8. Summer camp

Last weekend I picked up my younger daughter from her “performing arts” summer camp in the Catskills; yesterday my older daughter got back on a Greyhound from her oceanography summer camp at Woods Hole. Tomorrow I send her off to another camp, and then Tuesday I see the younger one off to yet another camp in New Hampshire. 

 

I didn’t “do” summer camps when I was a kid. I suspect my parents didn’t see the point in paying good money to get me out of their hair, when I was so quiet and introverted that I could be relied on to shut myself up in my room with my books and records and comic books all summer. It’s true that during high school I spent most weekdays with my Latin club associates at our Latin teacher’s house, doing “study groups” in preparation for the end-0f-summer national Latin club convention competitions. And one summer I spent a couple of days at a church-sponsored summer camp nearby, just to find out what it was like (I didn’t like it one bit).

 

I’ve always thought of the Orono University of Maine/National Poetry Foundation “decades” conferences as a kind of concentrated “poetry summer camp.” I went to my first one in 1993, a conference on poets of the 1930s, and it’s not exaggerating to say that it changed my life. I was astonished by how many Zukofsky papers had been presented there (I’d just finished an LZ dissertation); walking on campus at twilight, I said to Peter Quartermain, “someone ought to edit an LZ volume from these.” “You do it,” he said, and I was astonished at the audacity of the idea—me, a nobody... That became Upper Limit Music, my first book.

 

I came back over the years, sometimes talking about LZ, sometimes about other poets. The conferences were a wonderful, concentrated three-ring circus of poetic interest—poets I’d read for years and held in breathless awe, critics and scholars whose work I’d admired from afar, and most importantly what seems like scores of younger scholars and poets who’ve become what I think of as my own “cohort” in the poetry world.

 

Burt Hatlen, who ran the NPF and edited Sagetrieb and seemingly did everything useful and good—except for attending to publishing his own multitudinous essays in book form—was the linchpin of those conferences. I missed him last month in Orono, at the “Poets and Poetics of the 1990s” conference, and it made at times for a bittersweet feeling. Yes, it was a very good conference: smaller than I had remembered previous events being, but with a perhaps more concentrated dose of poetic energy. A series of wonderful readings, illuminating papers, wonderful conversations.

 

Oddly perhaps, this was the first Orono conference I’ve been to where I didn’t to some degree feel like an outsider, an intruder, someone faking his way into the inner circles. I’m not sure why that was; perhaps it’s merely a matter of time: if you hang around long enough, the work you’ve done—as flawed and flimsy as you know it to be—acquires a kind of acceptance, becomes a part of the furniture. It was a very good time.

 

So thank you, Carla Billetteri, Steve Evans, Ben Friedlander, and Jennifer Moxley. I hope you’ve gotten some well-deserved rest.

7. Celebrities

[This note dates from a month ago; I haven't been keeping up with this cross-posing business very well.]

 

My brushes with celebrities have been few and far between. We were on the East Side the other week, walking past the Campbell funeral home, and I thought someone hip must have died—I’ve never seen so many hipsters in ties smoking outside of here. And then, lo and behold as we turned onto Madison, there were Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa loading themselves into a big black SUV, presumably for the ride back to New Jersey, or perhaps the interment.

 

The one that sticks in my mind happened in Orono, Maine, at the National Poetry Foundation “American Poetry in the Fifties” conference a bit over twenty years ago. I was in a crowded room, with far too many academics and poets and far too much booze, amusedly watching a Hugh MacDiarmid scholar hitting on an avant-garde poet, when someone poked me and said, “Look, there’s Becky!”

 

He pointed at a young blonde woman across the room, conversing intently with a knot of poet-types. Yes, I said, she looks exactly like Becky, the older daughter in Roseanne. “No,” said my friend, “that is Becky. That’s the actress. She’s in college now, and she’s interested in Beat Poetry. So she came up to Orono to hang out with Beat Poets, and learn stuff.”

 

So I looked things up (harder then in those pre-Wikipedia days), and found that Lecy Goranson was indeed an undergrad at Vassar, an English major no less. Good for her, I thought at the time—and a good choice of conferences to attend. The MLA, for instance, would be just the place to kill dead any young person’s passionate interest in contemporary writing.* But the Orono conferences—free-wheeling interactions of living poets, critics, theorists, places where at times one could see literary history actually in the making—that’s something else altogether.

 

Looking forward to being in Maine next week, in short. Keeping my eyes open for celebrities!

*I’ve been to plenty of MLAs, and had just wonderful (and abysmally awful) times—but the ambient job-market angst and savage careerism on display... well...

6. Long haul

I’ve just finished the 42,000+ lines of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, volumes 3 through 6 in the big collected works. There was no prize at the end of the last volume, no badge I could stick on my lapel: “I FINISHED THE EARTHLY PARADISE!” I suppose I’ve joined a small and select club; how many people, in 2017, have read this gargantuan Victorian poem? I know one personally, and have met a couple of Victorian scholars whom I’m sure have read it; but I can’t imagine that there are more than a few hundred others.

 

Strangely enough, it’s (mostly) hasn’t felt like a slog, or an unending burden. Rather—since I’ve paced my reading out over six weeks or so—it’s been a rather charming evening’s (or morning’s) recourse: a half hour here, an hour there. The lines melt away beneath the reading eye, the pages seem to turn themselves. Which makes it I suppose the sort of “popular” reading Ron Silliman described all those years ago in “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World.” Poetry as easy reading; poetry lite?

 

But I understand why the book was such a bestseller, at least on the level of readability. Would I read it again? Not straight through, certainly; but there are passages, and individual tales, that I know I’ll revisit. Maybe not soon—the poem as a whole has such a strong and bitter flavor of mortality that it’s thrown me into a dark mood, from which I suspect I’ll have to extricate myself with a blast of Frank O’Hara.

5. Note on Boredom

[prefatory to a longer note on boredom]

 

I was at a mini-conference on the long poem, in the city, at a famous university, a few months back. A critic-scholar professor X (not his real initial) was in the chair. Two poets read. The first, Y (not his real initial), was a conceptualist, who read a long piece generated from a much shorter source text by a complex and somewhat mechanical procedure. The second, Z (not his real initial), a Language Poet, read a long piece “guided”—by some extent—by procedure, but relying upon old-fashioned “compositional” skills.

 

Afterwards, X opened the Q&A period with a comment on how his own attention had wandered. I found myself, he said (though I’m paraphrasing), tuning out now and then, losing the thread. And I’m wondering how you guys build that inevitable “tuning out” into your conception of the poem, that moment when the audience or reader loses focus on what’s going on.

 

Y grinned and nodded throughout his comment. Z knit his brow, and answered: No, no, not at all, I’d hope for the reader to be paying attention all the way through.

4. Eyes

“This book seems to give me eyes.” —Charlotte Brontë, on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters

 

It’s all about seeing, Ruskin argues in those first volumes, all about opening your eyes to the natural world and seeing it as it actually appears. That’s what J. M. W. Turner does in his paintings, says Ruskin. If a Turner doesn’t look like we conceive the world around us, the problem isn’t with the Turner, but with our conception of visual reality. Where do we get that everyday conception (the sky is blue, clouds are white, trees are mostly green, shadows are black, etc.)? It’s a shorthand, a reduction, derived from memories of our rare moments of actual looking and (more importantly) from representations of the world we’ve looked at—Old Master paintings, in short. “The Ancients,” Ruskin calls them.

 

It’s another battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the Moderns (with Turner at their head) come out on top this time. Turner can paint landscape, seascape, skyscape more truly than any other painter because he’s actually looked at those things, seen them without the goggles of convention. Modern Painters begins as a book-length cheering-session for Turner, but it turns into a course on how to look at nature—what nature “really” looks like.

 

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.”

3. Divided

Feeling strangely divided this late morning. After a few days of intense stretching exercises—many of them suggested by FB friends, some of them picked up from various physical therapy sites on the internet—my “ache” is amazingly diminished. By no means gone, but much better; I can now sleep on whichever side I find most congenial, at least.

 

I started the day by registering and reserving a hotel room for the Orono conference at the end of next month. I’d been heading into this with nothing but enthusiasm: I’ve been to I believe three previous “decades” conferences there, and found all of them wonderful, energizing events. Indeed, the first one I went to—the “1930s” conference, back in 1993—was a kind of blast-off moment in my academic life. Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky came out of that conference, as did many friendships that I still value.

 

But last night I had a dream about this coming conference, a strange and surreal dream (as my dreams so often are), clearly inflected by what I’ve been reading (NK Jemisin’s excellent fantasy novel The Kingdom of Gods) but also shot through with various run-of-the-mill self-doubts and diffidences. I won’t go into the details—they were remarkably crystalline, but very strange and disturbing—but they’ve left me with a very bad feeling looking forward to the end of the month. Then again, I suspect that bad feeling will only last a few hours.

 

On the other hand—since we’re speaking “divided”—I’m midway through a briefish prose piece that has me filled with unalloyed excitement. The last couple months have been very good in terms of intellectual work: First I completed a long-form review that had been bedeviling me for probably half a year (and the work I was reviewing had been lowering over me for far longer); writing the thing was agony and deep research, but I’m pretty proud of the finished product. Then I turned out another piece, a shorter review, which proved to be nothing but delight from start to finish. And now I’m in the midst of a piece which combines poetics, literary history, literary sociology, and Victorian stuff. The words don’t flow from my pen—it’s never a matter of “flow” with me, but painful coaxing—but the ideas are coming together in wonderful constellations. I can’t wait to get back to my desk.

2. Deterioration

I’ve had pretty decent luck with the old machine—my body, that is—for never having taken particular care of it. I was not an “active” child or adolescent, never got into the habit of regular exercise. Most of the time, I simply ate whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted. For much of my adulthood, I was shall we say “portly”: never quite obese, but sometimes verging thereupon.

 

It’s only in the last ten years or so that I’ve taken to any sort of exercise regimen: first a decent amount of biking, then a stair-stepping machine (too bloody boring), then a fairly significant program of daily walking. Combined with an all-out effort to avoid junk food and between-meal snacks, I’ve managed to drop about forty pounds from my all-time high some six years ago. (I still think of myself, however, as a fat guy.)

 

But everything deteriorates over time. A couple of years back, I had what amounted to an inflamed coccyx; that wasn’t a bad thing—I spent most of my time teaching on my feet, and rigged out a standing desk for my work at home. That kept me off my bum most of the time, but lordy it hurt when I had to sit for a long period, or at least it hurt in that particular spot.

 

The coccyx went away; then last year, shlepping the air conditioners from the third floor to the basement, and moving some cartons of LPs, I did something to my lower back that lasted for three weeks or so. (Expert tip: NEVER pack LPs in 12” x 18” boxes, unless you have someone stronger than me in mind to move them.) And that went away, as well.

 

So now it’s what I think is piriformis syndrome, brought on almost certainly by some peculiarity in my gait, or by my incessant walking. I can stand fine; I can walk fine; I can lie down more or less fine, except in a few very specific angles. But sitting—there’s the rub. I find myself fidgeting like a four-year-old, trying to find a comfortable position, trying to quell the dull ache in my left buttock.

 

I suspect this too shall pass, one way or another. And wonder what’s going to happen next.

1. Mammalian fauna

When I first moved to Florida late last century, I was fascinated by the animals, more specifically by the reptilian-type animals. When I was a kid roaming the western Kentucky forests with my cousins, I’d see lots of water moccasins, even an occasional rattler, and of course the garden-variety black garden snakes. In my parents’ home in Tennessee, there was the occasional blue-bellied salamander. But nothing compared to the scaled denizens of south Florida: snakes, all manner of lizards—from tiny gecko-like things, to curly-tailed fist-sized bruisers, to the vast and intimidating iguanas that hung around the fringes of campus at Our Fair University.

 

Wild mammals were rarer: lots of raccoons and squirrels, of course, and an occasional feral cat. And plenty of possums (yes, marsupials, I know, but furry...). One of the pleasures of moving northeast has been becoming reacquainted with mammalian wildlife. We have the raccoons and squirrels of course, but there’s more. Just in our yard, on an almost daily basis we’re visited by an extremely shy woodchuck (he lives somewhere out back, I think) and an extremely cute rabbit. I’ve caught sight, on a number of occasions, of hasty pairs of chipmunks.

 

The other night, on one of my late night walks—probably around 11.30 or so—I was glancing down at my phone as I walked down the sidewalk (dark, not many streetlamps, but plenty of light for walking). I heard the rustle of a heavy body a few feet from me and froze—I’d almost walked into a dark-clad late-night runner the week before—and there, in the corner of the yard I was passing, not eight feet from me, was a fully-grown doe, no doubt browsing at someone’s landscaping. We stared at each other for a moment—no, not at all a James Wright moment—and then she bustled off.

 

(The chipmunks scampered across the driveway as I was typing that last sentence.)

cross-posting

I haven't been good at keeping up the blog for the past—well, a long time. Recently, I started writing short notes on Facebook's "Notes" feature, and a gentle nudge from a friend reminded me that I was, in effect, blogging—only I was blogging on a platform that only my Facebook "friends," and others who use Facebook, could read. So I think I'm going to start cross-posting—composing on FB, whose interface I like rather better than Blogger, and then importing the posts here. I'll put the first (rather nugatory) one up now, and follow with the others I've done over the next few days. They're numbered, I suppose in imitation of Jeff Nunokawa's.

the new Tsar

Reading Bob Archambeau's little memoir of Ron Ellingson and Chicago's Aspidistra Bookstore in Bob's latest collection, Inventions of a Barbarous Age, I'm reminded of various bookstores in which I've spent time over the years. There have been many—Blacksburg's Softcovers, Ithaca's Blue Fox, Boca's BookWise, and any number of places in Washington DC and New York City. I haven't often struck up relationships with booksellers, alas, though when I have—Dave Wulf of BookWise, Sean Norton of Reston's Book Alcove—I've valued them. For a long time I've written my name in books, along with date and place of acquisition. Not usually the precise bookshop—but I can usually remember that, oddly enough, just by handling the book.

Reading Martin Gilbert's very long and not particularly good history of the First World War, I've gotten to the overthrow of the Tsar Nicholas and the Bolshevik revolution. Which reminded me, as it always does, of an incident in a bookshop in Alexandria, Virginia, a little over twenty years ago.

It was an odd place—in a kind of anonymous office space, as I remember it: not really a retail center at all, but a unit of office space that was being used as a bookshop. Well-organized; much of the stock seemed to consist of Library of Congress extra copies, or so they were stamped. I came up to the counter with five books: Terence Irwin's Aristotle's First Principles, three volumes of Mallarmé's letters in the big French paperbacks, and a nice hardcover Grove Press de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom.

The proprietor was an old man, heavily overweight, bald on the crown though long-haired otherwise, speaking with a thick eastern European accent. He chuckled at the de Sade: "You better not let your girlfriend see that!" As I paid for my books, he rambled on about how long he'd been in America. Then, apropos of nothing in particular, he started telling me about his childhood in Russia, how he'd grown up in St. Petersburg. "One day, my mother takes me out to the street. She holds me up, and there is a big car passing by, and a man in it with a uniform and a crew-cut. 'Look,' she says, 'it is the new Tsar!'"

He pauses. "It was Kerensky."

[Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky (1881-1970), for something less than four months leader of the Russian provisional government after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II; went into exile after being forced from power in the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917]

many Morrises

Yes, that's the Cambridge Library Edition of William Morris — a nicely-produced, print-on-demand reprint of the twenty-four volume Collected Works his daughter May Morris edited early in the last century.

I will admit that I was hoping for something rather more sumptuous in this edition; something more like the Ruskin Library Edition, with its endlessly informative introductions and its scrupulous footnotes. May Morris contents herself with reprinting the final versions of each of her father's texts, making note of some (but by no means all) of the variants in her intros. There are no footnotes, no illustrations to speak of. The typography is gorgeous, it's true, but this is a reading edition, not a state-of-the-art scholarly edition — as the Ruskin, over a hundred years after its publication, still remains.

It's taken me a long time to come around to reading Morris, I'll admit, and I wonder why. He's always been there in the background of my consciousness. Maybe, I reflect, it's because there are so many Morrises — a different William Morris for every interest.

•For those of us with radical tendencies, there's Morris the socialist. I'm also reading EP Thompson's biography of WM, in its second, revised 1977 edition. Thompson notes that he's ratcheted down the Marxism of the first 1950s edition, and has shortened the book, cutting out some of the details of Morris's socialist activities. But it's still over 800 pages long, jam-packed with analyses of Morris's readings of Marx, of how his work with the "anti-scrape" preservation society dovetails with his reading of Ruskin's socially-inflected work, etc. Morris is a foundational figure in English leftism, and there's no getting around that.

•Morris the socialist bleeds into Morris the proto-alternative-history novelist, author of News from Nowhere, the one text of his that remains in print in the most editions. This one I happened to have read a few years back, with some enjoyment, though it's a book that's frankly rather devoid of tension or incident.

•For readers of Architectural Digest, "Morris" means a kind of chair, or a family of wallpaper and fabric patterns — Morris the designer. That's probably the most widely known Morris. His design firm, founded in part to put into practice the craft-oriented principles of Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic," ended up producing a kind of ubiquitous late-Victorian environmental decor.

•There's Morris the rather interesting poet: the poems of The Defence of Guenevere, his first book, are quite excellent, tense exercises in Victorian medievalism. He's no Tennyson in music, and no Browning in psychological penetration, but there are some really wonderful moments throughout these poems. The longer narrative things — I've just embarked on Jason, volume 2 of the set — are far more languid, so far as I can tell, but still highly readable.

•And then there's Morris the fantasist. My friends in the fantasy scholarship world recognize this Morris first and foremost: the guy who wrote these long prose romances like The Waters of the Wondrous Isle and The Wood Beyond the World. Thompson spends about six pages on these books, which take up several volumes in the Cambridge edition, but which loom far larger in the imagination of fantasy buffs (thanks largely I think to JRR Tolkien's enthusiasm for them).

•Morris the translator: When he wasn't writing epic poems or vast prose romances, or designing furniture or weaving tapestries, Morris translated the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and a stack of Icelandic sagas — in the process introducing the sagas to the English-speaking world. The classical translations are no better than okay (LZ cites some in A Test of Poetry), but the sagas are quite impressive.

In short, at least 6 overlapping Morrises, one it seems for almost any audience. I've known about each of them for ages, but they've never quite coalesced in my imagination into a single figure. Now they're beginning to, and I'm becoming more and more impressed with the man's energy and breadth.

the letter I sent to Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee)

-->

Dear Senator Alexander,

One of the proudest mementos of my adolescence is a photograph taken of me as a high school senior (public school) from Clarksville, being congratulated by you in the governor's office in Nashville for having been awarded a national merit scholarship. That picture must have been taken in 1981 or 1982, and I treasure it. I have followed your career with some interest since, and while we diverge on many political issues, I have always believed that you have a strong and abiding commitment to public education.

I beg you to reconsider your support for the administration's nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. She has spent her life attempting to undermine public education in the United States, to reshape it according to profit-driven free market model that will in the long run benefit only rich districts and rich parents. And she is patently unqualified for the position, as her testimony before the Senate committee amply demonstrated. Not merely has she never attended a public school or worked in the field of education, but she has no grasp of, or evident interest in the real issues confronting public education in this new century, only an ideologically-driven agenda.

You have forged an impressive legacy in public service, and have repeatedly demonstrated your commitment to our schools and our children. Please don't destroy that legacy and betray that commitment by voting for Ms DeVos.

Yours truly,

Mark Scroggins

Trump and Style

There's a video turning up frequently in my Facebook feed of the president praising Frederick Douglass in terms of astonishing banality: "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed."

Okay, so he probably has no idea who Frederick Douglass was, or what he represents. He's been told this is a person who's important to some other people, and so the president is mechanically praising him, in the only vocabulary—impoverished, grade-school, business-oriented—he has at his command. And our response (rightly) is disbelief and ridicule.

We—writers, academics, intellectuals—are for better or worse appalled at Trump's style. We hate his hairdo, his suits, his general demeanor. We find his gold-plated apartment a kind of over-the-top parody of what a 7-year-old imagines it's like to be rich. Many of us prefer Bernie Sanders's style-less, rumpled "style." (A prime manifestation of Castiligone's sprezzatura, a style achieved precisely without any of the effort that usually goes into achieving a "look.")

There a kind of snobbishness here, as I'm nowhere near the first to point out. Whatever we don't have, we like to think we have style—if not sartorially (most poets and academics, myself included, are fashion disasters), then verbally. If we had the president's money, our apartments would be models of arts & crafts coziness, or coolly impressive midcentury modernist spaces. But barring wealth, we know language, and we bristle when we hear the repetitive, aggressive, and intellectually flattened bits of rhetoric that make up Trump's speech.

But in order to resist this new regime, we've got to do our best to ignore the stylistic flourishes of its figurehead. Every moment we spend decrying the new gold drapes in the Oval Office, the president's too-long necktie (held together with scotch tape), the Rube Goldberg haystack of his bouffant, the ghastly spectacle of his Manhattan apartment, or the rather remarkable shallowness of his vocabulary, is a moment in which our attention has lapsed from the plans, policies, and appointees that are issuing from the White House.

MLA

I haven't been to the annual Modern Language Association conference for maybe six or seven years, but I'll be in Philadelphia later this week. It'll be my first visit in a long time that hasn't been overshadowed by job-market responsibilities and their attendant angst; and of course it'll be my first visit as a recovering academic—though I suppose, since I'm giving a paper at an academic conference, that sort of makes me an academic anyway.

At any rate, I'll be talking about Peter O'Leary's dazzling poem The Sampo. The talk's called "The 'twilight machine': Nonhuman Poetics in Peter O'Leary's The Sampo." Come hear me Thursday afternoon. Here's the first couple of paragraphs:

Peter O’Leary—a devout but profoundly syncretic (perhaps even heterodox) Roman Catholic poet—has long been devoted to investigating the nonhuman. His first three collections, written very much under the influence of his mentor the visionary late modernist poet Ronald Johnson, are explorations of a deity conceived in emphatically non-anthropomorphic terms, if mediated through centuries of religious tradition. In his fourth book, Phosphorescence of Thought (2013), O’Leary brings his poetics to focus as much on the natural world as as the supernatural: this long poem, modeled to some degree on Whitman’s Song of Myself, envisions the processual whole of nature, from the minute details of the poet’s hikes along the Des Plaines river (birds, the movement of water), to the chemical processes of life itself, to the neural transactions by which human beings strive to make sense of their environment, all as a manifestation of deity.

            This ecopoetical shift in O’Leary’s work has ramified in interesting directions in his latest publication, the 2016 narrative poem The Sampo, which adapts passages from the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. This poem marks a number of shifts in O’Leary’s writing. Perhaps most notably, while his earlier poetry takes the lyrical, ruminative, and paratactic forms characteristic of such (broadly speaking) modernist poets as Johnson, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, and Wallace Stevens, The Sampo is a narrative poem: and a fantasy narrative, no less, a story that might even be categorized among the much-reviled “sword and sorcery” subgenre of fantasy. 

And it gets better from there...

year's end

I used to post a year’s-end list of books I’d read and been impressed by; 2016, however, has been such a eventual year that it seems appropriate to get a bit more garrulous.

Yes, this has been a strange year—in many ways, an awful year. I don’t really want to get into the central event casting its shadow backward over everything that came before: the election. Is it enough to say that I’m sad, and fearful, and sick at heart? I have friends from most parts of the political spectrum, and no one I know—even the dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, even those who hated Obama, and who loathed Clinton—is particularly happy about Trump’s victory. I know there are Americans out there who are delighted about the Trump win—but I’m afraid holding that opinion is a deal-breaker for me: I want to know more about you, but I don’t really want to know you.

And then there were the celebrity deaths. It’s an actuarial matter, of course. The generation born after World War II, those who make up the vast majority of the stars of the pop music of the 60s and 70s, are getting to be that age. Some of them are dying early, as some members of every generation die. That doesn’t change the fact that we’re moved at the unexpected passing of people whom we’ve never actually met, but whose works and whose public personae have had a huge impact on our own formation.

I can’t really overstate what David Bowie’s music meant to me when I was young. The Berlin “trilogy” of albums, especially—Low, “Heroes” , and Lodger—were central to how I conceived of music, and art-making in general, in my late teens. I hadn’t listened to his later work much when I downloaded Blackstar, and found myself flattened by the power and subtlety of which Bowie was still capable.

I was unexpectedly moved by the news of George Michael’s death. I can’t say I was a huge George Michael fan—I don’t know that I ever bought one one of his records. But I listened quite attentively and with much pleasure whenever his songs were played, and I watched the videos on MTV (back when they played music videos) over and over again. Watching them again, I realize how much those music videos—Michael’s, but also Madonna’s, Howard Jones’s, Cyndi Lauper’s, and a host of others’—provided a generation of viewers, me among them, not merely with a fashion sense, but with a whole vocabulary of sexuality and interpersonal emotion.

In the literary world, the passing that most moved me was that of Geoffrey Hill. I’d begun my exploration of his poetry some 25 years ago with a kind of detachment—this isn’t really the sort of thing that I’m into, but it’s definitely worth thinking about, and so forth. Over the years, as Hill branched out in new directions, and as I did a bit of maturing myself, his work became more and more important to me. I suppose at the beginning of 2016 I’d have had to admit that no living poet’s work meant more to me than his.

***

But enough of deaths for the moment. My life has changed over the past year. I suppose I’ve accomplished things, though as is the way with publications, it’s rather more a matter of things I’ve accomplished some time ago finally hitting print. I’m still kind of gobsmacked to have had three books published over a twelve-month period: Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries from U of Alabama in late 2015, Michael Moorcock: Fantasy, Fiction and the World’s Pain from McFarland a few months later, and The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry from MadHat just a few weeks ago. Still pinching myself. Predictably, the Moorcock book is the one that’s got the most reviews, on the blogosphere and the reading group websites and the SF/fantasy world; Intricate Thicket seems to have sunk without a trace; I hope Mathematical Sublime finds a few more readers.

More importantly: we have thrown over our positions at Our Fair University, and moved to divide our time between Manhattan and New Jersey. For better or worse, no more moaning about Florida weather, Florida drivers, and (the lack of) Florida culture. I am trying to retool myself as a New Yorker these days, with mixed success. I don’t miss grading papers at all; I occasionally find myself missing teaching students, but most of all I miss the colleagues I have come to value and love, and I miss the proximity of the friends I’ve made over the last two decades, though I hope to maintain the friendships.

***

Moving twenty years worth of books, papers, and musical instruments has been a profoundly disruptive experience. Most of my books (including cartons and cartons of unread poetry) have yet to be unpacked, and my usual pace of reading has been much retarded. So finally, not a “best of 2016” list, but a list of some of the books of poetry (not all of them first published this past year) that’ve impressed themselves on me over the year:

Eva Hooker, Godwit

Geneva Chao, One of Us Is Wave One of Us Is Shore

Norman Finkelstein, The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New and Selected Poems

John Matthias, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro and Other Poems

Peter O’Leary, The Sampo

John Peck, Cantilena

J. H. Prynne, The White Stones

Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came

Ken Taylor, Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell

Elizabeth Robinson, Counterpart

poem draft, dated 11/4/16-11/9/16

And then there was that time—he’s telling

someone, years hence—he hopes to be—when we all

            ran a raging fever, when we slewed

            from the gas range to the icebox, when nothing,

not even the voice of our parents, could calm

us down. You hated me, she says, and I

            hated everything you said. We barely remembered

            the commons, the playground, the vacant

                        lot, even as a concept. Something was hiding

                        in a corner of the basement, misshapen and

            scary, and it got out, made skittering hoof-clicks

            in the dark across the polished hall floor, left

a funny metallic taste in the bottom of the water-

cups. It’s not that something happened, but that

                        something had been happening all

                        along, growing up beside us

                        like an unnoticed sibling or

                        a spectral husband. Corner-

                        of-the-eye stuff, you know?

            The colder air braces you against

            the fall, when it finally comes.

There’s a rabbit in the backyard, nosing

around among the leaves you haven’t

            raked. Mail stacked in the hall, a dozen

            files cluttering the desktop. You shift

and putter, neaten up and put away.

This is no time for pretending everything’s

            changed or everything’s alright, that the gears

            have somehow slipped or the shiny machinery’s

broken.This is how it’s supposed to work, this

is where your day-in-day-out has brought you.

                        The fever broke, he tells the child

                        on his knee, just nodding off

                        in sleepiness or boredom, and the sky

                        was clear and pure and clean.

                        We could count the fingers before

                        us, put one foot in front

                        of the other. We knew our right

            hand from our left, and our neighbors

            from our enemies. Who we were allowed

to love, and who was off limits. The rabbit

is gone, and all the little squabbling sparrows.

            The brilliant yellow leaves are mostly fallen,

            crunch damply under our waffled

boot-heels, or mutely let themselves

be gathered in. And down the street, the engine

            is still running, solid and remorseless.

            O David Kaufmann, sage and bewildered

lodestar of these marginal notes, pray for us now

and at the hour of our waking, pray for us

            before the Law and beyond the door

            through which we passed unknowing.

It's Alive! The Mathematic Sublime: Writing About Poetry

My new collection of essays and reviews is out now: The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry. (Those of you who are scared of math—count me as one—shouldn't be put off by the title: I guarantee, no equations!)

What's in it, you ask? Well, taking a leaf from Bob Archambeau's book (or rather, his blog, in which he describes his new book—published under the same imprint as The Mathematical Sublime, and featuring a shocking similar cover design—what I like to call "MadHat/Clarendon"), here's a rundown of the contents, so that you can find out what I have to say about your favorite poet or poetry critic:
 

Introduction

[In which I explain how I came to poetry and to the various poets I write about, and what the whole "mathematical sublime business is about]

            1. Reviews

The Condition of Hebrew: Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech!
[In which Hill is compared to Bruce Andrews, but then I take that back.]

A Tinkertoy Poetics: Charles Bernstein, All the Whiskey in Heaven

[Holy smoke! FSG has published a selected Charles Bernstein that isn't particularly user-friendly for typical FSG types!]
Kedging in Time: John Matthias, Kedging

[John Matthias continues being one of the most important late modernist American poets.]
The New Colossus, Revisited: Jonathan Barron and Eric Selinger, Jewish American Poetry

[Jewish American poetry has been slighted; Barron and Selinger gives us a gigantic gumbo of evidence that it oughtn't be.]
Passionate, Eccentric Reading: Norman Finkelstein, Not One of Them in Place

[Finkelstein offers a more focused genealogy of Jewish American poetry: can you say "Post-Objectivist"?]
By the Rivers of Babylon: Maeera Shreiber, Singing in a Strange Land
[Shreiber gives Jewish American poetry yet another look, this time with a focus on the religious element.]
Zuk and Ole Bill: The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky

[These letters are too important not to have been published already; shame WCW didn't save LZ's letters to him more often.]
A Poetics of Being: Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

[In this massively important book, we learn that Oppen never really read Hegel, but that he didn't need to.]
Scars and Fascination: John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh and Lake Shore Drive

[Wilkinson's poetry—even twenty years between these two collections—remains harsh, repellant, and fascinating.]
Resignation and Independence: Robert Archambeau, The Poet Resigns

[A smorgasbord of critical forays; the close readings are more convincing than the broad generalizations, but it's nice someone is making the latter.]
Twilight Gardening: Ronald Johnson, The Shrubberies

[Old men tend their gardens; old poets writing garden poetry.]
Postmodern Poetry’s Blue Period: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios

[DuPlessis makes the essay new; and thinks eloquently about what's at stake in doing that.]
Innovation’s Explainer: Peter Quartermain, Stubborn Poetries

[Nobody writes about weird poetry better than Quartermain, but can't we have a little fun?]
The Book of Oz: Ronald Johnson, ARK
[New edition of ARK! and why that's a very good thing.]

            2. Essays

Susan Howe’s Hauntologies
[Susan Howe, Shakespeare, Jacques Derrida, Ghost Box records, Harry Smith's Anthology—whole lotta hauntin' goin' on.]

The “half-fabulous field-ditcher”: Ruskin, Pound, Geoffrey Hill

[Yes, Pound was a Ruskinian (without knowing it), but Geoffrey Hill knows it; gratuitous swipes at Cesare Pavese along the way.]
The “net / (k)not – work(s)” of Robert Sheppard’s Twentieth Century Blues

[Sheppard writes a book which wants to be a hypertext, or maybe a labyrinth.]
“I am not an occultist”: Robert Duncan’s H. D. Book
[No, Virginia, modernism was not a sweeping of the decks of late-Victorian fustian, a hygiene of language; it was a bunch of occultism and a big carnival of table-rapping seances. So sez RD.]

The Master of Speech and Speech Itself: Nathaniel Mackey’s “Septet for the End of Time”
[An early essay on an early Mackey chapbook; still very fond of this piece.]

            3. 100 Poem-Books

[From the pages of Culture Industry itself, 100 micro- (and sometimes a bit longer) reviews of poetry books. Robert Christgau's "Consumer Guide" must have been somewhere in my mind writing these, but I don't assign letter grades. Mostly I don't write about what I don't like, though a few have crept in. Your book is probably noted here.]

repetition

Right now I'm working on a large essay-review, an attempt at coming to terms with a long and very complicated recent book of poetry. And it's a very, very difficult book, maybe one of the hardest I've ever read. So part of my essay is going to be an extended thinking-through of the issue of difficulty in poetry.

I wrote a few sentences on it this afternoon, and looked up a few things, and then I realized, I've been writing this passage, this essay, ever since I started my dissertation a million years ago! And God help me, I'm still writing it. I found quotations and passages I can still stand by in a discarded early chapter of the dissertation (on Mallarmé); I found useful materials in the dissertation itself (which became my first real book).

Zukofsky says somewhere that every writer writes a single work her or his entire life, plays variations on a tiny number of themes. I suppose that's true on some level. And I can think of all kinds of smart critics whose work can be not so much summed up as exemplified in one or two concepts: Empson = ambiguity; Ricks = allusion; Bloom = Oedipal struggle. That's not fair, I know, but it's not particularly inaccurate, either.

I'd always hoped to be not a hedgehog but a fox, darting from subject to subject, concept to concept. But I seem to be aging into a one-note calliope; or perhaps I'm just aging to the point where I recognize the themes my thinking has been circling around all along.

reading notes: Wyndham Lewis biographies

Why am I reading Wyndham Lewis?, you ask. Well, he represents a major hole in my knowledge of modernism. (Or perhaps, more fairly, one of the many major holes...) I think I admire his paintings and drawings more than those of any other English artist of the first half of the twentieth century, but I haven't ever really gotten a grip on his vast written corpus. I've read The Apes of God, Blasting & Bombardiering, Tarr, and quite a number of stray shorter things, but I've never systematically tackled his works and his career. So I'm starting that, and a fortuitous copy of Paul O'Keeffe's big biography—hailed by Laurence Rainey on the jacket—was one entrée.

I've finished the six-hundred-odd pages of O'Keeffe now, and feel a bit more warmly toward it then I did in my last post. It sent me back to Tarr (which I'm in the middle of) and oddly enough, it sent me back to Jeffrey Meyers's 1980 The Enemy, the first full-length biography of Lewis, and until O'Keeffe, the biography of record. O'Keeffe clearly despises Meyers's book; as I work my way through Meyers's account of events O'Keeffe also describes, I recognize how much energy in Some Sort of Genius has been devoted to setting the record straight, to making clear that Meyers has gotten this or that sequence of events or exchange of letters wrong.

It's a perfectly understandable impulse, even pardonable, but someone who comes to O'Keeffe first, with no knowledge of Meyers, is apt to wonder why so many pages are devoted to excruciatingly detailed sorting out of dates and meetings and so forth. The reason—occasionally revealed in an endnote, less often in an outright textual reference—is that O'Keeffe is striving to write a definitive biography, to basically blow his only competitor out of the water so far as the facts of the matter go. Sometimes O'Keeffe is fascinating and richly detailed on very interesting matters indeed; at other times, he goes on at spectacular length on quite trivial matters.

I haven't read all the way through Meyers's The Enemy yet, so comparisons must be provisional. But here's a few anyway:  

•O'Keeffe is a more graceful and subtle writer than Meyers by far; sometimes his style rises to real pitches of musicality that I enjoy very much. But Meyers is far more forceful and straightforward, and cuts to the chase when he needs to: there's a lot to be said for that.

•Which leads to the very obvious fact that O'Keeffe could have used some grim and relentless editing. Some Sort of Genius is a biography that is weighed down, at times almost sunk, by the accumulation of detail. It's good to know that Lewis was expelled from The Slade—a fact which O'Keeffe has feretted out, but Meyers is completely innocent of. It's less fascinating to be given the term-by-term numbers of how many times Lewis signed in for his classes, and how many times he had a friend forge his signature. (That, I'm afraid, is the biographer showing off his research.)

•The paper trail of Lewis's early life is distressingly scanty. Meyers passes breezily over everything until his public emergence in his mid-twenties in London; O'Keeffe shows us every scrap he has accumulated, alas not particularly to any illuminating effect. When the paper trail gets better established, then both biographers begin expanding. But Meyers has the edge here, for his attention is more firmly fixed on the writing, the painting, the work in short. Neither biographer provides the kind of rich examination of the works that one gets in Edgar Johnson's life of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, or A. David Moody's recently completed (and triumphant) life of Pound, but Meyers provides a somewhat better sense of what's going on in each book, and why each new canvas is important. (On the other hand, O'Keeffe will let you know what sort of advance Lewis received for each book, and how long he kept the publisher waiting, and so forth—even if sometimes it's not quite clear whether the book is a novel or a set of essays or whatever.)

•Meyers is frankly a lot better at setting Lewis in the context of modernism as a movement and as a congeries of disparate talents. He's better at managing his cast of characters, showing them as important writers/painters/artists in their own right, rather than as walk-ons in the drama of Wyndham Lewis's life (as they appear in O'Keeffe).

Ultimately I'm not really happy with either of these biographies. I'll take Meyers as a solidly-reading, well-contextualized life, which gives a clear sense of Lewis's role among the "men of 1914" and why we ought to take Lewis seriously. But if I want to check a fact or a date, or untangle the intricacies of a particular imbroglio, I'll turn to O'Keeffe. His book is, after all, now the biography of record. But it's a long way from the biography Lewis deserves, I think.

reading notes: Paul O'Keeffe on Wyndham Lewis

Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (2000; London: Pimlico, 2001)

I started and abandoned The Enemy, Jeffrey Meyers’s 1980 biography of Wyndham Lewis, a couple of times, though I’m not quite sure why. O’Keeffe is certainly a more graceful writer, but in the long run I don't know whether he has the interpretive edge over Meyers—though he certainly has amassed far more data, and has gone over the documentary record far, far more closely.

(A bit irritating, indeed, how O’Keeffe lets his reader know how he has gone through years of sign-in records for the National Gallery or the Slade School, or through tax records, or whatever, in his own text.)

I commented on Facebook how Lewis comes across in this text as a “colossal jerk,” at least in his early years; now I’m into his late thirties, and he shows no signs of turning into a likeable figure. Clearly, O’Keeffe has not gone to any exculpatory pains with Lewis, often singling out a particularly jerkish action and letting it stand at the end of a chapter or a section of a chapter like a ghoulish punctuation mark. Judged just on those actions—the string of cast-off mistresses and illegitimate children, the constant receptions of financial largesse responded to with surly incivility—Lewis comes across as someone who is certainly “some sort of genius,” but not someone with whom one might want to hang out. (Indeed, given the number of people who precisely did want to hang out with Lewis—lovers, painters, writers—it’s got to be counted against O’Keeffe that he isn’t able or willing to convey precisely what people found so magnetic and interesting about the man. And that, I’d venture to say, might be one of the biography’s ultimate failures.)

O’Keeffe fails to convey a convincing portrait of Lewis’s interiority, which I think is what a reader most hankers for in a biography, especially a biography of a writer. I’ve gotten to Lewis’s late thirties now; we’ve already passed through the Vorticist period, Blast, Tarr, and a great deal of his most vital visual art. (I’d guess all of his most vital visual art, since now he’s at the point where he’s mostly doing portraits.) And I still don’t have a very clear picture of what makes Lewis “tick,” as it were. I suspect—indeed, I’m convinced—that this is because of a paucity of documentary evidence. There simply isn’t very much from Lewis’s own pen in his early years about himself, or at least if there is O’Keeffe hasn’t quoted or paraphrased it.

O’Keeffe is not very good, it must be said, on the visual art. He can describe a picture adequately, but there’s no sense whatsoever of what place Lewis’s art has within art history as a whole—where he comes by his style, what makes his style vital and interesting, "new." We get an adequate account of his break with the Omega Workshop/Bloomsbury (Fry, Grant, Bell), but it’s told more in terms of a personal break with Bloomsbury than as a matter of artistic principle. We get almost nothing about what Lewis’s own principles of art might be, aside from some fleeting, anecdotal business distinguishing his own work from the Italian Futurists. The whole very interesting business of Vorticism is passed over painfully rapidly.

One would hope for more from O’Keeffe’s treatment of Lewis’s writing, given that he’s edited Tarr for the Black Sparrow Lewis edition. Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing. Aside from some occasional comments, and a good deal of detailed description of the business of publishing Lewis’s work, O’Keeffe gives us almost no sense of what’s interesting or striking about Lewis’s writing, or what distinguishes it (say) from Joyce’s Portrait, which is presented as proceeding in tandem (at least in terms of publication) with Tarr.

So in the end we have this enormously detailed, rather fat volume chronicling the life of a major painter and writer which is very good indeed on the details of his movements, his lodgings, his financial arrangements, his amorous entanglements, and his business dealings; but which is very sketchy on the work that prompts our interest in the writer, and which doesn’t really in the end convey a convincing picture of what makes this alternately energetic and otiose figure tick, what motivates him.

But I’m only 2/5 through the book; I’m hoping things will pick up in the latter portions, when Lewis’s paper trail becomes more concrete.

12 april 2016

Hannah Sullivan's book The Work of Revision (did I mention how generally excellent it is?) captured a long-held desire of mine to think about and perhaps theorize the process of revision. I'm certainly planning on mining its bibliography.

But thinking about revision sent me to an alas as-yet-not-properly examined shopping bag of books I picked up over the New Year's holiday in Sarasota and Sanibel, and digging out a collection edited by Judith Kennedy, Victorian Authors and Their Works: Revision Motivations and Modes (Ohio University Press, 1991). It has essays—unfortunately brief ones—on a variety of important writers of the period, from Carlyle to Conrad. So I read Kennedy's introduction, and a couple of the essays.

Or I should say Kennedy's "Preface," for it's not really long enough or searching enough to be a proper introduction. She nods towards what she calls a "recent surge of interest" in textual scholarship, then gives a too-hasty overview of the shift from Greg-Bowers methodology to the "social text" thought of McGann and Shillingsburg. It's way too hasty—undigested even—and pales beside the careful, scrupulous, and inventive way Sullivan dovetails an account of that same shift with a description of attitudes towards revision in her own first chapter.

Only two chapters of Kennedy's collection actually read. Susan Shatto provides a quick-n-nasty overview of how Tennyson composed Maud (desultorily, for himself, then finishing when there was the prospect of a publication contract and money). Fred Kaplan tells again the story of John Stuart Mill's maid accidentally burning the manuscript of Part I of Carlyle's French Revolution, and of Carlyle having to compose the whole thing over again. What's striking is that a very few scraps (all burnt around the edges) of that first manuscript have survived, and their words seems to be pretty much precisely duplicated in the book as Carlyle actually (re)wrote it. Did he treasure up those scraps of prose, incorporating them into his new text when he got to the right place? Or Carlyle (as Kaplan tends to think) simply have such a retentive and capacious memory that he was able to largely reconstruct the whole book as he originally wrote it?

***

Peter O'Leary's The Sampo, now read (slowly, with feeling), is magnificent. It makes me wonder if there isn't (or shouldn't be) some movement back towards outright narrative among the few poets I follow and value.

11 april 2016

It's been ages; no excuses, though this has been a wearying semester, punctuated with some fine conference visits and some good music. I've resolved to begin writing in this space again.

First, a bit of self-promotion:

Mentioned earlier on this blog, but as yet unlinked (I think), I have two recently published books:

Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries is out from the University of Alabama Press; it collects essays and long-form reviews that I've written over the past 15 years or more. I'm rather proud of many of the pieces here.

Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World's Pain is out from McFarland; it's a rather lighter affair, falling somewhere between fanboy-enthusiasm and real live criticism. But it is frankly the most comprehensive book on Moorcock out there, so if you're a fan you really ought to buy it.

***

What I've been reading lately, and what I'm reading:

Just finished a third go-through of Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems (Yale, 2006). I've been forcing my graduate creative writing students to work through this one over the course of the semester, just to give them a taste of late high modernism and high formalism (and frankly, because I love Hill's work). It's weird to work with a selection, rather than the single volumes I usually teach out of; I'm always trying to lay my finger on a particular poem or section of a longer thing, only to find that it hasn't been included. And I note how the volume tapers off towards the end—Scenes from Comus and Without Title are only very scantily represented—as if to catch breath before the grand explosion of work that Hill's released over the past decade—the last 1/3 or so of Broken Hierarchies, the vast 2013 collected poems.

The Kalevala, in its 1907 Kirby translation, despite the Hiawatha-meter into which the translator has predictably cast it, is highly readable indeed. I'm not sure whether the book wouldn't have moldered indefinitely on my shelves if I hadn't taken it down to gear up for a serious plunge into Peter O'Leary's fantastic recasting of portions, now available from the Cultural Society as The Sampo. This one is not to be missed: all of O'Leary's characteristic energy and verbal invention, in the service of high fantasy. Or—to call it what it is—sword and sorcery!

Hannah Sullivan's The Work of Revision (Harvard, 2013) is a pretty splendid piece of criticism. I confess to reading fewer books of criticism these days than I did, say, two decades ago. But I was pleasantly surprised over the summer by books by Brian Reed, Chris Nealon, and Gordon Teskey, and since have found myself reacquiring the taste. (Part of it, I think, is getting my own two books out the door, and being able as it were to take a breath.) Sullivan's book is for the most part gracefully written and more importantly just generally smart. She takes all that we already knew about writers' revisionary processes (both pre- and post-publication) and sorts it into a general theory of the cultural importance of revising, reaching a kind of apotheosis in the Creative Writing Industry's making revision a kind of index of "real" writing. Which is, as she points out, an inheritance of high modernism, a way of thinking that would have been utterly alien to the Romantics. Her book is chock full of insights in particular authors, and does a really fine job of taxonomizing various types of revision.

As usual, I'm dipping into and digging into various slim volumes of contemporary verse. I hope to begin noting them in depth—as I hope to be updating the blog at rather more decent intervals.

cont.

I'm about a third of the way through indexing the book—that is, entering all my highlighted elements into an alphabetized document—and I figure I'm working at the rate of about ten pages a hour, twelve when I'm doing well. That's not bad at all, but I'm sure not going to get rich doing this.

My drummer-colleague in the history department as a 900-page manuscript he needs indexed; he tells me he's contacted an indexer who'd do it for $1.50 a page; which seems rather low—this page recommends expecting between $4 and $6 per page for an academic book. Even if we take that top number ($6) and my fastest rate (12 pp. an hour), we need to figure in probably at least as much time spent going over the proofs in a preliminary fashion. So 6 pages an hour, all told, at $6 a page = $36 an hour.

That seems like an impressive number, or at least it would have when I was eighteen. These days, in white-collar land, I feel like I might be working beneath my normal rates. On the other hand, I'm going to come up with an index that I can truly call my own.

Indexed

So I read and returned the proofs of Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World's Pain. By my count, 15 corrections total, and only two of them were the press's mistake. The rest were bits I'd overlooked. Like I said in my last post, a very clean set of proofs.

Now I'm deep into indexing the book. This is I believe the fifth book I've indexed, and I've gotten into a rhythm with the thing. I read the proofs with three different colors of highlighters at hand; I mark (1) proper names, (2) titles, and (3) concepts/ideas/miscellaneous, each in a different color. Some pages end up looking like Monet paintings; others are relatively white. Then I go back thru, a page at at time, and transfer each marked item to a Word document.

That sounds pretty slow and painstaking, and, well, it is. I like it that way. By the time I'm done, I know my book inside and out. I know what needs indexing, and what really doesn't. Yes, I've tried it with a PDF of the proofs, doing the word-search thing, and I can easily imagine how that procedure might make the whole business much easier and more palatable for someone who's in a hurry. But there's something about moving from one medium to another—from the printed-out proofs to the Word document—that makes me a bit more careful.

My antiquated indexing habits (hey, at least I don't use index cards!) make for a better book—at least for me.

For one thing, I end up reading proofs at least twice. That is, I read once, with pen in hand, for proofing, looking specifically for errors. But I don't send corrections in until I've done the highlighter-armed pre-indexing markup. That means that I've read the entire script, closely, at least twice. It works for me—so far as I can tell, there are fewer than a dozen typos in The Poem of a Life, and less than 10 in Intricate Thicket.

And I feel that it makes for a better, more comprehensive index. And yes, as one colleague tells me, everyone uses Google Books for their words searches anymore—but they'll be better off using my index for Michael Moorcock, because I can do concepts, which Google Books can't.

My new life motto: I am an anorak, and proud of it.

Noted

I've been feeling not great about my writing lately, so it was a mixed blessing to get page proofs for my forthcoming Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World's Pain, which should be out (hopefully early) in the new year. But reading the proofs, in the interstices of grading papers and preparing exams, has actually been kind of fun. For one thing, they're really, really clean—very few corrections necessary. (I pat myself on the head for that, frankly—I gave them a clean ms to work with.)

And I've been having a ball reading the reference notes, and am reminded of one of the things that I love about doing criticism/scholarship. I try really hard to project a kind of sprezzatura in my text, to just "toss out" whatever insights I have come to as if they're perfectly obvious. But it's in the notes that I record my real labors, all the various texts I've collated, the stuff I've brought together and thought about and disentangled.

When I re-read my own notes—and this is true of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, especially—I can't help thinking, damn, this guy knows some stuff, he's read a bunch of books. The notes are a kind of gesture towards the clichéd 9-10ths of the iceberg that's out of view; the text is the visible portion.