Eliot's typewriter

Once upon a time, I'm told, publishers hired something known as "press clipping services," folks who'd read all the relevant venues & look out for reviews of newly released books. Well, that was once upon a time. I found out that The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (now shipping!) had been reviewed in the TLS from a friend in Cork, not from my publisher. (When I asked my editor if she'd seen the review a couple of weeks later, she said, "Oh yes, we saw that – very positive, no?" Thanks for letting me know...)

Anyway, in the interests of prolonging the euphoria of publication as long as possible, I'd love to hear from any of my seven readers out there if they happen upon any reviews of the book – in print, on the blogosphere, on the walls of the loo – in the next few weeks or months. And if you happen to be one of the four people who've pre-ordered from amazon or the evil B&N, I'd love to hear from you when the book arrives, & get your feedback on't. Feel free to email at mw - dot - scroggins - at - gmail - dot - com. I'll try to avoid turning Culture Industry into a full-time book promotional outlet – but allow me to indulge myself for a while: after all, this has been a very long haul, & there are college funds involved.
***
Back in the old days – "good" or otherwise – there was a standard procedure for academically tackling Pound's Cantos: one procured a copy of one of the "guides" to the poem (Peter Makin's Pound's Cantos is still my favorite) to explain the overall architecture, & one of the volumes of annotations – Carroll F. Terrell's 2-volume Companion was industry standard, but William Cookson's Guide would do at a pinch – to elucidate foreign phrases & recondite allusions. I worked my way thru the Cantos (not the first time around, however) this way, & I suspect generations of undergrads & grad students have done so as well – & scores of books on Pound bear the marks of a Terrell-supported trawl thru the text.

All that changed for me in 1992, when I picked up (at the much-missed Blue Fox, one of the loveliest of Ithaca's many used bookstores) a copy of Lawrence Rainey's 1st book, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Yale UP, 1991). That book was my first exposure to the "new modernist studies," now I guess almost 2 decades old. In re-reading the Malatesta Cantos, Rainey destroyed the notion that EP was drawing upon some homogeneous archive of "history" in writing about Sigismundo Malatesta – an impression the student reader easily arrives at relying on Terrell's or Cookson's laconic annotation. Instead, LR showed that Pound's Malatesta was a profoundly romanticized figure, drawn as much from 19th-c. potboiler novels as from the historical record – & moreover, that EP's quotations from archival sources – as we already knew, but sometimes were apt to forget – were highly selective & sometimes considerably retouched, yielding a Malatesta that met the ideological needs of the poet in his own historical moment, but by no means an "objective" portrait of the 15th-c. figure.

The "new modernist studies" to which Rainey's book introduced me have revitalized modernism as an academic field. (Indeed, Rainey has been so prominent in that revitalization that he has become the target of younger scholar's potshots, as I learned at a modernism conference at Cornell a few years ago.) More & more attention has been paid to the ways in which modernist texts were produced, disseminated, & received, & to their social and political contexts. Far more attention has been given to the works of women, gay & lesbian writers, & writers of color. Modernism, from being a heroic revolution of a handful of white men – "the men of 1914," in (I think) Wyndham Lewis's phrase – has become a whole international congeries of overlapping "movements" & individual initiatives, firmly embedded in a very particular set of social, political, & economic circumstances.

But even as salutary attention has turned to the works of HD, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, & the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, scholars have continued to read & re-read the "men of 1914" – Joyce, Pound, Eliot, & (too rarely) Lewis. Rainey's most recent book, Revisiting the Waste Land (Yale UP, 2005), which I picked up at The Strand this past weekend, looks at the single most canonically secure work of "high" modernism (besides of course Ulysses), the poem WC Williams complained had dropped an "atom bomb" amid a burgeoning nativist American modernism.*

Rainey's book is made up of 3 chapters & about 50 pages of "synoptic bibliographical" description of Eliot's letters & manuscripts (the sort of thing that I, anal animal that I am, dote upon). The chapters essentially follow the Jerome McGann-sanctioned triad of examining a text according to the stages of its production, publication (dissemination), & reception. I was a trifle disappointed to find that the middle chapter was "The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land," a ground-breaking & eye-opening essay that's old enough to be a "classic" (Rainey has already published it in at least three venues), but the logic of including it is pretty much inescapable.

And its familiarity is more than made up for by the chapters which bookend it. The last, "IMMENSE. MAGNIFICENT. TERRIBLE.: Reading The Waste Land," does a fine job of dispelling some of the myths surrounding the immediate reception of the poem. It shows that the tension between reading TWL as expression of the Zeitgeist & reading it as TSE's "personal grouse" was there from the very beginning, & how TSE's subsequent writings & career worked to enforce a kind of coherence & "classicism" on the poem which was by no means evident to its first readers.

But it's the 1st, mammoth chapter – "With Automatic Hand: Writing The Waste Land" – that's the real wonder here. Ever since Valerie Eliot published the draft materials for TWL back in 1971, scholars such as Hugh Kenner, Lyndall Gordon, Grover Smith, & others have advanced often conflicting theories about precisely how the poem was composed, in what order the various bits were written & woven together. Rainey unravels the entire mystery, to my eyes quite convincingly, using the most basic bibliographic methods: He compares typewriter scripts – LR shows when TSE stopped using one typewriter & began using another – and he looks at the watermarks on the various papers used. Since TSE apparently bought paper only in small batches, & used the same paper for drafting & typing poems & writing letters, it becomes a fairly straightforward (if highly technical & tediously painstaking) matter to date each fragment of the poem – to a particular place, sometimes to within a matter of days.

Rainey ends the chapter with a meditation, fittingly enough, on the typist in "The Fire Sermon," a forlorn figure who exemplifies both the social pressures of the early 1920s & the process of composing the poem in which she appears. Revisiting the Waste Land is a solid & illuminating piece of scholarship (Rainey strives hard, sometimes with limited success, to make the more technical aspects of his research accessible & exciting): like all too few books of literary criticism I read, it makes me a little proud to be in this business.

*The good doctor, in retrospect, protested too much: after all, at least 3 of the greatest works in American modernist poetry – Spring and All, The Bridge, & "Poem beginning 'The'" – were written in explicit or implicit reaction to The Waste Land.

back; biographical anonymity

Well, we're back to warmer climes. New York was wonderful as usual, pulsing with life. Cultural tourism (apart from a fruitful but sweaty visit to The Strand) was confined to the Macy's Parade (this year's highlight – according to the tastemakers – a giant inflatable balloon version of Jeff Koons's "Rabbit" – not a patch on the flower-covered two-stories-high "Puppy" at Rockefeller Center some years back) and to a wonderful Lincoln Center production of Cymbeline. I've always had a soft spot for the late Shakespeare tragicomedies they used to call "romances," but Cymbeline has been my least favorite of the four. Okay, it's still not up to the mark of The Tempest or Winter's Tale (& my own partiality for Pericles Prince of Tyre is perhaps perverse Zukofskyana), but this production made Cymbeline come alive for me (& made it make sense – I always lose track of the characters when reading early modern dramas about 2 acts in, & wander befuddled thru much of the most important action) in ways that I hadn't anticipated. I gather the show is actually still yet to officially open, but if you're in NYC over the holidays, I'd highly recommend it.
***
Well, my comments the other day on Andrew Motion's Guardian review of A. David Moody's Ezra Pound, Poet: The Young Genius got me a righteous smacking down from a blogger named Eshuneutics, both in my comments box & on his own rather interesting blog. Yes, I suppose I was over the top a bit there in attacking Motion & wondering about what Moody's biography – as yet unread by me – would amount to. I suppose Culture Industry leans a bit too much towards the pugilistic at times, & I think I ought to give my own splenetic tendencies a rest: to try for a bit more celebration & thoughtful speculation, a bit less simple grousing.

But Motion's review made me think about a grad student who dropped by my office hours the other day to discuss my upcoming biography seminar, & who shared his response to a review of the latest Hunter Thompson biography: "The guy begins, 'The only time I met Hunter S. Thompson...,' then spends several paragraphs talking about Thompson's career, life, & eccentricities, & only at the end does he say 'Oh yeah, this is a pretty good biography.'"

That, I'm beginning to think, is about the best the biographer can expect from the average reviewer.* This makes reviewing biography potentially a rather cushy task, as opposed to reviewing a new book of, say, poetry, philosophy, or political economy. One needs take only the most cursory note of the shortcomings or strengths of the biographer's actual text: instead, one can fill up all that dreaded white space with a potted summary (garnished with anecdotes) of the subject's life. This isn't at all inevitable – there're lots of reviews of biographies that focus sharply on the actual dynamics of the text – but one finds, frustratingly, the "6 paragraphs of life-summary plus 2 paragraphs of actual reviewing" all the time, from the Guardian to the TLS to the Miami Herald.

Sometimes I think biography is the anonymous art, the art in which the biographer, if she has done her work well, vanishes from the reader's attention, which is wholly drawn into the reconstructed narrative of the subject's life. There are of course wonderfully intrusive biographers: Boswell, for instance, continually poking his presence into the camera shots of Johnson's conversation, or Peter Ackroyd, inventing dialogues between himself and the long-dead Dickens. More often, however, we have to be cunningly alert for the biographer's presence in the text, for those moments when the biographical "might have" shades into a "would have" & then into a "did"; or when a subtle turn of adjective performs the work of interpretation that by rights ought to be left to the reader alone.
***
Huzzah! Amen! Selah! The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, according to amazon.com, & according to the stack of complimentary copies I found waiting by the doorstep earlier today, is now shipping!

*Motion goes a little beyond that in assessing Moody's book, & in praising Moody's objectivity and energy, but his review spends far too much time providing an abbreviated account of Pound's career, pitched it seems for an audience who knows next to nothing about one of the 20th century's central poets.

hiatus?

Culture Industry takes to the air tomorrow, on the single worst travel day of the year, bound to NYC for the holiday (including a possible viewing of what some New Yorkers insist on calling the "Macy's Day Parade"). The blog may or may not be dark over the next few days. In the briefcase:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
the Oxford Authors Samuel Johnson
The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky

It's true, I and the latter book have rarely been more than five feet apart over the last few days.* And while the rarely cynical Peter O'Leary reminds me that the "initial bask" of such things fades rather rapidly, I'm doing my best – like a pensioner on his last excursion to Nighttown – to prolong the ecstasy.

*I do, however, leave it elsewhere when I take lavatory breaks – tho after I joked to my department chair, as he was flipping thru the book, that I took it to the potty with me, he laughed nervously & started rubbing that scented antiseptic stuff into his hands.

Guess what the postperson brought...

Yes, that's right – a printers' advance copy of Daddy's new book. We're happy!

laureates in space

Who'd've thought it – an English Poet Laureate entirely out of it? I'm shocked, shocked. (Until, that is, I consider John Betjeman & John Masefield, & a whole parade of mummified relics who've occupied the office: the list is of course considerably shorter than the American one only because the English post is a lifetime one.) But then I read current PL Andrew Motion's review in the Guardian of the first volume of A. David Moody's biography of Pound, Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920.

Motion begins by lamenting "the blur near the centre of 20th-century literary biography: lives of the two greatest modernists are missing." Of course, he means modernist poets – heaven knows there are lives of Joyce, arguably greater than either Eliot or Pound, the "two greatest" he's referring to. Motion continues:

Peter Ackroyd and others have done their best to get round the prohibitions of the Eliot estate, but we still lack a properly detailed, intimate account. Problems of a different kind have delayed a full and scholarly biography of Pound, despite the best efforts of Humphrey Carpenter and others. Pound's life is so vast in its energies, so richly international in its reach and so bedevilled by controversies that it has taken more than 30 years - since Pound's death in 1972 - for A David Moody's book to arrive on the scene. The first volume of this grand opus is a significant event.

I'm flummoxed by this paragraph. In the first place, while the Eliot estate did indeed make problems for Ackroyd in his writing TS Eliot: A Life, it's still a pretty damned good biography, and Lyndall Gordon's TS Eliot: An Imperfect Life is even better. I can imagine more detailed, more revelatory biographies – & heaven knows we'll get them in 15 years' time, when crucial caches of TSE's letters are unsealed – but I have no idea what Motion wants in a "properly detailed, intimate account": details of Eliot's cock size, as we get in Lew Ellingham & Kevin Killian's life of Jack Spicer?

And this notion that we lack a "full and scholarly biography of Pound" has me rather puzzled. There's no shortage of Pound biographies out there: full-length treatments include Charles Norman's (1960), Noel Stock's (1970), Humphrey Carpenter's (1988) and JJ Wilhelm's (in three volumes, 1985, 1990, 1994); shorter & more specialized books include Ackroyd's illustrated Ezra Pound and His World (1980), Jacob Korg's book on EP & HD (2003), C David Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile (1976), Anne Conover's book on EP & Olga Rudge (2001), John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987), Ira Nadel's recent volume for Palgrave's Literary Lives series, & probably a few others shelved in my office at work right now, where I can't lay hands on them.

All of these books have shortcomings, some of them more dire than others. Norman's book is a breezy celebrity bio, notable mostly (to me at least) for his use of Zukofsky as a resource. Stock's is the life as told by a somewhat repentant former disciple. Wilhelm simply can't write, & has no sense of discrimination among his materials.

Humphrey Carpenter's big (1000+ pp.) work, then, is probably the biography of record, unfortunately: while he conveys an admirable density of facts & dates, his work is hampered by the fact that he's utterly unsympathetic to, & mostly uncomprehending of, Pound's mature poetic project. (What possessed the author of lives of Auden & JRR Tolkien to devote this much energy to Pound of all people? Aesthetically, it's rather like me polishing off the LZ biography & setting out to write the life of Billy Collins.) I'll consult Carpenter for a date; but for a sense of Pound's poetry or for a clear idea of what his political or economic thought at any particular stage, I look elsewhere.

For all of Motion's boosterism on behalf of Moody's new biography (or at least its 1st volume – which, let's be frank, covers Pound the young man and Pound the impresario, & doesn't quite get to the Pound of the Cantos, which is where the real interest lies), he doesn't really say anything to persuade me that this book's any better than its predecessors: according to Motion, Moody's

prose is more obviously driven by the need to get the facts straight and to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of the poems, than by curiosity about psychological motives and personal characteristics. It means the book has an air of slightly detached efficiency - which is no bad thing, except that it makes Pound himself seem a touch remote. We see the blaze of his firebrand energy; we marvel at his generosity to writers of whom he approves; we admire his astonishing powers of self-driving; but we rarely feel these things on our pulses.

And that's all he has to say about the book itself; the rest of the review is, as the manner of anglo-reviewers on biography, a summary of the biographee's career (as if readers of the Guardian had never heard of EP).

Which leads me to a tentative conclusion: A David Moody's is not merely the best Pound biography Andrew Motion's ever read, but it's the first. And what makes it better than all the rest (which he seems not to have dipped into) is the mere fact that it's been published by Oxford University Press – a grand step towards making Pound safe for British palates.

[Final note: I'll read Moody's book, of course, & its sequel, tho there's nothing about Moody's criticism – mostly on Eliot – that persuades me he'll have much perceptive to say about Pound's poetry. The Pound biography I'm waiting for, of course, is the one in progress by Tim Redman, author of the excellent Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism.]

numbers-watching

I'll have more to say about recent movements on the happily reappeared Say Something Wonderful & my own comments box, but for the nonce, I'm watching the numbers as the days count down to the release of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. I have little idea what those "sales ranking" numbers on amazon.com actually mean – I recall someone saying that if you buy a single copy, you can get your book to jump a few thousand spaces – but it's worth noting that Poem of a Life has made its category's bestsellers list. Here's what the top few books in the sub-sub-sub-sub-category "Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > United States > Poetry" look like as of about 10.45 this morning:

1) Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

2) Garrison Keillor, Good Poems

3) Robert Hass, Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 [another Shoemaker & Hoard book, mark you]

4) Mary Karr, The Liar's Club: A Memoir

5) TS Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition

6) Louise Glück, Averno: Poems

7) Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

8) Yr humble blogger, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky

That's what I call a pleasant Saturday morning surprise.

Prynne & pleasure; incoming

What with J. away in Phoenix for a drama conference, I'm one day into a four-day stint of single parenting, & am thus far just plain exhausted. Not necessarily in a bad way – some of the day's events have been very pleasant indeed, & the weather at least is cooperating by not being godawfully hot (which in South Florida is still more than possible in mid-November).
***
Among the great stacks of unsifted mail I find the latest Chicago Review (53:2/3), which I'd opened and briefly glanced at. Too briefly, it turns out, for I find to my delight that this issue publishes the hitherto unpublished Book V of Ronald Johnson's Radi os, as edited by Johnson's executor the estimable Peter O'Leary. I can't wait to read it – but it'll have to wait till tomorrow, when I'm a bit less bleary.
***
Tonight in the graduate poetry workshop I pretend to lead (moderate? ride herd on?) a student did a stunning presentation on JH Prynne's Furtherance, turning up all sorts of riches that I hadn't yet uncovered in my own readings of the book. That in itself was delightful, especially in contrast to what I'd been reading lately myself (in addition to the big Bloodaxe Prynne Poems), NH Reeve & Richard Kerridge's Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of JH Prynne (Liverpool UP, 1995).

This, I will admit, is my 3rd assault on the book – the 3rd time I've started to read it; the previous two attempts have petered out somewhere in the second chapter. It's by no means a stupid book – quite the contrary – nor is it poorly written: indeed, it's marked by a refreshing lucidity. But once again I'm reminded of why I've started and abandoned the book twice now, & am unsure whether I'll get thru it this time. R&K, that is, pay far too little attention to the phenomenology of reading Prynne; while they give an obligatory nod to the notion that JHP is notoriously "difficult," they entirely ignore the reaction that the average reader – & even the average reader of modernist & late modernist poetry – has to work of such obduracy: a reaction, that is, of boredom, of resentment, of grudging labor, ultimately perhaps of abandonment. In short, they spend precisely no time exploring or discussing what sorts of pleasure Prynne's poetry might offer.

I for one value Prynne's work very highly indeed. While I came to it relatively late – I think I bought my first Prynne book, a little second-hand copy of High Pink on Chrome, around 1992 or so – I've always taken a particular pleasure (perhaps in part masochistic) in the dense & shifting textures of his poetry. And I know a lot of people who do likewise.

But Reeve & Kerridge, in their intelligent but profoundly dispassionate analysis of Prynne, fail utterly to present any reasons, apart from the intellectual unpacking of the verse*, why anyone who isn't already committed to the poet would want to read JHP's work. It's true, one doesn't have to make such an argument for Pound, or Joyce, or perhaps even Zukofsky – at least not now – but in the first book devoted to a "notoriously difficult" writer, the failure to make any sort of partisan appeal to pleasure strikes me as a significant misstep. Maybe that appeal's just yet to come, somewhere in chapter 3 or 4. But that'll be too late for non-Prynnites, I'm afraid.

*R & K's actual readings of Prynne's poems, so far as I've read, too rarely go beyond the "let's see what kind of sense can be made of these lines" move – ie, let's see how we can try to translate them into something resembling a coherent line of discourse. Sorry, gentlemen, but I can do that sort of work on my own – & end up liking my naturalizations better than yours.

placeholder/reading list

One book leads to another – or rather, the ignorance revealed in reading one book leads to a desire for remediation – ie, another book. After finishing Strachey's Queen Victoria & Eminent Victorians, & spending the usual amounts of time in class discussing how modernism is a reaction to Victorian culture in general, I found myself reminded how butt-ignorant of Victorian literature in general I am. Okay, so I've read at least one book by all of the "major" novelists & a smattering of poetry by most of the poets (lots & lots of Tennyson, Hopkins, Barrett Browning, & Browning, truth to tell) – and of course more Ruskin than is good for anyone – but it's kind of embarassing that I've probably read more Wilkie Collins novels than Hardies, Eliots, & Dickenses put together. And I can never keep straight which parties Disraeli, Gladstone, & the rest belonged to, much less remember what they stood for.

Solution? Crutches: Jerome Buckley's The Victorian Temper & Richard Altick's Victorian People and Ideas (the former one of my dad's books – he was a largely autodidact Dickens scholar – the latter some sort of hangover from my undergrad days). Yes, very old, very one-sided surveys. But much of it is news to me. Thus far my favorite (in theory) new discovery: The "Spasmodic School" of poets. The work looks godawful, but who can resist the name? Bill Keckler, I hereby invite you to join me in a new grouping of "innovative" poets: THE NEW SPASMODICS.

placeholder/reading list

So I had this dream last night – no, not that kind of dream, tho it was very pleasant indeed – & when I got up this morning, I dashed off an email to my managing editor: "Dear R–––: While ordinarily I don't share my dreams, I had a lovely dream last night that I'd gotten an advance copy of The Poem of a Life; any chance this one's going to come true?" Of course I'd forgotten that today is the day after Veterans Day (or Veterans' Day, or Armistice Day, etc.) & therefore a holiday for most white-collar types. "Professor Fidget," Paul Naylor calls me; he doesn't know the half of it. I expect, once I get the book in my hands and the first 2-day euphoria has passed, to be (in Samuel Beckett's words) "a sad animal indeed."
***
I am incapable of sustained intellectual effort in blogging these days (& yes, I know there are many who would have me strike "these days" from that sentence), but I've been reading:

•Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: as readable & as acid as the day it fell from the hands of the "neurasthenic" (thanks, WB, for that moniker)

•JH Prynne, Furtherance: 4 chapbooks, two of which are every bit as stonily impenetrable to me as the first time I read them three years ago

•Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi: okay, I'm a sucker for any book that manages to wind in Joyce, Piranesi, Ruskin, Zukofsky, & Guy Davenport, & while I'm only a few pages into this one, I can tell it's going to be a doozey

•Joseph Brooker, Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture: I'm a sucker for reception histories – Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare, for all of Taylor's sometimes flamboyant silliness, is one of the landmark pieces of litcrit for me – and what's not to love about a book whose central chapter is titled "The Men of 1946: Tales Told of Dick and Hugh"? (that's Dick Ellmann & Hugh Kenner)

•Andrew Taylor, God's Fugitive: The Life of CM Doughty: modernist scholars know Doughty, if they know him at all, as the subject of a line in the Pisan Cantos, in which Pound recalls reading his epic poem The Dawn in Britain to Yeats back at Stone Cottage. Arabists know him as the most important traveller in the middle east between Burton & TE Lawrence, & the author of the quirky but brilliant Travels in Arabia Deserta. Taylor writes his life as the life of a traveller more than a writer, but the character of this God-besotted eminent Victorian – he brings Strachey's General Gordon to mind occasionally – is absolutely rivetting

And of course about a page & a half of The Phenomenology of Spirit daily. It keeps me from feeling intelligent.

biographical anxiety

[Left: The Worrier, London statue]

So I spent an hour and a half in my office at Our Fair University today, putting together my book orders for the spring term & letting myself be distracted by jocular & very pleasant conversations with colleagues, students, & various persons of interest. And I got those little buggers in to the bookstore, & for once well in advance of the deadline. I had one pretty scary moment, though (and those who know me well know that behind my blustering Archambaldian exterior I'm really a mass of fears & neuroses), when I showed a colleague I like & admire very much my booklist for the biography grad seminar & asked "If you were one of our grads, would you take this class?"

"Sure, it looks great," he immediately replied. "But I can see why you're worried about the class making." ("Making" the enrollment threshold, that is – and I hadn't been worried before he said that, but by God I was now...) "After all, they think of literature & theory, but they don't really think of biography as... you know... serious."

I cited Daniel Green at The Reading Experience and Richard Prouty at One-Way Street the other day as having written "interesting" things about biography. Probably more accurate to say "troubling" things, so far as my own investment in the genre goes. Green writes

only through biography do some critics reach an audience at all and do some writers receive any public attention at all. Biographies are the closest thing to long-form criticism published by most presses, and the closest most readers of newspaper and magazine reviews ever get to extended consideration of even the most famous writers. But if most biographies wind up having only "scant bearing on the literature," it's hard to see why we need them. Successive biographies of the same usual suspects, each claiming to be the new "standard life" are hardly a good substitute for real criticism.

Prouty is a deal harsher:

Biographies are interruptions in my normal reading. I prefer the fiction to the author most every time. If a writer's biography is more interesting than his or her works, I get suspicious. Even well-written, engaging biographies have limited readerly appeal. They tend to be really long with highly predictable plot structures: birth, early discovery of genius, development of first great work, big personal crisis, development of first not so great work, another personal crisis, second great work, a period of cruising on their reputation, health crisis, bitter and useless old age, death.... Biography is considered kind of a low skill in literary studies, primarily because they can sometimes read like they're a research notes dump rather than a thoughtful examination of a life and its work.

It's that last sentence, particularly the "low skill in literary studies" bit, that hurts. It sets off all kinds of career-oriented alarm bells in my little head – have I committed academic suicide by devoting almost a decade to this damned book? Will they laugh at me behind my back at the MLA & the MSA: "Heh, heh, while I was building an immense edifice of intellectual history tracing the rise & decline of the notion of aesthetic autonomy from Shaftesbury to Silliman, & while you were teasing out how Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian Hegelianism works to revise Laclau & Mouffe, that poor schmuck was writing a storybook!"?

So while I was getting into an epic 3-way comments-box pissing match over at Incertus yesterday over the academic & aesthetic status of the emerging genre of "Creative Nonfiction," my inner shlimazl was moaning (or kvetching maybe, but I don't know from Yiddish) "Oh, but who's being marginalized more? When's the last time you saw a job in the MLA Joblist for a 'biographer or scholar of biography'? I'll never get any respect now..."

But there's no help for it at this point. At least you, gentle readers & ungentle, could salve the ignominy of my intellectual self-immolation by purchasing some gift copies of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (guaranteed tastily readable, tho possibly intellectual quite-low-calory) for Hanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, & Saturnalia. I have a PDF of the dust jacket, & it would look quite nice on a coffee table in a room with a rust & teal color scheme.

GIRLdrive

[painting by Miriam Laufer, EBB's grandmother]

Okay, go right now & check out one of the coolest, most thoughtful blogs I've encountered recently: GIRLdrive, the ongoing photographic & verbal documentary record of two young women on the road, interviewing "young women across the country, asking them what they think and feel about feminism." The duo's credentials & backgrounds are impressive: Nona Willis Aronowitz is a scholar of 1970s pornographic movies & the daughter of feminist scholar Ellen Willis & sociologist/activist Stanley Aronowitz, & writes very well indeed. Emma Bee Bernstein, daughter of artist Susan Bee and Language poet Charles Bernstein, is a fine photographer (and loves her little brother Felix).

J. wants Pippa & Daphne to grow up to archaeologists or war correspondents; I'd always leaned towards painters or musicians, but I think I'd be more than happy if they decided to be cross-country documentary bloggers.

another green world

I guess I've been obsessed ever since grad school with the notion of one day having an outdoor or semi-outdoor study. The landlord of the house I spent several years in in Ithaca was a genial, curly-haired Swiss architect who had converted a shed in his backyard into a glass-walled, book-lined sanctum; every year I & my apartmentmates would linger over glasses of sherry after signing the next year's lease, and I would gaze covetously over the neat piles of papers on his tables and desk.

Then there was that special issue of Le Magazine Littéraire on Jacques Derrida that came out sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, in which I could not merely admire the deconstructeur's Euro fashion sense (which frankly was a good deal more dodgy when I came to see him in person), but could lust after the huge glassed-in workspace behind his seemingly modest house in suburban Paris, where piles of books & papers competed for table space with a brand new Macintosh and various snazzy ashtrays.

One of the few good things about living in Florida, frankly, is that one can have a year-round outdoor study without having to worry about heating it. (That is, if you don't mind shivering for maybe two weeks of the year.) Most of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (see link at right for ordering information – the holidays are coming!) was written at a table right outside the back door of our house, a pleasant but not ideal location. After all, that table was intended to be a dining table, to use for dinner parties and pleasantly temperate evening suppers, a function utterly vitiated when the thing was covered with books & paper, pens & notebooks, etc. And a workspace several rooms away from my study, where most of my books & papers live, meant that things tended to pile up alarmingly in the vicinity of my outdoor table – think huge tottering stacks of books leaning against the French doors.

So finally at long last I have moved the last of my stuff to a new location: an awning-shaded 12' X 12' space at the very corner of the side yard, right outside the door to my office. It's a modest setting, perfectly appropriate for a modest intellectual & aesthetic agenda. I feel like I'm in the midst of the jungle out there with overgrown ficus & palms pressing down upon me, but have crystal-clear wireless internet, good light, and fresh air. The books, papers, guitars and other stringed instruments are only a step away, & all the papers & ephemera can be whisked into the study in a moment at the first warning of an approaching hurricane. And now... and now I need to figure out something else to write. The Divine Oscar wanted to live up to his china; I need to live up to my outdoor study.

[The view from inside]

work in progress

[more work in progress, not as fun as last time's:]

Dawn, New & Improved

Turn the sun rising into
a new genre, dubbed for want
of better words solar apotheosis.
Slug down the coin slot,
night down for blurred metal
racket, cat calling for her
husbands. Reach across her back
for the door lock, gear box
frozen and matted. As authoritative
as he may appear, suddenly
the sky cracks with motion –
women and men running, backpacks
purses briefcases scattered heedless before
the sun of a new
trademark. Logos as logo, descending
dove whose feathered breast touches
your lips for one aching
moment before the darkness falls
and endless credits scroll. I
am in a box somewhere,
beyond the rumblings and gurglings
of the tongueless dialectic, flicking
a lighter to make out
the cramped curves of my
own limbs, sapless. Someone planned
it all, brought us to
this sorry pass. Waves pink
far as the eye sees
under the tumid, bristling
orb – and a blanket crusted
with sand, rimed with salt.
You are in a box
somewhere, as Spirit unfolds itself
in the patter of dirt
and the thud of clods
drizzling down over your head.

end-of-weekend various

Busy weekend; reading lots of things, going lots of places. We took the girls down to Ft. Lauderdale today to go to the science museum & walk along the "Riverwalk" (which I suspect is actually man-made canals), & found ourselves in the middle of a multi-venued "jazz brunch." I'm not too crazy about what passes for jazz at these things – let's just say it warms the hearts of the over-70s in the crowd – but it was very fine to be in the midst of crowds that weren't Boca Raton crowds (ie swarms of tourists, snowbirds, Eurosleaze etc.). Ft. L. is so many of the things I'd rather be living among: more class-diverse, gayer, more pet-friendly; more an approximation of the urban I hanker for.
***
Collecting bad words for biographers. James Joyce: "biografiend." Joyce Carol Oates: "pathographer." "Every great man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography" – Oscar Wilde.
***
(I hope none of the potential students of my biography seminar are reading Culture Industry these days, since I'm giving away most of the few ideas I have about the subject.) Catherine Parke, in Biography: Writing Lives, justifies the fact that all of her exemplary texts are literary biographies:

Over the past 200 years, professional writers have surpassed the former leading candidates of biographical interest in Western culture: royalty, saints, and military heroes. Writers, beginning in the late seventeenth century, became the new heroes of modern print culture and expanding literacy. Their lives also became templates for post-Renaissance notions of the relation between public and private self, the Western invention of individual identity, and the foundational concept of the reality of a psychological life.

Well, ain't that convenient? I'm a literary scholar, teaching the works of poets, fiction writers, dramatists & essayists, & have gotten interested in biography; & by golly, there seem to be more biographies about the people I'm already invested in than anybody else! So I (MS) must hie me off to Barnes & Noble & do some grubby quantitative analysis. First I go thru the "Biography" section counting heads; then I'm off to the places Parke isn't looking – "Music," to count how many lives of Frank Black, Morrissey, & Madonna there are, & "Film," where lives of Rock Hudson & Marilyn Monroe outsell the latest Ezra Pound any day of the week.

Aside from the self-aggrandizing nature of Parke's claim, there's something to be said for examining specifically literary biography (& yes, most of the biographees this spring will be writers), not least the hurdle of making interesting lives whose most significant moments are spent in solitary desk-labor; & of course the mise-en-abyme of the writer confronting the writer, trying to capture one set of words in another.
***
Obviously I haven't written much about poetry per se in ages. But I'm feeling nostalgic for the days when blogospheric compatriats like Josh Corey would actually post work in progress. Here's a fragment of my own w-i-p, maybe a bit of an aria from a post-android opera:

bend down you fabled aviatrix
mistress of struts fuselage
and yellow busy wasps
beneath your canopy I acquaint
me with sea-surge the moan
of dark and underwater
caves swim through the air
on pinioned and tense wings
lights dim and pattering rain

& John Latta's been posting some very gnarly new lines on his gnarly Dumpster Island.
***
Eric posted this clip a few weeks back on Say Something Wonderful, but it's too good not to disseminate, particularly since I've had the song ringing thru my mind for days now.

end-of-week various

Some interesting thinking about biography taking place on One-Way Street and The Reading Experience. My own Road to Damascus moment came during a light-headed, tingly drive home last night, when I realized that I should stop sweating the upcoming class, stop trying to be Professor Effing Know-It-All, & let the syllabus take its own scrappy, partial, & opinionated route.

It doesn't help matters that Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman & Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage – two of my money texts – are now out of print. But I think I've found the decent overview book: Catherine Parke's Biography: Writing Lives (Routledge 2002). Yes, I was put off by the fact that the book was originally published by Twayne, but then I reflected that after all, some of those Twayne volumes are pretty decent (& there's nothing worse than press-based snobbery – after all, why wasn't I put off by its being published by Routledge, which has published some of the most high-octane vapid theoretical silliness in recent years?). And on examination, Parke turns out to be pretty good – it probably helps that she doesn't seen to be a biographer herself, therefore doesn't have her weenie in any particular argumentative campfires.
***
I am officially in love with Jane Austen. & inclined to agree with Scott Mackenzie, who all those years ago, at a table in Eugene, Oregon, several pitchers into the pub's stock of some nice local microbrew, opined that it just didn't get any better than Emma.
***
And like Bilbo Baggins, feeling spread too thin, like butter over too much toast, at least in the writing department. Too many notebooks – the little Moleskines for poetry drafts and general observations, the big green commonplace book, the new large-format Moleskine that's filling up with thoughts & quotations on biographical matters, the very private personal journals – and of course Culture Industry, which believe it or not takes up more time than it takes to type.
***
A colleague passed me a brace of CDs containing the MP3s of what looks like the entire Bruce Springsteen corpus. Me a Springsteen fan? Well, not really, tho I can listen & appreciate when I manage to tune out the general cultish cultural static, the deification of the man. But I'm reminded of why I didn't buy The River when it first came out: the title song must be among the saddest five or ten lyrics I've ever heard. (Right up there with "Donna, Donna" or "The Poor Boy Is Taken Away," if you know what I mean.) Almost more than my tender sentimental heart can stand, tho I've listened to it a half dozen times over the last two days.

Sincerity & Ajectification

Last time around I was speculating on the possible usefulness of Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History (Harvard UP, 2007) for my upcoming (much-dreaded) seminar in Biography: Theory & Practice, & worrying about its "breeziness & occasional flyspecks." Well, I've finished the book (it's almost 300 pages, but they're teeny tiny pages with big margins & lots of pictures), & can confidently pronounce upon it: As the painter (Hugh Grant) in the film of Rose Tremain's Restoration tells Robert Downey Jr., on being shown the latter's amateurish canvas, "It is an excrescence." As Bart Simpson would say: "Craptacular."

While bad reviews are deliciously fun to write, some books are so painfully ill-conceived & superficially thought thru that criticizing them in detail feels like a species of cruelty to slow animals. What's worst is that Biography is a really great idea – sfarz I know there is, as Hamilton points out over & over again, no short summary history of the field – and seems to spring from a congeries of good intentions: to introduce & critique the history of biography; to pronounce upon its present state & future prospects; to give the field some of the respect that it's been lacking in the academy.

(Note to M. Hamilton: A conceptually sloppy, excrementally copy-edited, inadequately referenced "pop" overview of biography – even if it does have pretty pictures – is unlikely to help establish biography among the academic disciplines. But I sympathize with its marginalization – a marginalization even more extreme than that which proponents of "creative nonfiction" have been vigorously fighting against for however long. For my take on the subject of biography & literary/cultural studies, see this paper from half a decade ago.)

Part of the problem is Hamilton's desire to write for a popular audience, which is a laudable one – something which I attempted in The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (tho my publisher let drop at one point that the book still has a "scholarly tone" – but you're welcome to buy it anyway & decide for yourself). But as Janet Malcolm shows in The Silent Woman, her book on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, & the politics of posthumous biographical reputation, you don't have to dumb down to achieve readability. Hamilton rightly recognizes Samuel Johnson & James Boswell as terrifically important figures in the history of biography; but he spends as much time on the racy anecdote of Boswell getting it on with Rousseau's mistress (13 times!) as he does on the structure and method of Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, & makes almost no mention of Boswell's own methods in writing Johnson's Life.

I guess I'd call that "breeziness" – passing over the meat of the argument to linger over the not particularly nourishing garnishes. What's more troubling is the number of times Hamilton simply gets things wrong.

•He claims that the main reason Sir Walter Raleigh was executed was some unflattering implications about contemporary monarchs in The History of the World, thereby making SWR the "first martyr to biography." Well, he's already stretching terminology past the place where I'll follow when he lumps Raleigh's History in the field of biography, but any student of early modern history & culture can tell you the reasons for Raleigh's execution were far more complex than that (& really had little to do with his writing).

•Carlyle gets name-checked & quoted once or twice, but his seminal biographical writings – in Heroes & Hero-Worship, the life of Frederick the Great, & his edition of Cromwell – get nary a mention, which is sort of like writing about Victorian poetry without noticing Tennyson.

•Hamilton makes the interesting argument that during the period of the huge, reputation-whitewashing, Victorian mausoleum biographies, life-writing energies got drawn off into fiction. This works pretty well for Jane Eyre & David Copperfield, but why in God's name does he adduce Moby-Dick & Heart of Darkness, two utterly unbiographical novels?

•In a fantastically distorted account of structuralist & post-structuralist thought (which could have been written by a Bill O'Reilly scriptwriter), Hamilton blames it all on Mikhail Bakhtin – adducing tons of illustrative quotations, not from Bakhtin's authenticated works, but from Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language: yes, theory-heads still slaver over the possibility that Bakhtin used V.'s name in some early writings, but the weight of scholarly opinion is that Voloshinov should be acknowledged as the author of the work bearing his name. Hamilton, fighting the theory-wars of the '80s, doesn't seem to have noticed. (Indeed, he seems entirely innocent of theoretical developments since about 1979.)

This is just the tip – here goes the cliché – of the proverbial iceberg, a vast chilly density of flippant verbiage, misremembered facts, & high-sounding puffery. But what should I have expected, I guess, from a biographer who issued a revised edition of his biography of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery under the clever title The Full Monty. (For a suitably scathing review – I love the word "twaddle" – see here.)
***
Last time around, I quoted Oscar Wilde "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling" – which prompted a useful comment from Don Share: "I'm not sure if genuine feeling is the same as sentimentality, but of the latter, Richard Hugo said: 'Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake.'" That's a good observation, & deserves as follow-up a bit more of the context of Wilde's remark (which gets quoted as if it were a free-standing aphorism, rather than a line from Gilbert in "The Critic as Artist"):

the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has 'nothing to say.' But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

To which Ernest replies: "I wonder do you really believe what you say?" A good question – one might argue, I suppose, that by this point in the dialogue Gilbert has become rather shall we say "carried away" by his own rhetoric on behalf of a formalist insincerity, a method for the artist to "multiply his personalities."

The simplest thing to say is that "genuine feeling" – "sincerity" – is not enough to make good poetry (tho it's great for voyeuristically interesting blogs), but that poetry can be a way of embodying such genuine feeling in form – a sincere regard for which (& here I follow Zukofsky, & suspect the Divine Oscar would agree) is a necessity for successful verse.

wee update

After getting a big sloppy soul-kiss of enthusiasm for the forthcoming The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (still available at a whacking great discount from Amazon.com, just in time for Hanukah, Kwanzaa, & all those other gift-giving occasions – 4 weeks & counting till publication, kids), I've been alerted to the existence of Al Filreis's consistently lively & informative blog. Al, if you don't know him, is the co-director (with Charles Bernstein) of PennSound, the fantastic poetry website-clearinghouse-reading series at the U of Pennsylvania, & the author of for my money two of the 5 or 10 best books on Wallace Stevens.
***
I've also added a link to W.B. Keckler's ebulliant Joe Brainard's Pyjamas, a blog (& webzine) that gives a big (smiling) one-fingered salute to the brow-furrowed seriousness the likes of Rbt. Pinsky & Louise Glück would project as the climate of American poetry today. (The Divine Oscar: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.")

biography & concision

I've been thinking about biography again – frantically, as it's book-order time for next semester's graduate seminar in Biography: Theory and Practice, & by golly there seems to be very little on biographical theory in print at the moment. Dipping desultorily into Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History (Harvard UP, 2007), which for all its breeziness & frequent flyspecks ("Samuel Johnson was fascinated by the lives of poets – if only because his own attempts to write verse had proved miserable failures" – ye gods & little fishes, has the man never exposed himself to the mordant grandeurs of "London" or "The Vanity of Human Wishes," 2 poems for which I'd exchange about 80% of the Norton Anthology of English Poetry????) may turn out to be the course's pis aller.

Much more fun, of course, has been Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria, an exquisitely written 240-page jeweler's setting of the 81-year life & 63-year reign of the woman who gave sex a bad name. How does one perform such a feat of miniaturization, of Proust-summarizing? One has in mind the passage from the Preface to Eminent Victorians, of course: "To preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity – a brevity which excludes anything that is redundant and nothing that is significant – that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer."

In a long set-piece passage towards the end of the book – one of the very few such passages – Strachey describes the Queen's collection-mania, how Victoria retained not merely everything she inherited – china, jewels, furniture, draperies, paintings – but every single object she acquired, both by purchase and by the "constant stream of gifts" that flowed in "from every quarter of the globe"; to boot, she had catalogued & photographed every object in each of the royal residences, recording its appearance from various perspectives, its provenance, its position within a given room. "And Victoria," Strachey writes,

with a gigantic volume or two of the endless catalogue always beside her, to look through, to ponder upon, to expatiate over, could feel, with a double contentment, that the transitoriness of this world had been arrested by the amplitude of her might.

Thus the collection, ever multiplying, ever encroaching upon new fields of consciousness, ever rooting itself more firmly in the depths of instinct, became one of the dominating influences of that strange existence.

(This is scarily like my own relationship to my books...) What is this a description of, however, but the Victorian multi-volume "Life and Letters" biography, the very print mausoleums that Strachey set out to demolish in Eminent Victorians?

piratical

I'd always suspected that it was only a bit of hair, some eye liner, & maybe a few other details – acting talent, facial structure, about – ahem, well an unspecified number of pounds, & about a zillion dollars – that separated me from Johnny Depp. My triumphant second place costume prize at tonight's Halloween party confirms me in that belief. I'm considering making this my normal conference- and teaching-wear.

physical culture (industry)

Once again I'm inspired by Jonathan Mayhew.

I stayed in shape thru high school by, well, having a high schooler's metabolism, & playing a lot of tennis. I stayed in shape thru college by doing a lot of running (ruining one knee in the process) and by living in out-of-the-way dorms on a huge campus, so that I had to walk several miles a day just to get to class. I stayed in shape thru grad school by living in Ithaca, where it was about a mile walk, much of it at what seemed a 30-degree incline, to get to the library or the department.

So now as I enter my twilight years of tenure & dim middle age, the machine is beginning to fall apart; years of sitting & reading, not to mention a general disinclination to do anything much active in the punishing South Florida climate, are catching up with me – minor backaches, stiffness, & a general Third Reich-like physical spreading out, as if my body needed more Lebensraum. (Having two preschoolers doesn't help, as it encourages one to view meals less as leisurely & carefully planned affairs than as ordeals – bolt one's food as quickly as possible, trying to head off infant disasters...)

After reading Jonathan's heartening post yesterday, I strapped on the iPod and walked a couple of miles, enough to get thru most of Give 'Em Enough Rope. Today (having changed shoes, as my Birkenstocks reduced my feet to bloody blistered ribbons) I did about half again as much – three movements of the Eroica. The after-pains are heartening.
***
Then again, there's this, towards which Margaret Soltan directed readers some months back. (That's not my picture, by the way.)

directionless

I wanna write in about five different directions, & of course oughtn't to be writing in any of them, but busily prepping tomorrow's class on Endgame & Adorno. But...

Eric comments on yesterday's chunk o' TWA:

"The individual passages have to be grasped as consequences of what has come before, the meaning of a divergent repetition has to be evaluated, and reappearance has to be perceived not merely as architectonic correspondence but as something that has evolved with necessity."

This seems true of how we read poems as well, no? Which leads me to wonder, is it more true of Beethoven than of other composers? You know music better than I do--is this true of some kinds, some periods, more than others?

Yes, indeed, I think that's true about how we read poems, at least one sort of poem (& it seems like a pretty close description of what the New Critics, bless their pointy little heads, used to tell us was the right way to trundle thru a Yeats poem. Which implies for me that Adorno's "immanent criticism" quite obviously has a lot in common with the New Criticism). In someone like Zukofsky or Ron Johnson, tho, I wonder if the notion of "evolving with necessity" – awfully reminiscent of "organic form" – might not have been eschewed in favor of something more like "architectonic correspondence"?

I think Adorno sees this sort of music – what he calls "highly organized" music – as emerging more or less with Bach (Adornauts feel free to correct me), and reaching its maturity with Beethoven and the Romantics. Me know more about music than you? – bite your tongue, Mr. S! Bob Archambeau has just pointed me to a fascinating omnibus review by Richard Taruskin of recent Adornian-influenced "defences" of "high" classical music, in The New Republic; much to think about, & interesting parallels perhaps with the situation of contemporary poetry.
***
Speaking of Ron Johnson, I've just discovered an old correspondent, WB Keckler, has a very lively blog indeed, Joe Brainard's Pyjamas. And he's dug up a Ronald Johnson poem I didn't know existed, the man's elegy for Princess Di. I'm afraid I don't share William's enthusiasm for the poem, tho I can see how tastes might diverge on this sort of thing. But it reminded me of section 36 of Geoffrey Hill's Speech! Speech!, which addresses the same subject & deploys many of the same images, but to a far more mordant effect:

Huntress? No not thát huntress but some
other creature of fable. And then for her |
like being hunted. Or inescapably
beholden (this should sound tired but not
emotional to excess). Half forgotten
in one lifetime the funeral sentences
instantly resurrected – hów can they do it?
Whatever of our loves here lies apart:
whatever it is | you look for in sleep:
simple bio-degradation, a slather
of half-rotted black willow leaves
at the lake's edge.

***
And speaking of Geoffrey Hill, I wish could be at this, if only to see the dour one's expression while Jorie Graham reads.
***
Eric muses, perhaps with an anthology in mind, about why so much writing about poetry is so awful. What, he wonders, are some really wonderful pieces of writing addressing individual poems, or poetry in general? Three sentimental favorites of my own:

•John Ruskin phrase-by-phrase dissection of "Lycidas" in Sesame & Lilies
•Hugh Kenner's Muybridgesque stop-motion of WCW's "Poem" (the one about the cat) in The Pound Era
•Susan Howe's fugue on "My Life had stood – a loaded Gun" in My Emily Dickinson

So what are your suggestions, readers gentle & ungentle?

Beethoven is Hegel in notes,

I wrote last post, thinking I'd hit upon something. But of course I must have read it, or something like it, somewhere in Adorno. In TWA's splendid, luminous essay "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel," after a particularly gnarly passage from Hegel's Subjective Logic, one finds this:

Music of Beethoven's type, in which ideally the reprise, the return in reminiscence of complexes expounded earlier, should be the result of development, that is, of dialectic, offers an analogue to this that transcends mere analogy. Highly organized music too must be heard multidimensionally, forward and backward at the same time. Its temporal organizing principle requires this: time can be articulated only through distinctions between what is familiar and what is not yet familiar, between what already exists and what is new; the condition of moving forward is a retrogressive consciousness. One has to know a whole movement and be aware retrospectively at every moment of what has come before. The individual passages have to be grasped as consequences of what has come before, the meaning of a divergent repetition has to be evaluated, and reappearance has to be perceived not merely as architectonic correspondence but as something that has evolved with necessity. What may help both in understanding this analogy and in understanding the core of Hegel's thought is recognizing that the conception of totality as an identity immanently mediated by nonidentity is a law of artistic form transposed into the philosophical domain. (Hegel: Three Studies, trans Shierry Weber Nicholson, MIT P 1993, 136-7)

***
Skoteinos: darkness, obscurity. The essay among other things is a wonderful primer on difficulty in Hegel.

unfinished

So now I have this tiny (externally) but (internally) whacking big iPod, 4 times the space of my wheezing, ancient original, & no longer have to worry about whether adding the new John Zorn record is going to force me to delete White Light/White Heat or something just as crucial. But then I have to worry about the hard drive on my laptop, which is (I believe) something like 20 gigs smaller (go figure) than this tiny iPod thingy. The solution of course is to relocate the iTunes library to an external hard drive.

Which I've done, & now I'm going wild ripping CDs that I haven't listened to in years. There was a very long period – maybe the better part of a decade – where I listened to almost nothing but "classical" music, jazz, & British Isles folk music. And I was under the impression that I had fairly decent libraries in all of those areas, until I started thinking to myself, what ought I to have listened to over those years when I was doing a nonstop diet of Messiaen, Gorecki, Schnittke, Gavin Bryars, etc? & so I came to realize that my library of the "real" classics – & here I'm thinking in particular of Beethoven, Brahms, & Mahler – is actually rather thin.

Some of that can be remedied in-house. I just ripped all 8 CDs of J.'s box set of the complete Beethoven quartets, along with her Karajan versions of the Brahms symphonies. But Mahler is still thin on the ground. One of the curiosities among the CDs I accumulated from my two-year subscription to the BBC's classical music magazine, which sent a disc every month, is a recording of Mahler's 10th symphony – unfinished at his death in 1911 – which has been "completed" by someone else.

Now I can imagine finishing an unfinished novel for which detailed notes exist – Wharton's The Buccaneers, for instance – or even writing a ending for a book whose author dropped dead without telling where he was going (Edwin Drood); I can even imagine, in an era when poetic rules & conventions were much more universal & binding than our own, finishing an unfinished poem: if, say, the last 300 lines of Thomson's The Seasons were missing, or if Spenser had left a detailed outline for the last 1/3 of Faerie Queene VI – I can see a writer of even moderate genius being able to turn out a serviceable pastiche. But I can't for the life of me imagine "completing" a major piece of romantic orchestral music.

(A lot of that's just a function of my abysmal ignorance about music – about, especially, the process of composition, orchestration, & so forth. Wikipedia tells me of Mahler's 10th that "a continuous 'beginning-to-end' draft of 1,945 bars exists, but much of it is not fully elaborated and most of it not orchestrated." Okay. I can dig the "not orchestrated" part: I assume GM sketched out the progression of major themes & melodies, & his "completer" assigned them to sections of the orchestra & them cooked up parts for the rest of the players. But what in heaven's name does "not fully elaborated" mean? This is all a function of my failure to take that music appreciation class back in the '80s, when I was still able to learn things.)

Pope is Bach in poetry; Thomson is Telemann. Beethoven is Hegel in notes.

Graphic Zukofsky

So you're wondering what to wear to the big book-release bash I'm planning for the (now about 5-6 weeks off) release of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky? How about these (scroll down just a skoshe) nifty graphic designs, which can be printed on t-shirts, tank tops, even your little one's onesie:


Makes me remember with some fondness the t-shirts somebody (was it Bob Creeley?) had made up for a little Zukofsky conference in Buffalo 10 years ago. On the back, one of Elsa Dorfman's more geekish photos of LZ in conversation. On the front, the same scarecrowish profile as in the above pink graphic, with the tiny legend "Louie, Louie." (Oh baby, we gotta go...)

(Thanks to Jessica for the tip.)

adventures fictive & nonfictive

So we're back in humid South Florida, after a rather hectic afternoon & evening's travels: driving hell-bent for leather down the Massachusetts turnpike after spending a bit too long over lunch; dropping off the rental car at the Enterprise station – a good 10-minutes' drive from the airport, & with only a bare hour to spare before the flight left – only to learn that the flimsy little wagon (a PT Cruiser of all things – damn the government for bailing out Lee Iaccoca all those years ago!) had an unseen dent under its front bumper (something we & our insurance company'll be sorting out for weeks to come no doubt); elbowing our way in true Manhattanite pushiness thru the obviously not-as-in-a-hurry-as-us people waiting at security, where the Logan Airport authorities in their wisdom were funnelling three lines of passengers thru a single metal detector. But we made the flight, & got home in fairly good time, only to realize that we'd just gotten used to a chill in the air and leaves on the ground. One of my Florida-bred students, touchingly, brought up in class the other day "those trees they have up north that they get syrup out of, right?" I wish I taken her a picture of the blazing-red maples.
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Thinking again of nonfiction, creative & otherwise. The books on the trip turned out to be neither Delany nor Austen (& not even Catullus), but a couple of serendipitous last-minute finds: Lytton Strachey's biography of Queen Victoria & Clive Wilmer's splendid Penguin edition of John Ruskin's Unto This Last (interestingly enough, the first Ruskin I ever read, in one of the mid-century Everyman hardcovers). Wilmer's done the book proud, both thru scrupulous editing and helpful endnotes, but also by taking the opportunity to surround Unto This Last – not a long book – with a wide range of Ruskin's writings addressing the issues of art & political economy, from "The King of the Golden River" to Fors Clavigera. I've been a Ruskin admirer for years & years now, & have only gotten around to Strachey fairly recently, & then only the famous Eminent Victorians, the book that put the snark into snarkiness. Queen Victoria is a much gentler book, tho by no means free of irony (a necessary nutrient, I believe). It shows off to great advantage Strachey's rather wonderful prose style, which I realized early on is no more or less than an updating of 18th-century cadential prose to a 20th-century sensibility. Ruskin, of course, is fit to teach anyone prose writing.
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"But is it creative nonfiction?" I found myself asking, with flat phrases from Lee Gutkind's troops-rousing editorials in Creative Nonfiction ringing (or dully thumping) in my mind? Well of course it isn't. At least not to the extent that Strachey & Ruskin are consciously writing within already defined genres – Strachey the biography, Ruskin the work of political economy, or, more broadly defined, the Victorian hortatory essay (I may just have coined a new genre there myself...).

I of course have no desire to trespass on the turves of any of my colleagues in the creative writing industry, which is why I'm reluctant to designate anything I write "creative nonfiction," though it may be nonfiction & certainly feels creative, at least while I've pounding it out. But I'm also thoroughly & consistently suspicious of all attempts at genre-defining, which in the end serve more to fence some things out from institutional attention than they do to draw attention to others. I deeply regret the academy's tendency, over the last half-century, to define "poetry" as "lyric," & more specifically as "one- to two-page personal lyric."

I find myself agreeing with Michael Peverett (whose prose I'll read any day, in almost any mood): the whole exercise smacks of the sociological, of an emergent branch of the American creative writing industry, under the pressure of various institutional demands, seeking to define itself by plucking out outstanding contemporary exemplars of its practice, by press-ganging past writers into the fold, & by drawing lines around what is & what isn't kosher under the banner. Maybe I'm just reacting allergically to Gutkind's rather pedestrian effusions, which seem to rule out about 80% of what I find interesting in nonfiction writing. But I worry that creative nonfiction, which seems in recent years to have begun to get a real foothold in the MFA mills, seems to be passing up a golden opportunity: rather than taking a purely negative definition – it's not verse, & it's not fiction – & running with the extraordinary freedom & openness those two rules provide, folks like Gutkind seem to want to reduce the form to something like "the personal essay & memoir."

Not that there's anything wrong with those forms – I'd take Montaigne & Pepys with me to that desert island, if I were allowed just a couple more books – but what about everything else? If the term "creative nonfiction" doesn't include Zukofsky's Bottom: on Shakespeare, Benjamin's Arcades Project, Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination – not to mention all of Emerson's essays, lots of MFK Fisher, Carlyle's The French Revolution, & Stein's portraits – then I'm afraid it's not of much use to me.
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Mildly amusing sidebar: Thinking o'er this CNF business, & wondering "do I ever write this stuff?" I kept stumbling over the phrase "literary journalism," used as one of the subgenres of the CNF master-genre. Oh, sure, thought I – I do that; I write lots of omnibus book reviews & career-spanning commentaries on writers that aren't really hard-boiled criticism. But then I realized that "literary journalism" didn't mean "writing about literary subjects for periodicals," but "journalism that's a cut above most newspaper & magazine writing in terms of its attention to language, theme, etc." In other words, the word literary is being used in that execrable & lazy manner as a vague synonym for "good." As one finds "literary" a new sub-genre in fiction: here we have your science fiction, here's your erotic fiction, here's your mystery & fantasy, & here's your literary fiction. And if you hang around long enough, you get to migrate from one shelf to the other, as Wilkie Collins & Edgar Poe did.

Ad Interim

With a remarkably increased iPod memory, I've been busily ripping & rediscovering old favorites: Miles's sublime Sketches of Spain, for instance, every note of which I know, but which I haven't listened through for a half-decade or more; or the effervescent Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, with its sprightly & sensitive readings of Frank Loesser & Rogers & Hart tunes. And exploring the vast library of things my friend the Grillo pressed on me: astonishing how dated '80s-era Cabaret Voltaire sounds, when it was such an avant-garde rush at the time.
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And cooking me up some "creative nonfiction" – as with any "assignment," using the opportunity to get some a few things straight in my own all too cluttered & muddled head. How's "The Strenuous Labor of the Concept" as a title?
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We're off to points north for a long weekend to (with luck) see some actual deciduous trees turning red & yellow, & to feel the much-missed bite of autumn nights. In a quandary over what to bring reading-wise. Somehow Hegel seems too heavy for such a jaunt. I've just acquired a copy of Samuel Delany's Phallos, which looks like great fun – a homoerotic Lacanian romp in the form of a pirated internet "summary" of a lost 1960s pornographic novel (posing as an 18th-century or late Victorian production) set in antiquity, shot thru with Delany's characteristic winking footnotes & nail-chewed ugly-but-attractive objects of desire – but I'm afraid I'd finish it on the plane up, & then be left bookless. Perhaps the solution – could it be? – is Emma.

Victorian parenting

Virginia Woolf on her father, Leslie Stephen: "Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts – very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet 'Read what you like,' he said, and all his books, 'mangy and worthless,' as he called them, but certainly they were many and various, were to be had without asking. To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not – that was his only lesson in the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant – that was his only lesson in the art of writing."

but is it creative?

Thanks so much for the kind comments on the last post, all the happy returns & so forth. The birthday was – yes – survived, & I managed to repress my Mr Ramsay-like feelings of having wasted my potential & having nothing to look forward to but a long darkening corridor of increasing aphasia (did I ever mention the first day of classes when I couldn't lay my hands on the word "syllabus"?), of having my students & friends finish my sentences for me, of being increasingly unable to type the word "have" ("ahve") or to remember that funny chord in "Maggie May," etc. – repressed them all in favor of several days of familial sunshine & a rather wonderful (thanks, Mrs R!) dinner party. I overdid the dal, as usual, & ended up sending three containers home with various guests; but there remain lentils, rice, vindaloo & palak paneer enough for supper tonight & lunch tomorrow (yum!).
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The big ticket gift item was an upgrade to my old iPod, which at almost 4 years old is beginning to feel its age – won't hold a battery charge for more than a few hours, takes forever to warm up, etc. The new "classic" iPod has a hard drive larger than my laptop, actually, so I can't really imagine ever quite filling it up, even if I were to take the time to rip every CD in the closet. (No, I have yet to warm up to the not-so-new world of exclusively downloaded music, though I'm quite amused by the concept of Radiohead's new album, which you can download on a "choose your own price" basis.)

The new iPod is packed with super-sharp color graphics which are nice but to me rather beside the point – after all, this is a audio delivery device, so far as I'm concerned. The only upgrade that I'm really keen on is in the time-wasting "games" category: where my old 2nd-generation machine had a pong-like game called "Brick," in which one bounced a dot off of slightly larger dots with a flipper-like stick, the new one has something called "Vortex," where you bounce a beautifully rendered white ball down a tunnel against exploding bricks. Wee-hoo. There goes the time that would have been devoted to my next book.
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I have been asked, & have accepted, a colleague's invitation to participate in a "creative nonfiction" reading. Problem is of course that I have no idea what "creative nonfiction" is, aside from a fairly new MFA program job description. (The Bourdieu in me answers that that is precisely what it is.) I figure, well, I sometimes write things that aren't poems, & that aren't book reviews or critical essays or bits of biography, & that aren't blog entries – so maybe that's creative nonfiction. But is it creative?

As Richard Thompson says, "So they say to you, 'Ooh, that's a funny chord, innit?' And I say, 'That's jazz!' 'Bit of a bum note there, eh?' So I play it again, and say, 'That's jazz!'"

dark alphabet

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Cosey is God

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

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

culinary

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

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

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

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

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

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