentary on Obscure Avant-Gardist Y. A splendid talk, veering between close reading, textual history, and sociological locating. The other guy Professor X's was Professor Z, whose only bespoke audience (alas) was his partner; everyone else was there to hear X. Z talked about his subject – let's call it "an American poetic genre" – in terms that showed he was entirely ignorant of what the modernists had done with that genre, and what the Language Poets had done, and what any number of interesting contemporaries had done. I'm happy to say that no-one handed him his teeth in the q&a session, but there were any number of cutting comments passed back & forth in the hall afterward. Me, I sat squirming with discomfort for the poor gent.

All of this is by way of saying that I'm off in two weeks time for ICFA – that's the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts – in Orlando, to deliver my very first paper on a science fiction/fantasy subject. This is a BIG conference – hundreds and hundreds of papers; very big names in the field, both in terms of writers and of scholars; people in from all corners of the globe. And I'm scared stiff.

Sure, I've been reading fantasy and SF as long as I've been reading, and I think I've been reading it fairly critically & carefully over the last few years. But this is my first venture into talking about it in an academic context, & I'm acutely aware of how little I really know about this field and its critical discourse. No way I can pull this off by putting on a steampunk hat and showing what an enthusiastic fanboy I can be.

It's probably a good thing to begin making steps outside of one's comfort zone, early or late. I'll let you know when I'm on the verge of attempting my first Victorianist conference.

The letter carrier – well, the UPS person, I guess – brought a package from Cambridge University Press the other day, & after I scratched my head a moment (what in world did I order?), I opened it, only to find groovy pristine author's copies of the brand spanking new Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945, edited by Jennifer Ashton. My own essay bears the unwieldy title of "From the Late Modernism of the 'Objectivists' to the Proto-postmodernism of 'Projective Verse.'" (No, not my title, I'm afraid.) The book's chock full of nutty goodness:

1. Periodizing American poetry since 1945 Jennifer Ashton

2. From the late modernism of the objectivists to the proto-postmodernism of 'Projective Verse' Mark Scroggins

3. Confessional poetry Deborah Nelson

4. Surrealism as a living modernism: what the New York poets learned from two generations of New York painting Charles Altieri

5. The San Francisco renaissance Michael Davidson

6. Three generations of Beat poetics Ronna C. Johnson

7. The poetics of chant and inner/outer space: the Black Arts movement Margo Natalie Crawford

8. Feminist poetries Lisa Sewell

9. Ecopoetries in America Nick Selby

10. Language writing Steve McCaffery

11. Post-1945 American poetry and its institutions Hank Lazer

12. The contemporary 'mainstream' lyric Christina Pugh

13. Poems in and out of school: Allen Grossman and Susan Howe Oren Izenberg

14. Rap, hip-hop, spoken word Michael W. Clune

15. Poetry of the twenty-first century: the first decade Jennifer Ashton

So as you can see, it's packed full of great contributors, among whom I feel kind of slight. And it's also more or less affordable – if you don't want a copy for yourself, see if you can't persuade your institutional library to buy one!

scroggins world tour dates, spring 2013

The Grateful Dead had Deadheads; Jimmy Buffet has Parrot-heads. Thank Ba'al I don't have any hardcore fan-followers, because heaven knows what sort of "heads" they'd be saddled with as a name. Anyway, I poke my head out from the great sift of papers (real and virtual) to announce upcoming appearances:

•Tuesday, 19 February, Richard Greene of the University of Toronto, award-bedecked poet and biographer of Edith Sitwell, editor of a selection of Graham Greene's letters, will be at Our Fair University; we'll be having a free-form "conversation on literary biography." (7.00 PM, CU 321, for locals.) It'll be great fun.

•The very next day (phew!) I'm sitting on a panel with some of my esteemed departmental colleagues, trying to impart some wisdom (?) to undergraduates about how to go about applying to grad school. Flyer here.

•Friday, 22 February, at the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, I'll be on one of two whiz-bang panels on "The New Gnostics: Vectors in Postmodern Poetry." I'll be talking about Robert Duncan – paper title "'I am not an occultist': Esotericism, Literary History, and Autobiography in The H.D. Book."

•Then, after a few weeks to catch my breath, I'm off to Orlando to the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. This is I gather a rather big deal for those involved in science fiction & fantasy studies. It's my first time around, so I'm kinda scared and unsure of myself – what if I mistake a book by Ursula K. LeGuin for something by Joanna Russ? What if I miss an obvious reference to a Celtic fertility ceremony? What if I forget my snazzy steampunk-modified-goggles-&-top-hat combination? The paper I'll be delivering is called "Recalculating the Apocalypse: Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme and Adaptation."

Hope to see some of you at one or more of these things.

fallow

So I've reached a top-ish rung in the academy – I'm full professor; there's nowhere to go, as someone said, but to the grave. (Or to a named chair somewhere, as if that'll happen...) According to popular wisdom, this is the point at which I start recycling my lecture notes and pretty much switch off my scholarship. And I've seen it happen, several times. Usually it happens a bit earlier: someone scrapes together the book or the requisite articles to get tenure, and then we don't see them in print ever again.

Now I'd hasten to assure my conservative friends that this isn't by any means the norm; in fact, when I say I've seen it happen "several times," what I mean is that I see it happen perhaps 10% of the time among my colleagues across the departments; the vast majority of us keep on publishing after getting tenured, even after getting promoted to Full.

Lately, however, I've been feeling a bit adrift. I have all sorts of vague outlines of the next "big" (ie, book-length) project in mind, but nothing that I'm particularly enthusiastic about pursuing. I know I could just sit down and start writing – I've done quite a bit of that – but I feel the pull of the books: I'd rather, quite frankly, just keep reading, making notes, trying to scribble down connections.

I've been feeling guilty about that – the production schedule seems to have broken down. Why aren't I writing? why aren't I producing, like a healthy cog?

This week has been one of reassurance, tho. A few days ago I got the latest copy-edited version of my next Parnassus essay (on Black Mountain); the cuts have been brutal, and will need to be sorted thru and fought over, but this should see print by summer. Today I just got the final copy-edited version of a book chapter that might be out by the end of the year, and I realize that sometime before Christmas, I read proof for another that should be out sometime this spring. And yet another book chapter, I noted as I sifted thru e-mails today, is in the hopper.

And when I look over my commitments calendar, I realize I'm committed to two non-onerous (read: pleasurable) reviews this spring, and yet another book chapter. And editors will be reading this summer my first full-length essay on Ruskin, mirabile dictu (no, it's not written, but it's all there in my talking points for last fall's graduate seminar, waiting to be quarried out).

So maybe I'm not lying quite as fallow as I sometimes fear. Indeed, I wonder if perhaps I'm not doing too much.

ye olde modernes

There's one advantage to electing Democrats to the White House; at least every four years they give you something to talk about in a poetry workshop, in the form of an inaugural poem. Richard Blanco's effort yesterday is interesting: not interesting enough to be good poetry, but interesting enough to talk about. It feels as though he were given a list of topics to touch upon, a handful of themes to treat, & was left to make the best of them – in a wholly un-ironical manner. Maybe it's the utter absence of irony that's unsettling.
***
Teaching the modernists this semester. This week it's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," a poem which I've been reading for a quarter-century or more, I'd guess. So I re-read it again a half dozen times over the past few days. I suspect it will be a hard sell – so much of it depends on modulations of tone, evocations of cultural landscapes all these young people born in the 1990s can't even imagine. It was hard for me to imagine them when I first read the poem, as well, but then I've been more or less professionally thinking about it & poems like it for years & years now.

Distance. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," or for that matter "The Waste Land," is as far away from us in 2013 as those poems were from Keats and Shelley's major works. I have trouble wrapping my mind around that.

unfinishing

[James Spates]

One of the few treasures in my Ruskin collection – and it's a working library, not a collector's treasure-trove – is a little vanity-press production from 1966, The Ruskin-Froude Friendship as Represented Through Letters. I picked it up in The Strand the year before last, along with a bunch of other Ruskiniana. It's inscribed by its author/editor, Helen Gill Viljoen "To Dr. Rosenberg – With kind regard and best wishes." Of course, that's John D. Rosenberg, author of The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (1961), the book that's widely regarded as having kicked off contemporary Ruskin criticism, & a book which would start Rosenberg's career as a distinguished Victorianist. In 1966, Rosenberg was a young scholar; he had joined the Columbia faculty four years earlier; Viljoen was 67, & had retired from Queens College the year before. Since 1929, she had been working on Dark Star, a revolutionary biography of John Ruskin.

I'm most of the way thru James L. Spates's very strange and very absorbing The Imperfect Round: Helen Gill Viljoen's Life of Ruskin. I'll be frank: this is a weird book. It's a smart book, if a bit eccentric. Spates is a professor of sociology, not a literary scholar, and he's sometimes a bit wobbly on the norms of the discipline – how to insert comments and emendations into quoted letters, how to cite cross-references in footnotes, and so forth. And he's not a critic or theorist of biography. Nonetheless, this is one of the most compelling pieces of writing about biography I've encountered in a very long time.

Helen Gill Viljoen (pronounced "Fil-yoon," if you were wondering) was an American Ruskin scholar. She's remembered for three books: a massive and incredibly detailed edition of Ruskin's late Brantwood Diary (Yale UP, 1971); a little book on Ruskin's friendship with Froude (Pageant, 1966); and Ruskin's Scottish Heritage (U of Illinois P, 1956), a large-scale "prelude" to a full-scale biography of Ruskin that she never wrote, or never brought to the point of publication.

Viljoen visited Brantwood in 1929, when Ruskin's library and papers were still in the house, pretty much in the state Ruskin had left them. Well, in the state Cook and Wedderburn had left them, after going thru everything in the course of preparing their 39-volume Library Edition of his works. She wasn't planning on doing much research; she had just finished her PhD at Wisconsin (on Modern Painters) and thought perhaps to follow up on some of her hunches about Ruskin's reading. But in the course of going thru the bookcases, she discovered Ruskin's diaries (which had never been published), and in reading thru them – and pretty much transcribing them whole over the next few weeks – she came to the conclusion that the Library Edition editors had systematically distorted the record of Ruskin's life – repressing the story of his obsession with Rose La Touche, airbrushing out the terrific tension in his relationship with his parents.

What she had in the diaries, Viljoen decided, was the basis for a new, revisionary life of Ruskin, one that would completely eclipse the "standard" lives of WG Collingwood and ET Cook, and would sweep away the handful of Stracheyan productions written in the first decades of the century. So for the rest of her life she was laboring towards a massive, multi-volume biography that would capture the true essence of Ruskin, that would set straight the mistaken record that almost all Ruskin scholars were relying on.

Viljoen's career, as Spates presents it, is a tragedy of an over-scrupulous scholar who could never stop researching, could never sit down and just write the book that she had been working her entire adult life to make real. Decade after decade, Viljoen accumulates more and more notes for her Ruskin biography, comes upon new caches of letters and stacks of documents. Time and again, she gets sidetracked: Before she writes the biography proper, she needs to transcribe and edit all of the sermon notebooks Ruskin kept as a teenager; and then she has to account for all of his ancestors, and remove various myths surrounding his parents' background; and then, disgusted with the way most of his diaries have been edited and published, she has to do her own massive job on his "Brantwood" diary, appending full biographical sketches of every person mentioned, annotating every single reference in his maddening allusive text (that last project seems to have eaten up around a decade of her working life).

Every job takes longer than she's planned; every ancillary project ends up sidetracking her from writing the biography proper. It's almost heartbreaking, really. Part of me admires Viljoen unreservedly: in her desire from absolute accuracy, and complete thoroughness, she's kind of a patron saint of scholars. But even scholarship has to stop somewhere. There's no such thing as total knowledge, & the desire for total knowledge can keep one from offering any of one's knowledge to the world in print.

Spates clearly reads Viljoen as kind of an unsung hero of Ruskin studies, and I'm inclined to agree. But my admiration for her is rather less whole-hearted than his. Yes, she probably knew more about Ruskin than anyone else alive – maybe more than anyone else ever will know. But the inability to know when to stop, to call a more or less temporary halt to the quest for information & to set down what one already knows, is at least as important a faculty of the scholar as the drive for continued research.

And frankly, I'm less than convinced that Viljoen's critical acumen is all that Spates makes it out to be. As he narrates in The Imperfect Round, Viljoen spent a number of years pursuing an allegorical reading of Ruskin's work, in which almost all of his writings, from the early Poetry of Architecture thru Praeterita (& even including his private diaries) are coded allegories of his own family, & later of his pursuit of Rose La Touche. Viljoen never published any of this work – she told everyone she knew about it, and received scant encouragement from the scholarly community – but apparently she clung to this reading to the very end. It distracted her from working on Ruskin's life for a number of years, and heaven knows how it would have affected the biography she never really wrote. The very notion of an extended allegory, running thru and structuring all of Ruskin's works, strikes me as incredibly unlikely; it goes against everything I know about how Ruskin wrote and thought, every intuition I've had about his work over the past decade of reading him. He's simply not that kind of writer. Alas, there's something all too Casaubon-like in this bit of Viljoen's intellectual history.

So I have reservations, both about Helen Gill Viljoen's work and about James Spates's full-throated praise of that work. But The Imperfect Round is a book every Ruskinian needs to own, and indeed every biographer ought to read. It's the most absorbing cautionary tale about the art of life-writing I've encountered, and gives us in scrupulous detail the moving human tragedy of a gifted writer's encounter with, and ultimate absorption in, the endless vortex of the record of the past.

year's end

Yes, as I always say, I hate year-end "best of" lists, whether of books or records or movies or whatever. Especially of books. On the one hand, there's the implicit "check out how much I read factor." Now I read a lot, but I'm not particularly proud of it. Indeed, I feel there's something slightly pathological about how much I read. I get something close to a panic attack when I realize I'm going to be somewhere where I might have a couple of hours on my hands, and I don't have something to read.

And then there's the whole "cool kid" quotient. Astonishingly enough, I was not one of the cool kids back in high school, and things really haven't improved. So no, I probably haven't gotten around to reading the latest super-snazzy book of poetry or theory or whatever. But I feel bad about not having done so every time I see that title pop up on the year-end "best of" lists.

Any way, here's some highlights from this year's reading, sorted roughly by genre. Stuff that's stuck in my mind enough to note or recommend:

Poetry:

•Odi Barbare, by Geoffrey Hill, is a bit of a return to form after the disappointments of Oracles/Oraclau and Clavics; he's still writing too much in the home stretch, if you ask me.

•With Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger, Susan Gevirtz continues to demonstrate that she's one of the poets you really ought to read, even if you haven't.

•Terra Lucida, by Joseph Donahue and Gnostic Frequencies, by Patrick Pritchett, are two very different explorations in the fascinating province of "new gnosticism."

•John Peck's I Came, I Saw: Eight Poems is typical Peck – and by "typical" I mean dense, musical, and impactedly beautiful.

•I'd read Jill Magi's earlier books, but with SLOT she seems to really be coming into her own as an important contemporary voice; solid, moving.

•Jena Osman's Public Figures continues her exploration of "documentary" poetics; this outing revolves around statues & monuments in Philadelphia.

•Gravesend, by Cole Swensen, does nifty things with ghosts, graves, and the town of Gravesend in England; I like it because it's so obviously about something, and because Swensen has a really dead-on lyric ear.

•I contributed a blurb sight unseen to Alan Halsey's Even if only out of, saying nice things about his work as a whole; this one doesn't disappoint, either; epigrams like Martial on speed and shrooms.

•Matthew Cooperman's Still: Of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move initially impressed me as yet another "here's the unremitting barrage of data we're subjected to every day" books, but as it progressed, it moved me more and more, until it became almost overwhelming.

•Stacy Doris's Knot: Doris was one of the poets we lost recently, and I bitterly regret not getting to know her work, which plays wonderful games with tenses and verbs, earlier.

Fiction:

•Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: ouch.

•China Miéville, The City and the City: deserved every prize it got – tho for my taste, it went a little genre-y at the end (noir, rather than sf, though)

•And of course, maybe the high point of the year's reading, the umpteenth read-thru of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; I love that book!

Biography:

•Joan Evans's 1950s John Ruskin is very good indeed; a good deal less carefully rendered detail than Derrick Leon's magnificent 1949 John Ruskin, The Great Victorian, but perhaps more smartly judgmental. Peter Quennell's John Ruskin: The Portrait of a Prophet was published the same year as Leon's biography, which is unfortunate, as the density of Leon's research overshadows the liveliness and grace of Quennell's style.

•Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde: yes, it took me a long time to get around to this one, so long that I suppose it's been largely superseded (but when was I ever up to date?); but it was worth the wait. 

•Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, which I've already written about a bit; an important book.

Sui generis:

•Keith Tuma, On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes: what's to say? great anecdotes, wonderful theorizing about the genre of the anecdotes, and a tremendous emotional wallop to the whole.

I read some really splendid books of criticism and correspondence, but most of them were on Ruskin, & I think I'll save a bit of that for my big long-awaited (by me) post on finishing the Library Edition. Which I did, this year, and which puts me in an exclusive club of about 200 members, I'd guess. Almost like winning the shit-eating contest.

hobby time

I meant to paint some soldiers this evening, but time got away; I ended up varnishing some already painted soldiers and gluing them (with rubber cement, so they're easily removable) to bases.

So this is what I'm up to:

They're on the stove-top, so you can get some idea of scale (note burner control to right). At a nominal 1:72 scale, they stand around an inch high. These particular sets aren't great, as these types of soldiers go. On the left are a couple of bases' worth of Romans, from the much-maligned Airfix "Romans" sets; most of the swords didn't survive the injection-molding process, & the sculptor seemed to have no idea of how a pilum (short lance) was actually carried. I must have bought these back in the 1970s sometime; I had to scrape my adolescent self's very bad paint jobs off of some of them. (Luckily, since I was too dumb to varnish back then, much of the paint had already flaked off.)

On the right are Airfix's "Ancient Britons," one of the first sets I bought back in the day, but a set that's still available – this particular formation is from a new box. Eventually I'll get around to repainting my old ones as well. I have in mind a huge diorama of the siege of Alesia, or something like that. I'm looking forward to incorporating some of the newer, far more realistic and dynamically sculpted Gallic Warriors from Italeri:

Here's a few more or less in progress.

jarnot's duncan

Ben asks me to expand a bit on my praise of Lisa Jarnot's Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography. Maybe the word "footwork" wasn't the best; maybe I should have said "spadework," or "ground-work." Any way –

What's evident thruout her book is a massive organizational effort, one which I can sympathize with & understand, having done something similar (or parallel) with the LZ biography. When you begin a book like this – that is, a first comprehensive biography of someone about whom much is known, but whose life has never been told at length – there's an enormous amount of sorting and filing to be done. I'll speak to my own methods, since I don't really know precisely what road Jarnot took, but I began by constructing chronological databases, based more or less on what sources were out there (Dictionary of Literary Biography articles, biographical sketches, etc.): one database of writings, sorted first by composition date (when known) and then by publication date; then another database of events (education, jobs, addresses, meetings with important people, readings, illnesses, etc.). Those databases constituted a kind of skeleton for everything – the girders beneath the fabric of the narrative, as it were.

Then the real work began: reading everything possible by, about, and around the subject. Of course LZ's works – I had already read everything several times, but was constantly re-reading. (When it actually came down to writing a given chapter, I'd re-read everything LZ had written during that period, just to have it fresh in my mind.) Perhaps as importantly, from a biographical standpoint, was correspondence: I tried to read every extant letter LZ had written, and every letter he'd received. Contemporaneous letters are the gold standard for biographical evidence, so far as I'm concerned, and I tried to back up every statement of "fact" with a letter written as near as possible the actual event. As I read letters, I entered the gist of their contents into the "events" database, often altering the orders and dates of events as better evidence emerged.

Interviews as well got sifted into the mix; they proved more useful for human "impressions" of events than for actual hard data, it became rapidly clear – people have great memories for their own first impressions of someone, but their memories for dates and places are far less reliable.

At any event, I ended up with several thousands of pages of photocopies and notes before I even began the actual writing of the thing, which was a wholly different challenge: how to pour as much of this material as possible into a readable narrative, one that wouldn't be clogged or overburdened with detail, yet would convey the shape of LZ's life and writing career. Looking back, I think I achieved maybe 60% of what I hoped to do.

Jarnot, I suspect, had a much larger mass of material to work with – after all, Duncan spent a large proportion of his later years on the road doing readings and visiting teaching gigs, and he seemed to be in more or less constant correspondence with Jess during that period: a lot of letters to take account of, a lot of quotidian data. She's had a hell of a lot of stuff to sort through and make into a book, and she's done a very solid job of it indeed.

done-ish

I turned in my grades last night, just under the wire as usual. I'd tried something new in my undergraduate course: sick to death of taking roll and trying to enforce attendance policies (please, Professor S, I had to miss class because my car broke down...), I built a huge quiz component into the final grade. I  told them I was giving at least 10 quizzes over the course of the semester; that the quizzes would be more or less mindlessly easy if they'd done the reading for the class; that the quiz would always happen first thing, so they needed to be on time; that I would end up dropping at least one or two of the lowest grades; and that this would constitute 20% of their final grade.

I got generous; I ended up giving not 10 or 11, but 12 quizzes – and averaged them all in, even though that gave them the possibility of getting extra points. I gave quizzes that had more than the normal number questions, but averaged them in as if they were the regular. And some of the students still ended up losing a sold 10 or 11 points off the top of their grades.
***
The graduate seminar papers were far more pleasant to read than the undergrad grades had been to calculate. I learned some things, as one is supposed to do in a graduate seminar. I miss my seminar already: what will I do with my Wednesday nights, now there's no-one to talk Ruskin to?
***
Going back and forth between Joan Evans's splendid 1954 biography John Ruskin and Lisa Jarnot's splendid (in very different ways) Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus (2012). Jarnot has done her footwork in ways that I suspect only another biographer can fully appreciate.

downwinding

Alone in the house today; everybody's else's off at of all things a Swedish Xmas fest, Santa Lucia and a bazaar and so forth. I had a hankering to go myself, but I'm deeply sunk in the slough of finishing up grading. Just read and marked the last of the Ruskin seminar papers (the last on hand, that is – still waiting for a couple of laggards), and am about to plunge into crunching the numbers for my undergraduate "Intro to Literary Studies" course. Looking back at my syllabus, I realize that I've come up with an insanely complex algorithm for determining final grades. This may take hours.
***
Yes, I've finished. Consummatum est. That is, the other day I finished the last substantive volume of the Ruskin Library edition, Vol. 37, part two of the Letters. Right now I'm working my way through the Bibliography volume, which has its own anal-retentive pleasures. Expect a longish blog post on the experience of reading thru all of Ruskin over a two-and-a-half-year stretch. And then another on the wonders of the apparatus volumes (the bibliography, the general index) of this edition.
***
My next few weeks are pretty clearly laid out for me, & it looks busy indeed. A major essay to be given a huge overhaul before Christmas; the holiday; then a jaunt north to NYC for a few days, then to Boston for the MLA (thankfully, my major task will be child care; and there's an enormous hobby shop in the Boston area I have my eye on for visiting); back to Boca just in time to start teaching.
***
Teaching: this Spring there's an undergraduate American modernism course, which I could probably teach in my sleep, but which I'm rather excited about. We're doing Pound, Eliot, WCW, Stein, Barnes, and Faulkner. And then there's a graduate poetry workshop, for which I just got around to ordering the books the other day:

LZ, Selected Poems
Basil Bunting, Complete Poems
JH Prynne, Pearls that Were and Triodes
Michael Palmer, Thread
Jill Magi, SLOT
Cole Swensen, Gravesend
Jena Osman, Public Figures

endgame

I was going to start blogging again, wasn't I? Well, that worked out well...

At any rate, the semester is almost over. I have taught my last undergraduate class (tho precious little "teaching" takes place that last week, I'm afraid), and the Ruskin seminar is largely wound up; we had our last official meeting Wednesday night. We'll meet again next week, but mostly for comestibles and potables, a free-wheeling discussion of Wilde's "Decay of Lying," and perhaps an episode of the sexed-up and hilariously inaccurate Desperate Romantics.

At the moment I'm in that wee breathing space between finishing teaching and having to dive into a sea of final grading. An odd place, where I want to get lots of things done – I've a big Black Mountain essay that needs major revision, for instance – but instead have been just nosing about among my books, happily learning things. I finished The Divine Comedy for the whateverth time the other day (Mandelbaum translation this time around), & feeling a little at sea without a "big" book on the burner, began The Cantos again: five cantos a day the current pace, tho that'll slow down when I hit the long ones.

One of the interesting aspects of the Ruskin seminar was the degree to which it ended up being an exercise in literary and intellectual biography. Looking back over my talking points (by the end, some 30,000 words, maybe 60 pages), I realize there's a pretty thorough short biography all written up in there. Mind you, I absurdly over-prepare for graduate seminars – probably only a third or so of that mass of mostly well-turned prose ever got talked thru. But something should be done with all that; I have a perverse hankering to start proposing a Ruskin life to some of the "brief lives" series out there.

But what about those hobbies, the piquant chutneys of life? Well, I've haven't laid a single brush to a single figurine over the past two weeks (tho I have gazed longingly on many a set reviewed in the Plastic Soldier Review site). But I have been thrashing away on the bouzouki or guitar for about half an hour every day, and even sat down the other day with the hurdy-gurdy, a pair of pliers, rosin, and cotton wool (it's complicated), and tried to coax some semi-musical sounds out of it. Better yet, Pippa and I spent an hour playing hell-for-leather versions of Irish dance tunes one afternoon last week, and started getting together a neat take on Richard Thompson's "The Angels Took My Racehorse Away." At 10, she's ten times the musician I'll ever be; but it's delightful being her accompanist.

hobby time

The semester is winding down, & it's been a doozy. I've cooked up two conference proposals, done three tenure reviews, written a letter of support for a sabbatical, and given a reading in Ohio. I've lived thru the 2012 presidential campaign. The worst of course is yet to come: applications for our MA program are sitting in the file cabinet, waiting to be read and decided on; one more sabbatical letter remains to be written, and several letters of recommendation; and I'm part of the evaluation committee for one of the college's "eminent scholars." Not to mention the usual end-of-term grading and so forth. No wonder I haven't gotten my book orders for the spring in yet.

I've been thinking about "hobbies," those ancillary pursuits we put so much of our hearts into, lately. I'm lucky: if I were working at an insurance agency, I'd probably be trying to snatch waking moments to read and think about poetry; as it is, I get paid (sorta) to think and talk and write about literature (or at least that's part of my job description). When I read Adorno's essay "Free Time" some years ago – the one where he says I have no hobbies; I write and read and think and make music and think about music; hobbies are capital's way of colonizing the little free time left to workers – I felt all virtuous and Frankfurt-schooly.

But more recently I've come to feel that it's good, for me at least, to spend significant time doing thing with my hands and eyes and ears that have nothing to do with the "serious" work I'm committed to. I've made peace with my own trivial pursuits. I haven't bought a new guitar in a couple of years now, and have no plans to buy any more instruments anytime soon: but I do intend to spend a good deal more time making bad music. And yes, I've resurrected my teenaged hobby of collecting and painting toy soldiers ("military miniatures," that is). So look for lots of pictures of 30 Years' War battle formations, and a vast diorama of the Battle of the Teutonberg Wald, or the Battle of Maldon.

And maybe some poems along the way. That, after all, isn't a hobby.