Geoffrey Hill's production pace

[Geoffrey Hill on the left, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams center – try imagining Ron Silliman with Pat Robertson – oh, never mind.]

Someone should write a book on poets' rate of production. I once began a Parnassus essay on Ted Enslin with the following snarky anecdote:

Two friends of mine were waiting at the maître d's desk in a posh New York restaurant, when one of them whispered urgently, "Look over at that table – there's Joyce Carol Oates! She's having dinner with a guy – and he's holding her hand. He must be telling her he loves her." "Naw," the other said, "he's just trying to keep her from writing during the meal."

I went on to compare Enslin – who's published a veritable blizzard of books over his long and immensely prolific career – with Cid Corman & Robert Kelly, & gave some thought (& rather too much snark) to the effects of overpublication, overproduction.

I think I had in mind, as counterexample, a poet like Basil Bunting, who popped off at 85, leaving behind – what? – 250 pages of work, only a handful of lines of which I'd be willing to sacrifice on that desert island. Or Geoffrey Hill, whose slim volumes – at least thru the mid-90s – emerged with such irregularity and constipated, impacted grace that one couldn't imagine His Giant Dourness becoming a publishing machine like John Ashbery or T. C. Boyle.

Well, there's a new Geoffrey Hill book out: Oraclau | Oracles, just published by Clutag Press in Thame, Oxfordshire. As it comes closely on the heels of A Treatise of Civil Power (Penguin, 2007 – an earlier chapbook version by Clutag in 2005), it's worth casting an eye over Hill's publishing pace, as he nears 80.

I met Hill once in I think it was 1987, at Campus on the Hill, where I was impressed by his savage comb-over (he'd just gotten what seems a very bad haircut, so the combed-over portion failed to meet the hair on the other side of his bald spot, as tho he'd been imperfectly scalped), limp handshake, & implacable seriousness. I was already deeply impressed by his poems – I had his first Collected Poems (Oxford UP, 1986; Penguin, 1985), which brought together 5 books & one longish poem published over 25 years:

For the Unfallen (1959)
King Log (1968)
Mercian Hymns (1971)
Tenebrae (1978)
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983)
Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres (1984)

For those who're counting, that's something like a book every 4 years. There was a lapse between the Collected Poems & Hill's next volume, but when that one came out, it was as if someone had turned on a spigot:

Canaan (1997)
The Triumph of Love (1998)
Speech! Speech! (2000)
The Orchards of Syon (2002)
Scenes from Comus (2005)
Without Title (2006)
A Treatise of Civil Power (2005/2007)
Oraclau | Oracles (2010)

What's more, the jacket copy for Oraclau | Oracles announces that this book is actually only one of five collections Hill has completed since A Treatise, one of which will appear in 2012, and all five of which will constitute the "final section" of Hill's Collected Poems 1952-2012, "scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2013."

My word. 12 collections, then, in 16 years. The man has picked up the pace a bit. What's most surprising is that Hill's post-1990 work is to my mind his best, retaining the gnarly intensity of the early work but transposing it to a decorous (& sometimes flippant) vernacular, plumbing the moral issues with which he's always been obsessed more deeply than ever. I haven't read Oraclau | Oracles yet, but I'm itching to; at this point in Hill's career, more collections are just more of a good thing.

Maybe I should reconsider that Joyce Carol Oates joke. Or maybe read some more of her books. Naw.

timid

Reading – mostly re-reading – Ezra Pound's early criticism, most of it from before the First World War, in Ira B. Nadel's Penguin Early Writings: Poems and Prose. An odd freshness to the reading, out of the aged New Directions typefaces and into the "canonical" Penguin fonts – and perhaps simply the lapse of a couple of years since revisiting the texts.

Pound was 28 when the Great War broke out; me, I'm – well – rather older than that now. When I was 28, I was living in Northern Virginia, finishing my dissertation. It would be another three years or so before I landed my first (and still only) academic position. Where I am now Full Professor, aged, grey-bearded, balding, making up for the sclerosis of my thinking with a kind of awkward Pythonesque classroom showmanship.

The cusp of 30 is a good age, a vigorous age: I read Pound's always energetic prose, his boundless ambitions, & envy:

I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost by translation, and – scarcely less important what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated. ("How I Began")

There is no waffle, no "on the other hand" or "but" or "one might concede." Positions are staked militarily, with no concessions, no "I am staking out a position" – the poet-critic speaks, & presents what he says as self-evident truth:

Ibycus and Liu Ch'e presented the "Image." Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag because of his lack of it. ("Vorticism")

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, and not from life... ("A Retrospect")

This is the writing of youth – or the writing of sublime self-assurance – or the writing, some would cavil, of monstrous arrogance. I wish I could write like this. I wonder, is my constant weighing of alternatives a mark of my fundamentalist upbringing, my deeply-ingrained diffidence (a Uriah Heepish humility – my mother always pronounced "humble" without the aitch)? or has a quarter-century in the academy so socialized me in the discourse of the "yes, but" that I'm unable, without considerable strain & self-analytical unease, to say what I think?

Note to self: a course in arrogance, in the sublime self-assurance that makes Milton (fuck you, Ezra Pound) just as great a poet as Dante, and just as scrappy.

all criticism should be professedly personal criticism. In the end the critic can only say 'I like it', or 'I am moved', or something of that sort. When he has shown us himself we are able to understand him. ("The Serious Artist")

All that the critic can do for the reader or audience or spectator is to focus his gaze or audition. ("A Retrospect")

Seth Abramson responds

Seth Abramson posted a reasoned & nicely-toned response to my little recent bellyache about the professionalization of poetry; my first impulse was to respond in the comments box, but I think he deserves to be heard above the fold:

Mark,

I think it's important to remember--as I always say, in nearly every article I write on the MFA degree--that the MFA is a "largely-unmarketable, non-professional art school degree." Consequently, the purpose of the rankings is to encourage programs to fund students (and do other things that applicants care about, like emphasizing studio work and a three-year flexible curriculum) not to help anyone get a job because (say) they went to the #11 program instead of the #42 program. That's really beside the point -- the rankings are intended for applicants only, i.e. to help them understand which programs are best at offering applicants what applicants report they care about, not for the benefit of professors, employers, &c. I realize everything in life has contained within it the possibility for its misuse and misunderstanding, but that doesn't change the fact that the rankings are not conceived of, nor designed as, the sort of cultural artifact you seem to presume they are.

Best,
Seth

And here's how I'd respond:

Seth--

all your points are well taken, & I'm totally supportive of the extent to which your lists really are designed to help applicants find a program that will give them what they need, without saddling them with lifetime debts.

And I'm not presuming anything about how the rankings are "conceived of" or "designed." Alas, in this sublunary world of Consumer Reports and the US News college rankings, your lists will inevitably taken as something other than what you've conceived or designed them for. As many times as we repeat that the MFA is, in your apt words, a "largely-unmarketable, non-professional art school degree," prospective MFAs will continue to imagine that they are the lucky few who will win the brass ring: much of it has to do with simple modeling, their wholly reasonable observation that poets & writers who teach in MFA programs, especially those who've managed to hook up with the "visiting writer" and contest judge circuits, have a pretty good life of it.

And as I implied in that previous post, while the MFA ideally would be an "art school" degree, the vocational training that comes with the program – teaching undergraduate courses, working on a magazine or a book series – is directed either towards a career teaching in the academy or a more vaguely defined "being a professional writer" within the various networks that make up the biz.

In the end I suspect it's a bit of a catch-22: despite the listing's laudable intentions, & its very real orientation towards applicants rather than institutions – as opposed to the program lists Lingua Franca used to run, ranking PhDs in various sub-disciplines – it's inevitably being taken in ways you didn't intend. And its very existence, as a kind of Rough Guide for those who are about to insert themselves into the MFA & all it entails, is a mark of this "art school" degree's sliding into professionalization.

Thanks for responding so thoughtfully,
Mark

packing

No, I'm not packing quite yet, but we're leaving at the crack of dawn for a long weekend in Williamsburg, VA, which has become one of our semi-habitual autumn haunts. It's good to get away to where one can really feel the chill in the air, where the trees actually turn. We also like 18th-century architecture, & the smell of woodsmoke, & people pretending to be 18th-century folks. If I lived in England, I suspect I'd be a (English) Civil War reenactor (Parliamentary side, of course).

I've decided on course texts for this spring's "Epic" class. Yes, it'll be Robert Fagles for the Iliad and the Odyssey; Stanley Lombardo tempted me, but Bernard Knox's introductions and notes for the Fagles volumes are just so very good, & the translation is so generally solid (if occasionally "chatty," as one scholar notes) that I'm not sure they're losing much. For the Aeneid, I'm leaping into the dark & using Sarah Ruden's new Yale translation. I'll let you know how it works out.

This afternoon I will attempt to make students excited about Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. I'll let you know how that works out, unless it's such a fiasco that I end up resigning my professorship and crawling into a hole somewhere. Go figure – I love teaching Milton. I just want to jump up & down & say, See, see, can't you see? He's so BRILLIANT! & he's such a PSYCHO! But that of course is beneath my dignity, so I try to do in balanced, periodic sentences.

My MFA problem

That last post set me thinking – or maybe this weekend I'd think about anything to avoid marking papers – about the entire institution of the MFA, which has become a topic of internet pissing & moaning as ubiquitous these days as Madonna was in 1985. Bob Archambeau, in the comments section of a recent, typically learned, post about "wit" in contemporary poetry on his own blog, lays out a list of a list of "ways to talk about the professionalization of poetry," from most to least boring:

1. Most boring: ranking MFA programs
2. Second most boring: complaining about the ranking of MFA programs.
3. Semi-boring: complaining about the prevalence of MFA programs
4. Sort of exciting: looking into the causes and effects of the rise of MFA programs from as disinterested and historically-informed a perspective as possible.
5. Exciting: seeing how the MFA programs fit into several long histories: of the universities, of the social role of the poet, of professionalism.
6. Totally exciting: linking the histories mentioned in 5, above, to aesthetic effects.

Hmmm. My own thoughts probably fall somewhere off the scale on the "boring" side, I fear. Let us say

0. Eminently pass-overable: personal ruminations on the MFA.

At any rate, I find the whole Seth Abramson-MFA ranking phenomenon actually rather interesting, at least as an index of how much things have shifted between my own far-off days as a young poet in an MFA program & my present as a portly, grey-bearded full prof who teaches in a young "dark horse" program. (Which, in case you're interested, includes exciting faculty with expertise in Creative Nonfiction, Literary Translation, and even – dare I say it? – Biography!)

Some things never change: there's the endless mantra, repeated by almost everyone, that "writing can't be taught"; a program can only do something else – give one time & breathing space in which to write, provide a interested company of similarly-minded young poets, perhaps (if one's really lucky) even drop one into a mentorship relationship with an older poet.

But certain things have clearly changed. The very existence of Seth Abramson's list, for instance. Now of course people back in the day used to talk about what the "best" programs were – where the "hot" poets were teaching, & where there were generous fellowships and cushy assistantships. That all this scuttlebutt has been qualitatively analyzed and put into a list, however, is an index of just how professionalized the MFA industry has become. I hear it in the corridors, & see it when I visit other institutions; MFAs are talking about poetry like they always have, but they're talking about pobiz (the prizes, the publications, the fellowships, the various ways to "make it") more than they ever have.

Indeed, the whole business of being a poet associated with academe has become much more rigorous and codified than it was. Publications – sure; journals are good, but a book is even better (which of course necessitates the endless round of $25 reading fees – a boring grouse in itself). A web presence is a must. Five years ago, you had to have a blog; now you have to be on Facebook, and friend everybody who might possibly help you get ahead. Attending AWP is a must – not so much to go to panels or readings, but to rub shoulders with possible publishers and useful connections. (And let's not kid ourselves – the off-site readings, both at MLA & AWP, are less a counter to the onsite events than they are their hipster simulacrum: if AWP is the mall, then the offsite events are the black market – but they're both commercial gatherings.)

I have rather ghastly misgivings whenever I lurch back and think about the MFA as a professional program. Here's where I'm coming from: I spent 6 or 7 years at a top-ranked PhD program where we as grad students were being explicitly groomed to do precisely what our professors/mentors did: to take up tenure-track positions teaching some variety of literature/theory/cultural studies. I don't have precise figures on the fortunes of my cohort at Campus on the Hill, but I suspect that we may be the last generation to have a better-than-even chance of grabbing that brass ring. The bottom dropped out of the academic "job market" around the time we matriculated, and it's been dropping steadily downward ever since. And as the jobs have dried up, the bar for grabbing one of those vanishing tenure-track jobs has climbed steadily higher. Once upon a time you could get a starting tenure-track position at Our Fair University with an ABD and a promising scholarly project; these days you won't even make the first cut of the applicant pool unless you've published at least a couple of articles. (In another 10 years, we might just as well put "book published or under contract" in the job description.)

Things are even tougher for MFA grad students who hope to get jobs like those of their MFA professors – you know, secure tenure-track university positions with livable teaching loads. The lucky ones will end up with instructorships or tenure-track positions at community colleges or teaching-intensive institutions; they'll be teaching 4 or 5 courses a semester, wondering where all the time for writing went. More will end up trying to piece a living together out of adjunct gigs, and maybe eventually drop out of the academy altogether. Only an exceptionally lucky few will end up doing what they were professionalized to do.

But, some argue, we're not training MFAs to be professors – we're training them to be poets. Well, so far as any real vocational training they get in the MFA goes, it's to to the things a professor does – it's certainly not to be an accountant or a dental hygienist or a geologist. And what many MFA programs seem to be doing, besides initiating young people into an increasingly dead-end profession, is professionalizing them as poets – is teaching them to work the circuits of publication, prize contests, post-graduate fellowships, etc.

My problem – aside from a general, gnawing sense of bad faith in participating in the graduate side of higher education at all – is that I don't have a clue as to how to help anyone get ahead as a poet. I can look at your poems & tell you what's exciting & unexciting about them to me; I can show you a bunch of tricks I've learned over the years; I can point you to any number of poets you might not have looked at otherwise. But I know about as much as your cat does about how to become a famous and successful poet-person.

I gave up staying awake nights trying to figure out how to be a famous & successful poet-person a long time ago. I've settled for trying to figure out how to write the poems I want to write, and to write them as well as I can. I think I might be able to help you with your poetry, if you want help with your poetry. Getting you published, hooking you up with the right contests, helping you into a job? I won't say you're on your own there, because there's thousands upon thousands out there right now trying to grab just those brass rings. But it's like those lovely subdisciplines of Middle English or colonial American lit: there are some regions of this profession I know a bit about, but don't claim to "do."

I'm not ashamed to call myself a professional academic; I'm a professional teacher, a professional scholar, to some degree even a professional writer. But I'm not a professional poet, & the moment a graduate program falls into the trap of thinking it can professionalize a creative praxis (even if it does so unconsciously), that's the moment it becomes a betrayal of that very praxis.

dark horses

Seth Abramson, with his annual Poets & Writers rankings of the top creative writing programs in the country, has become something of a kingmaker in the whole CW industry. Some people, like the folks who rush out to buy the US News college rankings every year, actually take these things seriously. My old undergrad alma mater, bless her, has been touting their program's breaking the top 40 of the rankings at the head of every e-mail and brochure I've seen over the past year.

Imagine my surprise then when I came upon Abramson's piece on the Huffington Post, something of an appendix to his latest rankings (see 'em here), on "The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs," and found, by the magic of alphabetization, the MFA program I attended –

Hard to imagine an underrated Ivy, but Campus on the Hill's MFA struggles to stay in the top 10 nationally despite boasting the third-best funding scheme in America -- even if you don't consider the fully-funded one-year lectureship virtually all graduates receive. The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) rates College Town at the Foot of the Hill the top college town in America. Plus, the student-to-faculty ratio is jaw-droppingly good

– cheek by jowl with the program in which I now teach at Our Fair University, described with beautiful concision as "A dark horse among dark horses."

I have no idea what the hell that means, but having studied hard in the long schoolroom of poststructuralist logodaedaly, I'm convinced that it can be made to mean something good. Very good.

reading notes

A veritable maelstrom of work lately, in the wake of an epic birthday party this past weekend. (The recycling bins are full of beer and wine bottles; I hazily remember – with wincing embarassment – that the guitars came out sometime after midnight.) In the intervals of grading (or thinking about grading), reading for classes, taking care of the girls, & other pursuits, I've turned over a few books of poems.

John Taggart's Crosses: Poems 1992-1998 (Stop Press 2005) was the great unfindable book (not) in my library. John & I had been frequent correspondents for a long while, had spent quality time with each other over the years, not least in the DC book and record stores, but had to some extent fallen out of touch after I moved to Florida & became immersed in the LZ biography. We reconnected at the 2004 LZ centenary conference at Barnard/Columbia in 2004, and since then I've deeply enjoyed his Flood Editions books, Pastorelles and There Are Birds – splendid collections both, exploring a newly compressed, rhythmically various idiom. To my delight, the postman the other day brought his brand-new, enormous selected poems, Is Music (Copper Canyon), edited by Peter O'Leary.

But Crosses: after searching futilely for the book online for years (having missed its initial publication announcement entirely), I'd entirely given up on finding the book, only to happen upon a pristine volume in City Lights in SF this past spring. For me, there was an odd kind of time-lag in reading this in 2010, for Crosses is really echt mid-period Taggart, its poetics deeply congruent with the repetition-with-variation of Loop (Sun & Moon, 1991), Standing Wave (Lost Roads, 1993), and When the Saints (Talisman House, 1999), rather than the suppler, more demotic poems of Pastorelles & There Are Birds. These are, however, as with the best of Taggart's work, strange, darkly luminous poems. He writes about music, musicians, and philosophers; he even writes, however obliquely, about film – I note an immersion in The Last Temptation of Christ. But there's no sense of the shallowly ekphrastic or adventitiously occasional here: a painting or a performance or even a movie are for Taggart the levers with which to pry his way into the deep & uncomfortable moral mysteries of life. There's a profound & bloody, quite probably heretical, Christian imagination at work in Taggart's poetry, along with a relentless, merciless musicality.

[102]
***
Turning from Crosses to Robert Creeley's late Life & Death (New Directions, 1998) is like switching from all-Schnittke radio station to a late-night noir jazz program. The idiom is far more comfortable – Creeley's familiar, clipped idiolect, the brief lines & occasionally memorable turns that have been familiar to our ears since For Love – but it's all in a darker, albeit simpler register. I've heard much complaint of the long falling-off of Creeley's work after its peak some 40 years ago (and yes, my favorite of his books remains Pieces), but most of the poems in Life & Death, tho they may not measure up to the bravura experimentation of the early books, are beautifully turned, even graceful. What makes the book hard reading is not the occasional slackness, the moments in which Creeley repeats well-worn moves from his playbook, or even the intentionally awkward rhyming bits, when Creeley betrays his affection for the Fireside Poets he read in his childhood – but the poet's growing obsession with aging and death, the sense that each poem might well be his final valediction.

[103]

alma mater

It was a kind of gnarly weekend. Yesterday (Sunday) I cooked up a pretty excellent dinner for some guests – palak paneer, chicken korma, basmati rice – which was washed down with approximately 1.3 bottles of wine for each of us; I’m still feeling the effects, I fear, after a long day of work. The madness of having a dinner party only sank in as we were doing the grocery shopping in the afternoon: I’d gotten up at 5 AM to catch a flight back to South Florida, having spent Friday and Saturday at my old alma mater, a large, engineering-technology-and-hard-science-oriented southern land grant university.

I was visiting – and a fine visit it was – as a member of the English Department’s “Distinguished Alumni Board.” I don’t feel very distinguished, I confess, tho visiting campus at length for the first time in two decades or so made me feel quite valetudinarian. That was what was striking. Old Alma Mater’s campus (see above the English Department’s former home building, where I spent hundreds of hours of classes) is incomparably prettier than Our Fair University where I now labor, and it’s been expanded remarkably: lots of new buildings, all more or less attractive, all more or less constructed in harmony with the dozens of university Gothic edifices already in place. So it hasn’t really changed much. I walked around on the paths I walked at 19 or 20, I visited the campus bookstore to find that they still specialized pretty much in t-shirts and hoodies rather than books, even the hotel where I was staying seemed to be hosting the same crowds of drunken students in their nightclub. (It’s now a Holiday Inn, tho it was a Marriott back then.)

And amid the clouds of garden-variety nostalgia, I found myself remembering not merely the good things – the great courses, the late-night sessions of reading and talking, the dancing, the girlfriends, the house parties with their student bands – but the frequent loneliness, the grinding boredom of so much of the time: the desperate need to find something to do when the books got just too oppressive. And I felt really, deeply old – even tho by any objective standard I’m still roughly middle-aged. It’s that sense (& I have no intention of dwelling on such a clichéd topic) of one’s youth as a time of endless opportunities, of open-ended choices and options. Hey, I’m more than happy with the path I’ve taken, & wouldn’t swap it for anything; but there’s something about being a 20-year-old with only vague ideas of the future that, at least in retrospect, is very exhilarating.

The “Distinguished Alumni Board” held a series of business meetings, and then served as hosts for a series of career workshops for English majors – résumé critiques, mock interviews, little round-table discussions of what these young people wanted to do with their lives. I fear I might have scared a handful of young folks away from graduate school in English (the terms “Ponzi scheme” and “astronomical odds” figured in my conversation). I was, you see, the academic “ringer” of the board – the one person who’d gone on the grad school in literature & actually made a success of it. And heaven knows, given the restructuring of the academy and the pyramid scheme of the academic labor force these days, I’m not recommending that path to anyone else.

The other alumni present were to a person personable, successful, and very nice, and almost without exception quite well to do. I suppose what stuck in my craw, more violently as the weekend proceeded, was the continual invocation of the “real world” – you know, that thing you enter once you graduate from college. By the final event, I found myself wincing every time I heard the phrase uttered, especially when it was coupled with a hopeful evocation of how well-prepared these young English majors were to “use” their “language skills” to get ahead in this “real world.” I’m a slow study with words, so I didn’t get around to formulating the thoughts swirling in my head until late Saturday night, but here’s what I would have said if I’d had Wilfrid Laurier’s famed silver tongue:

This weekend the other members of the Distinguished Alumni Board, all successful, generous, and remarkably nice people, have given you a good deal of very sound advice about making your way in the “real world” – the world after graduation. I wouldn’t subtract a word from any of the useful things they said. But I’d just like you to take a moment for a thought experiment: What if the world you’re living in now – the world of the English major, where the most important things are beautiful, well-crafted, exploratory monuments of language; where you expose yourselves to and participate in wonderful intensities of emotional depth, of social critique, of aesthetic experience; where you devote yourself, singly and in conjunction with your colleagues, to open-ended, sensibility-expanding intellectual exploration – what if that world’s just as “real” as the world in which your command of language all too often becomes a tool for selling things – yourself included? What if it’s realer? What if this is the real world, and the “real world” of “getting and spending” is just the Matrix?

Just a thought experiment – maybe. But if you value the kind of intellectual labor, emotional intensity, and aesthetic joy you find in the work you’ve done in the Department of English, and if you find the “real world” failing to live up to the possibilities of the “utopia” you’ve inhabited over the last few years, then don’t be afraid to try to change that “real” world, to make its reality something closer to the possibilities you’ve seen here.

That was my last word – and I wish I'd actually said it.

bring on the noise

My musical life tends to be a one-track thing. For the past week or more I've been doggedly (but with delight) listening thru the entire corpus of the Mekons, chronologically, as a single playlist on my iPod. I'm maybe 250 tracks into the total 370. I've passed thru the "punk" Mark I Mekons, the country & western Mark II Mekons, the delightfully experimental mid-period Mekons, & am now into the turn-of-the-millennium "retrospective" Mekons (ie, 2 volumes of odds 'n' sods, before they come roaring back in full force with Journey to the End of Night).

Instrumental rock isn't a genre I've given a lot of thought to, tho I'll blushingly admit to owning way too many King Crimson records, and even having once upon a time been able to play "Red" (badly) on the guitar. If you're still inclined to think of the genre in terms of surf rock (The Ventures, Dick Dale) or of noodly jazz improvs, you need to buy the above EP, There Are Crashes. It's by the Bells≥, a new Brooklyn-based band whose drummer – the only reason I know about this group – is the redoubtable Zach Barocas, whom I know as the proprietor of the excellent Cultural Society website. Zach's an excellent editor, a smart & sensitive poet, and a powerful & expressive whaler of the skins. This is muscular & exciting music, continually reaching out for, & then foreswearing, the "big" gesture. It reminds me of nothing so much as Mission of Burma in their prime. A lovely noise.

Hie thee to Bandcamp (for fancy formats) or the iTunes Store.

reading Lycidas

Thinking about Lycidas over the past few days, rereading the poem again & again. Thinking about Emerson in 1833, on his first transatlantic crossing, the ship caught in a gale & no-one on board knowing whether they were going to be alive or dead an hour hence, fishing the poem out of his memory: "I remembered up nearly the whole of Lycidas, clause by clause, here a verse & there a word, as Isis in the fable the broken body of Osiris."

Edward King, "a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637." "Who would not sing for Lycidas?" And who would sing for Milton, were he to drop dead at 28, author of a handful of minor poems? "So may some gentle muse / With lucky words favor my destined urn..." And who would sing for the 30-year-old Emerson, all his works yet to be written?

Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, seizes upon Lycidas – "a book perfectly known to you all" – & gives it an early & still unsurpassed "close reading":

Now go on: –

'Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast.
Blind mouths –'

I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly.

Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, int he two great offices of the Church – those of bishop and pastor.

A 'Bishop' means 'a person who sees.'

A 'Pastor' means 'a person who feeds.'

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed, – to be a Mouth.

In both instances, an immediate laying hands on a text familiar from childhood. (A nineteenth-century phenomenon, this easy assuming of familiarity with Milton's minor poems?) I didn't read Lycidas, I suspect, until I was in my mid-twenties. My students are encountering it, for the most part, for the first time – unless they've read it in another college course. What's lost in the university teaching of canonical poems when students (& for that matter their instructors) don't have that from-childhood familarity with the text? (More importantly, since there's no turning back the cultural clock, what's gained?)

Samuel Johnson hated Lycidas. One of the best "bad review" lines ever: "Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author."

For Johnson, the poem suffered in the first place from being a pastoral, "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting." (Keeping in mind that "vulgar" and "disgusting" meant something rather different in 1779 than they do now.) Its pastoral frame, its allegory, its "inherent improbability" – its lack of shall we say realism – mean that the poem "will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honour." And Lycidas's "grosser fault" lies precisely in Milton's Renaissance humanism: its mingling of the "awful and sacred truths" of Christian religion with the "trifling fictions" of the classical pastoral. If Lycidas is praised, Johnson concludes, it is because the "blaze" of "reputation justly acquired" "drives the eye away from nice examination."

We could say, I think, that Lycidas just isn't the sort of poem Johnson likes; (and – moreover?) that it violates his criteria of aesthetic valuation, criteria which include a certain "smoothness" of texture, a certain realism, and above all an ironclad decorum: one simply oughtn't higglety-pigglety mix together classical nymphs & singing shepherds with Christian pastors, regardless of the etymology of "pastor" itself.

(Discuss, perhaps, in relation to Michael Thurston's "review" of Black Life?)

bad. review.

Ruskin did more than write big books critiquing Renaissance art & architecture; he was a pretty busy critic of his contemporaries, as well, issuing a number of volumes of “Academy Notes” which assessed each year’s offerings from the Royal Academy. And he became quite an influential critic, more than fond of puncturing established reputations. Punch ran a brief bit of doggerel as a “pathetic lament of an Academician”:

I paints and paints,
Hears no complaints
And sells before I'm dry,
Till savage Ruskin sticks his tusk in,
Then nobody will buy.

Me, I’m kind of envious. The critic calls the work as she or he sees it, consequences – both to the critic and to his subject – be damned. Ruskin doesn’t give a rat’s ass if half the painters in England hate him, as long as the good ones know he’s on their side; and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass if he destroys the market for someone’s second-rate work – that just means someone should be working harder & painting better.

There’s precious little of that out there in the poetry reviewing world right now (aside of course from the perennially bilious William Logan). And in the poetry blogosphere, bad reviews are very hard to find indeed. Reviews seem to come in three varieties: more or less enthusiastic recommendations; expressions of doubt about the direction a poet’s taken, cushioned by mounds of respectful praise for her or his previous work and overall “project”; and attacks on established figures, mounted more or less on the basis of the labyrinthine socio-political-aesthetic politics of the “scene.”

Here’s an example of a bad review – indeed, an über-bad review, titled “Worst. Book. Ever.” It’s by a blogger who calls himself “MT,” and it’s of a collection called Black Life, by Dorothea Lasky. Up front: I do not know either MT or Dorothea Lasky. They are not my “friends” on Facebook, nor have we exchanged books, addresses, or offprints. This is really the first time I’ve ever heard of her poetry; yes, I don’t get out much. (I have it turns out heard MT’s real name, & at some point I may have read an essay of his, but more on him later.)

It’s a savage review, which reads like the sort of thing I’m tempted to write at 2 in the morning after I’ve had a few dog’s noses (gin & bitter) & am feeling particularly rejected by the world. Read the thing yourself; it’s not as beautifully crafted as one of Logan’s hatchet jobs, or as unbalanced as one of Franz Wright’s tirades, tho it has some nice moments of saevo indignatio. But note: MT feels, for whatever reason, that he needs to keep his bile (his “crankiness,” as he calls it in the blog description) anonymous.

What I’m really interested in are the comments, however. One sympathetic soul asks, if you hate the book so much, why bother reading it? To which MT replies:

i was reading/hearing about the book, there were poems in it that had been published in some high-profile and reputable places, so i picked it up and gave it a try. then the motivation was intellectual curiosity. as you know, like you, i think about this stuff for a living. so i wanted to understand how, why, by what definition, these were good poems. i'll admit failure on that score: i could not find a way to find them good.

The negative comments were rather interesting, however. One read simply “you really really just don't get it. Sad for you. Oh well.” Another:

It's kind of entertaining how clueless this review is. I'm just trying to figure out what's more pathetic—your nonsensical fundamentalism regarding "correct" grammar and punctuation, your lack of a sense of humor, your lack of a sense of poetry, or your malicious, tedious, and baseless attacks on the author's character.

But the final response really takes the cake. It's by someone I'll call "T"; I've met him once or twice, we are indeed friends on FB, he's always struck me as an intelligent, personable young poet-critic. T begins by emphatically "outing" MT, revealing his real name & his academic position:

It is especially sad to me that this person (Associate Professor of English ------------- for anyone who may not have cared to figure out the abbreviation "MT") teaches young women at ----------, and may in fact be a tenured professor, since the arguments he's making and his criteria for judgment are both paternalistic, if not misogynistic, racist, and very possibly anti-Semitic. In terms of the charge of misogyny, women's writing in particular has often been accused of being sentimental, effete, ill-formed, and naive (or in this case "faux-naif"). It is one of our unfortunate Victorian inheritances, and one that ---- proves has not gone away despite the efforts of countless artists, intellectuals, and writers in the 20th century. In terms of the charge of racism (which also obviously applies to the first), to assume that there is a standard or normative English (i.e., "well-written prose") reinforces a power structure that maintains its hegemony by policing certain forms of language use and marginalizing the language use of various “others.” Given that much of Pound's writing could hardly be considered normative (now or then), it is not just a little ironic that ----- holds up Pound as a model of normative English grammar. I'm not sure what ----- means by "Chagallery," but I also find it curious that the one example of "ugliness" he holds up, other than Lasky's poetry that is, happens to be a Russian Jew who survived pogrom and drew on Russian-Jewish folk traditions for his art.

(For the record, I can't abide Chagall's nostalgic surrealism-and-water. Does that make me anti-Semitic? Ask my Jewish daughters or my Jewish in-laws or my Jewish friends. And if we're going for full disclosure, perhaps T should have been more up front about the fact that he himself happens to be married to Dorothea Lasky.)

All this is rather beside the point. MT is an intelligent reader, generally well-disposed (as his blog demonstrates) to a pretty wide range of contemporary aesthetic modes. His review of Black Life is an ill-disposed savaging, but at the same time he's clearly trying to make sense of what sort of aesthetic criteria within which Lasky is operating. And none of his commentators are the least bit interested in helping him out. As MT puts it,

maybe it's a failure of critical imagination. maybe i got punk'd and this book was really a brilliant, flarfy critique of precisely the slackly vapid bid for a gig at a fifth-rate, low-res mfa program that it pretended to be. if so, when ashton kucher and camera crew show up, i'll sheepishly accept my punking.

If post-Romantic literary history has taught us anything, it's that when a writer is retooling the terms by which poetry is to be received – refunctioning what has been stigmatized as "weakness" into contemporary strengths, reshuffling what is to be taken as "bad" and "good" – she or he, & those who value her or his work, need to work double hard in making explicit the terms of those revaluations. Just ask Wordsworth, Whitman, Stein, etc. Just ask the Flarfistes. I don't know Lasky's work (tho I'm interested enough now to seek it out), but the bits that MT presents don't seem to conform to most definitions of "good" poetry: so show me, those of you in the know, what new definitions are being advanced.

2 latest reasons to love Hollywood

1) Sacha Baron Cohen, he of Brüno, Borat, & Ali G. fame, is set to star in a biopic of the Queen lead singer Freddy Mercury, according to Variety.

2) In other high culture news, Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and I, Robot has signed on to film Paradise Lost as an "epic war in heaven between archangels Michael and Lucifer." It "will be crafted as an action vehicle that will include aerial warfare, possibly shot in 3D." I dunno about you, but I'm pretty damned anxious to see this.

annals of academic publishing, part 437

Back in February 2008 I got a nice email from a journal editor (henceforward we'll call him "JE"), asking me to write a brief review of Maeera Shreiber's Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Stanford 2007) for his journal (henceforward "Journal"). So I had 82 other things to do that semester & over the coming summer; so I was swamped as usual; so of course I said "sure, send me the book!"

Well, true to my word, I got my review in by the end of July (2008, remember). And a nice thank-you from JE. "We'll be in touch if it needs anything." And then I forgot all about, confident that Maeera's work was going to receive its due in Journal.

Flash-forward to February 2010. I get an email from another journal who's lost my mailing address; they want to send me offprints of a review I wrote for them over the summer of 2009. And my memory is jogged about that Shreiber review. So I dash off an email:

Hi--

Just got an email from another journal, tracking me down for offprints of something of mine they published last year & forgot to tell me about, and it reminded me of this review of Maeera Shreiber's Singing in a Strange Land written for [Your Journal] year before last. Was it ever published? Did it somehow go astray?

best,

The response?:

Dear Prof. Scroggins,
I am the new editor of [Our Journal] -- [JE] is no longer with the journal -- and as I look through our files, I see that the review was scheduled to be published in issue 40.3 but somehow was not. I'll reschedule its publication for our next issue, which will be 41.3
With many apologies,
[New Editor]
Editor

Ah, gotta love that "somehow." A vague way of saying "oops, lost in the files." And earlier this week – a solid two years after I submitted the piece – I received contributor's copies & offprints of the review.

I don't think they do it this way at the New Yorker. Anyway, if you're interested in reading what I have to say about Maeera Shreiber's excellent (but no-longer-so-new) book on American Jewish poetry, backchannel me & I'll give you the actual citation for my laggard publisher.

half-way point

It's been a very long time since I've posted any original poetry on Culture Industry, but perhaps reaching the half-way mark on a long-term project calls for a bit of celebration. Over the past couple of years I've been working on a longish project in the mode of what Ted Pearson once called (describing his own work) "a long poem with very few words."

The title of the sequence as a whole is "Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles." I've shamelessly borrowed the designator pastorelle – "pastoral song" – from John Taggart's brilliant 2004 Flood Editions collection. The poems take their titles from the tunes of the 1989 Torture Garden collection (itself titled after Octave Mirbeau's 1899 Les jardin des supplices), by John Zorn's hardcore thrash jazz ensemble Naked City (Zorn sax, Fred Frith bass, Bill Frisell guitar, Wayne Horvitz keyboards, Joey Baron drums, Yamatsuka Eye vocals). Torture Garden collects 9 "miniature" pieces from Naked City's first eponymous album (1989), adding 33 more that would appear on its second record, Grand Guignol (1992). Its 42 tracks make an extraordinarily intense 25 minutes of music, a speedcore roller coaster comparable to Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record (1982) or Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (1984).

Each poem is what I think of as a "half sonnet": seven lines, each line an LZ-esque five words. Almost all of the actual language of the poems is appropriated, borrowed from books, the conversation around me, the songs running thru my head.

And now I'm halfway thru. Here's the twenty-first, with smatterings of Hegel, L'Allegro, an old familiar hymn, & the chatter of yesterday's department meeting:

21. Sack of Shit

Another question couched at hand
is this intellectual labor is
this does it produce does
virtue wash it all pure
spent grace fully trusting washed
absolute freedom mountain nymph sweet
terror soiled so tainted question.

books, bonfires, lawyers

The Milton course this semester will be reading what I guess is a substantial chunk of his controversial prose – more than they’d like to, I imagine. “Controversial,” by the way, means “involved in controversies that aren’t particularly relevant to most of my students’ lives” – like who cares about the structure of church government anymore? or who among my 20- to 25-year-olds believes that divorce should only be allowed in cases of adultery, whatever Jesus said about it?

But there’s one hoary old text that never fails the “contemporary relevance” test: Areopagitica, the “freedom of the press” pamphlet Milton published in 1644, which was much on the mind of the Framers when they put that 1st Amendment into the Constitution, & which gets cited at every turn whenever someone wants to defend someone’s right to publish something.

As never fails to get pointed out, Areopagitica isn’t a clarion call against censorship in general (Milton does believe works of “tolerated popery and open superstition” should not be allowed): it’s a call specifically against pre-publication censorship, books being entirely blocked from publication. Books, Milton argues, ought to be published with the names of their authors & publishers attached, and only then assessed. If an anonymously issued book is found to be “mischievous and libelous,” then it should be burned by the hangman; one assumes that name-bearing books would be liable to the same treatment, & their authors and publishers liable for whatever bads they promulgate. This isn’t so very different from contemporary American law: though attempts to criminalize “seditious” writing tend to peter out, libel remains a powerful legal stick wielded by corporations and individuals against writers and publishers.

Three things of course made me think forward on my syllabus towards Areogpagitica, & the whole discourse of the ills that books might do: First, someone’s reminiscence of this Houston loony, who back in 2006 wanted to remove Fahrenheit 451 from the school’s curriculum because of its “cussing” (his daughter’s description) and “using God’s name in vain,” and because of its descriptions of Bible burning. All taking place, beautifully, during Banned Books Week. (The irony of course is overwhelming.) Which of course led me to think about this whole business in Gainesville with the publicity-seeking “pastor” who’s hit upon Koran-burning as his last-ditch fundraiser for his on-life-support Pentecostal congregation. (No links there – you’ve already heard more than enough about this guy.)

And finally, Kent Johnson – the premier gadfly of American poetry. His latest work, A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara, in press at the moment, is something of a thought experiment: what if “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” a poem found among O’Hara’s posthumous papers by his friend Kenneth Koch, were not by O’Hara at all, but by Koch? Edmond Caldwell lays out the matter well in this post, as well as revealing the next, eye-popping development: a stern letter to Johnson’s publisher from the Kenneth Koch literary estate, strongly threatening legal action should A Question Mark be actually published.

Richard Allen addresses the legalities of the matter here, along with raising some questions about the letter’s authenticity, given Kent’s history of involvement with things – the Araki Yasusada business – that have gotten labelled “hoaxes” in some quarters. I don’t think KJ’s bluffing here; and I’d like to register outrage at the Koch people’s attempt to roll back the clock to the time before we all read Areopagitica. Hey, whatever you think of Yasusada or Kent Johnson in general, this is the moment to drop $20 for A Question Mark, if only to let Bertelsmann Inc. know that some American writing & thought is still taking place outside their umbrella of Mordor.

writing/music

I've been revisiting Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces lately, & thinking about one of my fantasy jobs – music journalism. Fantasy, that is, because aside from all the logistical business of swapping one career for another, it's pretty damned difficult to intellectually retool oneself at my advanced age. Once upon a time – back when I was in high school & an undergraduate, I'd have dropped everything for a gig reviewing records and concerts. Now, I'm not so sure that even if such an opportunity offered itself I'd take it.

For one thing, I don't think I have the kind of concentrated listening attention span I used to. I probably listen to more or less as much music as I did back in the day, but I'm not sure I listen to it as closely as I once did, or respond to it as deeply. I'm still capable of hearing a song or composition that I want to listen to over & over, & proceeding to play it repeatedly. But I have much less patience with the pieces that don't somehow catch my attention in the 1st or 2nd hearing. Maybe that means my tastes are more refined – that I'm able more immediately to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe it means that my musical palate is somewhat more blunted than it once was, so that it takes more & more stimulation to rouse it (make the vindaloo hotter & hotter, please).

But heaven knows music writing out there could use some help, if the books I've been dipping in are any indication. Lipstick Traces remains spirited & exciting, but I really have very little patience for what happens when Marcus starts writing about particular songs or particular musical moments: instead of describing or analyzing in any systematic manner what's going on in a given song, he spirals off in fugues of free association, essentially telling us what chains of thought the song is giving rise to in his head.

Jon Savage's England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, which I've also picked up, is the kind of day-by-day history only an obsessive-compulsive fan & archivist could write – and only an obsessive-compulsive fan & archivist could really enjoy. It's nice that what every member of the first lineup of the Pistols were up to any given week has been recorded, but it's not exactly enjoyable reading for the non-completist. (Hey, maybe that's it! – I'm just not a completist anymore.)

Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 is the closest to what I'd see myself as writing: a roughly chronologically organized history of the second generation of punk music, with some decent descriptions & analysis of the music itself, profiles of crucial players (many of them far from famous), and a solid sense of how aesthetic form was influenced by social and political forces. Thus far, alas, it's a bit on the bland side, and (like Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise) rather too broad in its scope to pay enough attention to any given moment. I guess that's the drawback of writing broad-stroke history – even if 400 pages for 5 years isn't exactly a thumbnail sketch. Most irritating moment: looking for bibliography/discography/reference notes at the end of the book (they weren't there), only to be told that I could find them by shlepping over to Reynolds's website (www.simonreynolds.net). I expected better from you, Penguin Books.
***
update: www.simonreynolds.net is now one of those "you could own this site" sites; the notes are here, however, on one of Reynolds's rather interesting blogs.

Pound, selected

When Ezra Pound died in 1972, I was – well, I was alive, but I wasn't old enough to be reading him. I grew up on Pound in those tatty New Directions paperbacks, some of them handsome, some of them – like the Selected Poems that came out in 1948, & kept getting reissued, year after year – you know the one, with the profile snap surrounded by black space – among the ugliest books in my library. I read the selections – the Selected Poems, and then the Selected Cantos – and then turned to the full monty: Personae, the Collected Earlier Poems ("stale cream-puffs," he called them in an author's note), The Cantos (in a thick, brick-like rust-jacketed hardcover).

I was turning over a small pile of recent issues of Paideuma (used to be the Pound journal, now a more generally modernist poetry-oriented thing) and came across a review of Pound's Early Writings: Poetry and Prose, edited by Ira B. Nadel, published five years ago by Penguin. I picked up a copy of the book earlier this year at the ALA in San Francisco; it's been off & on lunchtime reading – mostly just to kind of remind me of how good Pound can be, since it's been a couple of years since I've read him intensely.

There's some problems with the collection. Yes indeed, as Paideuma's reviewer notes, the introduction could have used some serious copy editing: the editor actually uses the Rastafarianism "prophesized" at one point (something I spend at least 15 minutes banning from my students' vocabularies when I teach Bible). And there's the delicious typo (?) where he describes Pound's "logopoeia" (you know, "the dance of the intellect among words") as "the dance of the intellect upon words."

And the notes, while perfectly copious & for the most part very useful, have some odd lacunae. It's good to know that "And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi / Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion, / Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things..." is quoting Purgatorio VI & Inferno IV, but it would be even nicer for a student reader to know that Pound's describing Henry James as he knew him in London before the Great War.

But overall it's a very solid collection, which manages to get in practically everything, prose & poetry, that the ordinary reader would want to tackle of Pound's productions up thru 1922. But I'm still not used to seeing Pound in that banded, combination matte/gloss standard issue Penguin cover. It's even more unsettling than seeing him in the Library of America (as welcome as that was). What the Penguin edition means (as did the Dover Thrift Edition a few years back) is that Pound is chunk by chunk going out of copyright, and his works are being thrown open to every promotional hand that speculates a buck can be made – and of course, every editorial hand who feels s/he can do a better job of presenting the work than's been done earlier.

The more the merrier, my readerly/scholarly side sez. But there's part of me – death-bound subjectivity, as I explained to my Milton class yesterday – that's regretting the editions of yesteryear (les neiges d'antan), Pound in those black & white paperbacks sporting their "New Directions Paperbook" numbers and the number of their printing, Wallace Stevens in that powder blue Knopf dust jacket, Beckett behind those horrid Grove Press cover designs. "They used to call it An-tig-you-ah," snarled the elderly Robert Frost when Guy Davenport mentioned that Archibald MacLeish was in Antigua; "they've changed everything."

listening/reading

For the most part I can't listen to pop music while writing or reading intently; the words being sung simply interfere with the words I'm trying to write or read. Even when I was writing the poems of "Anarchy for the U.K.," I couldn't set the iPod on Sex Pistols or Gang of Four or PiL; I'd listen intently, scribbling notes, then I'd switch off and tinker with the evolving collages of the poems. When I read an interview with Jerzy Kosinski where he talked about always listening to rock music at high volumes while writing, I thought to myself, that explains a lot about his his prose style (which I loathed).

I can on the other hand listen to classical or jazz, or really anything without words, & maintain a pretty decent level of concentration on the language before me. Not happy about this, tho – it makes me feel as tho I'm using music which demands & rewards full attention as something little better than sonic wallpaper. Like the listeners to the dire local NPR classical station – all warhorses, all the time – do. "It's nice music to have on in the background." Me, I think Webern's nice music to have on in the background – but I'm sure Anton himself would be pretty pissed off to be so used.

(The most radical refunctioning of the late 20th century: the intensely autonomous "high" art music of the late 19th c. – Brahms, Wagner – retrofitted to the social function of the baroque era's background sound.)

as ever

Milton's 7th sonnet, "How soon hath Time," bemoaning the passing of his 23rd year & the fact that he has as yet little in the way of accomplishment to show, and even lacks "inward ripeness," ends with this enigmatic sentence:

All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task Masters eye.

(I quote Roy Flannagan's original-spelling version). Already, in the sonnet's sestet, Milton has shifted from bewailing to acceptance; whatever his pace of maturation/production, it will be "in strictest measure eev'n / To that same lot, however mean, or high, / Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n."

The gist of the final lines is clear, restating the sentiments of the four lines before. But how precisely do we parse them? The annotators take a range of stabs at it:

Merritt Hughes cites Lewis Campbell, Pindar, Kester Svendsen, and Donald Dorian, and ends with Dorian's paraphrase:

All time is, if I have grace to use it so, as eternity in God's sight.

John Shawcross offers his own paraphase:

All things are, as they have always been, foreseen by God, my great task-master, just as long as I have the grace to use my inward ripeness as He wishes.

Flannagan quotes Svendsen:

All that matters is whether I have grace to use my ripeness in accordance with the will of God as one ever in His sight.

And Kerrigan/Rumrich/Fallon (this semester's set text) offer this:

All that I do in time is as though done in eternity, provided that I have the grace to act in accord with God's will.

Flannagan/Svendsen makes the most prose "sense" of the passage, tho he's clearly going well beyond the letter of the text ("All that matters"?). Kerrigan et al. would seem to be mildly expanding Hughes/Dorian. Shawcross is as usual pertinent (tho one has to ask whether the speaker's failure to "use his inward grace" would somehow invalidate God's foreknowledge, as Shawcross's syntax implies).

What do these glosses add up to, with all their minor variances & restatements of earlier authorities? They add up to one of those passages, so common in Milton, in which the overall import is fairly clear, but the specific semantic relations among the words are far less so.
***
LZ, 1963, in I's (pronounced eyes) will refunction Milton into a link between the transcendent, unreachable "blue sky" of Mallarmé and the debased orthography of contemporary advertisement:

Azure
as ever
adz aver

vectors ii

The girls started a new school this Fall. Among the delights of which are a newfound emphasis on daily homework. It's been a hard adjustment all round. Tonight, for instance. Bathed, pajama'd, toothbrushed, & with her story read to her, Daphne (1st grade) is ready to hit the sack; I ask: Did you have any homework?

D: Oops. I forgot. It's downstairs.

Me: Well, let's go do it. (thinking it's the same old shit – you know, unscramble the sentence, copy the letter "G" 10 times in upper- & lowercase)

D: You have to help me. It's an interview.

So we do an interview about my "job," with the big words getting spelled out – "p-r-o-f-e- etc."

D: Do you wear special clothes to your job?

Me: You mean like socks? Just write "no."

D: Do you like your job?

Me: Sure, why not? No, no – write "yes."

D: What other job would you like to do?

Me: R-O-C-K S-T-A-R...
****
Thinking about those EP Thompsonian "vectors" of influence. It's a tall order to trace antinomianism from the mid-17th-century to Blake – a large historical stretch. What makes Thompson so satisfying as a historian is the scrupulousness with which he lays out the problem of tracing such vectors of influence, & then the thoroughness with which he pursues available evidence.

Which made me think of Greil Marcus's now 21-year-old Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, which tries to do something more or less similar with a rather ill-defined antinomian millennialism – a kind of spirit of rebellion at the state of things that opens up holes of possibility, that ruptures the continuum of the oppressive everyday. He finds it in the 16th & 17th centuries (and in earlier times), then goes out to trace it from Dada thru the Lettrists & the Situationists to the Sex Pistols, by way of Malcolm McLaren. When Johnny Rotten sings "Anarchy in the UK," he isn't just voicing a particular note of youthful rebellion ca. 1976, he's channelling an entire history of civilization-stopping anarchy, from the Ranters thru May 1968.

It's a beguiling thesis, woven with all of Marcus's all-too-often over-the-top, "lyrical" prose. Of course it's the vectors that bother me, & that seem to have bothered many of Marcus's reviewers over the years. The book trots out endless, mesmerizing accounts of Zurich Dada & Paris Lettrism & International Situationism, but it's hard to see this succession of ruptures as a clearly related progression (a "history"); when one looks for the connecting links (the "vectors"), one sees a series of isomorphisms, rather than causal relationships.

It's arguable, I know – McLaren himself was happy in retrospect to hitch his wagon to the SI star (tho Lydon thought it was all piffle). What I'm pursuing is a rather more concrete vector of influence: the SI & the Leeds scene of the late 1970s – you know, Gang of Four, the Mekons, Delta 5, (ulp) Scritti Politti. The Mekons especially: key members were art students at Leeds University when TJ Clark, a member of the English branch of the SI, came to head the art department there. Various critics – among them Greil Marcus, of course – have made much of this, even reading the band's whole output as a kind of Situationist statement.

But what do the musicians themselves have to say about it? Jon Langford, in an interview:

The first tutors I had in my first year – it's interesting. Leeds University is very interesting because I got there the same time that this guy TJ Clark arrived. Pretty famous kind of art historian. He was the only British member of the Situationist International in Paris in 1968. He looked like Che Guevera when he arrived. (PSF laughs) We arrived kind of like invisible, and he arrived in this big puff of smoke. The rebel inside the department. But basically, he had all these kind of idiots working there that he had to kind of shift sideways and get rid of. But, they were the people who were teaching me in my first year. And they were just these kind of Modernist, Pop Arty kind of loser guys, you know. They just had a formula for what they thought they should be crushing the life out of all the students. So, basically, they did me in. (Interviewer laughs) But he was more on the art history side.

When I went back – I dropped out when the Mekons signed with Virgin, and he actually really supported me through doin' that – Clark. And by the time I got back, you know, he'd filled the department with all these really interesting people like Terry Atkinson and Griselda Pollock. And they all thought we were great. ‘Cause we'd been off fightin' the Punk Rock Wars, you know. And they understood what we were doin' and that that was what was where it was going on at that moment. That I shouldn't be, like, sittin' in my painting studio doing gestural painting or whatever. We were actually more in tune with what was going on than the teachers, so... We got a lot of support from them. So, I actually went back in 1980. Was it 1980? Yeah. I actually went back and finished my degree. And I did some painting to get my degree, basically. But then as soon as I left, I formed another band.

Tom Greenhaigh, being asked specifically about Clark's influence:

The Leeds art school scene in the late 70's was a weird blip of highly radicalised activity with a lot of marxist and feminist teachers who certainly upset the institutions they worked in as well as some of the students. It's hard to imagine this happening nowadays.For me personally at the time I wasn't bothered and took it for granted and only a lot later began to read T.J Clarke for myself. I think we were influenced a lot by Terry Atkinson who had been involved with Art & Language, who was also at Leeds, who dealt with issues of cultural practice and the implications of
trying to operate within capitalist modes of production and distribution.[this is quite a big subject... just to say... my final show was all pictures of T.J.Clarke as the paradigm of the radical academic... but I have a great deal of respect for the man and his work... it's interesting that since he fled the UK and gone to Berkeley he has become good mates with Greil Marcus...]

(So it all comes back to GM...) But does this make the lads (& lasses, for it wouldn't be the Mekons without Sally Timms & Susie Honeyman) Situationists? Stay tuned.

vectors

Bob Archambeau embarrasses me again. Not so much with his fashion choices – that goes without saying – as with his blog, where he posts these big, meaty literary-historical meditations, while I’m bitching about the weather or department meetings or putting up Marx Brothers clips or other such silliness. Maybe – come to think of it – I’m just plain shallow, or sailing into shallowness even as I plunge deeper into decrepitude.

Anyway, I’m still thinking about Ruskin, & trying to fit him into my sense of how modernism emerges from Victorian culture. I’m hamstrung, of course, by having to learn Victorian culture more or less from scratch. Okay, I took a couple of Victorian classes as an undergrad, and was a reader for a Victorian novel course as a grad student, & even audited a Victorian poetry seminar along the way. So I’ve read a lot of the stuff, even if I still can’t get excited about Trollope the way J. does (there’s always a Trollope novel in some stage of multiple rereading on the nightstand).

(She has, by the way, converted me to Kipling’s Stalky & Co.; finally, a public school novel in which the boys are without exception dire & reprehensible – if immensely funny & sympathetic – shits. Finally, a bit of realism about life between 13 & 17.)

I think the key here is to pursue the Pound-Ruskin nexus, which even on its face doesn’t seem at all unlikely. Here’s the thing: Pound almost never mentions Ruskin; there’s a reference in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and a couple of scattered things in the prose (calls him a “goose” at one point), but I think it can be coherently argued that Pound is absolutely saturated, probably without even knowing it, in a Ruskinian cultural discourse. And Michael Coyle’s already made that argument in EP, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture.

That is, the connection between aesthetic production and the state of the larger polity within which they're produced emerges in the early 19th century (according to Kenneth Clark, as quoted somewhere in Raymond Williams's Culture & Society); it's Ruskin who pushes that connection into an exploration of the social conditions upon which the artist ultimately depends, in the "Nature of Gothic" and then in The Political Economy of Art & the later works passim. So what Ruskin & Pound share is a sense of “culture” as an “organic” totality in which aesthetic productions reflect social relations, in which the general health of a society can be gauged by a close analysis of its artworks, and in which the health of the arts depends upon the health of the society as a whole.

What intervenes between the two figures is Aestheticism, with its doctrine of art's autonomy, of "art for art's sake." And EP, as Moody shows in his biography, is an aesthete thru & thru in the early work. When he turns "political" or "social" (Kenner, Davenport, & other date it to the post-Great War moment), he does so with little sense of how Ruskinian his ultimate stance will be. It's perhaps an impoverished Ruskinianism, for when Ruskin excoriates society, he always does so on a moral basis (at first Evangelical, later a more ill-defined "Christian"); Pound, on the other hand, has always seemed to me less concerned with the actual well-being of individual human beings under capitalism than on the wastage of potential artwork.

Now to work out the relationship of Ruskin to Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Mina Loy. Then there's a book.
***
But then there's Fors. (One of the Stalky boys – Beetle? M’Turk? – is a dedicated reader of Fors Clavigera, which seems less a mark of his social concerns than of his general bookishness.) Guy Davenport advanced a long time ago (in his "The House that Jack Built" essay) the notion that Ruskin, & Fors in general, is kind of a generative protomodernist ur-text, a "Victorian Cantos in prose." I'm of course fascinated by Fors; like those who read Tristram Shandy as proto-postmodernism, I want to see all of the digressiveness & parataxis & random trouvées of high modernism in the book. But it's not the same thing to say that Fors is willy-nilly protomodernist and to say that Fors is an actual model for modernist literary structure.

The problem is one of what EP Thompson, in his Witness Against the Beast, calls "vectors": if one's got a sense that there's something important shared between the 17th-century Muggletonians (Ludowick Muggleton's portrait, by the way, adorns Sussex University's ultra-modern chapel, which otherwise looks like a concrete & brick beehive) & William Blake, one must establish plausible, even probable "vectors" by which Blake would have been exposed in the late 18th century to Muggletonian ideas. (& Thompson does, at least to my satisfaction.)

The temporal stretch between JR & EP is much shorter, & the works & ideas were more widespread – Pound was 14 when Ruskin died, & cheapo editions of Fors & the rest of his works were all over the United States by the time of Pound's birth. But I'm still searching for that hard & fast accounts of Pound's – & the other modernists'* – reading of Ruskin, & what use they made of him.

*Joyce is a gimme; Stanislaus reports in his memoir that his brother absolutely doted on Ruskin, & even wrote a pastiche homage when he learned of JR's death in 1900.

REAL culture

So we've decided that real education for our girls can't be trusted to the schools, public or private: we're going to have to introduce them to the Marx Brothers at home. They took to A Night at the Opera like fowl to duck soup; tonight we watched (courtesy of Netflix) Cocoanuts, the MBs' first film. I hadn't seen it before myself.

The movie's a 1929 film of a 1925 George Kaufman musical, and the remnants of the musical show – lots of schmaltzy songs, big production dance numbers, a fairly nugatory "plot." Production values primitive at best. The grandest moments – too few & far between – are the Marxes making zany.

Me, I've always worshipped Groucho as one of the grand masters of the word of our century. In another life, I will have a tongue as sharp as his. But I fear Daphne, our youngest, has cathected all too strongly on Harpo. It's not just his mute cuteness she admires, but his spirit of blithe anarchy, his fearsome jolly destructiveness. Show her a Marx Brothers movie, & then fear for the furniture. Perhaps we need to buy her a horn.

1 week down, 14 to go...

So it's the end of the 1st week of classes. I ought to be all excited and, you know, tingly about the start of a new semester, opening the wonders of literature to all those fresh young minds and all that. And then I reflect that it's the start of my FORTY-THIRD semester doing this. That's including all those grad school semesters when I was just a reader or TA for some pompous windbag of a faculty member (thank Ba'al, at least I'm not as old as any of the folks I had to TA for!), and those years when I was picking up one or two classes a semester at a Chinese menu variety of schools – but not including when I was working on the dissertation, or that far distant & in retrospect idyllic sabbatical semester.

So when you go up in front of the class for the hundredth or hundred-and-first time, it's hard to muster the same enthusiasm you had back in the day. On the other hand, I've gotten much, much better at faking enthusiasm. And, to tell the truth, I really do still love the job. I'm probably a far better teacher than I was 15 years ago, when I was new here at Our Fair University: I know much more of what I'm talking about, I know what works & what doesn't work with students, I'm infinitely more patient (sometimes).

But Lordy, the baggage that comes along with those few weekly hours in which you're actually doing what you've been hired to do! Yes, this will be the Year Of Committees for yr humble blogger, whose chair has finally cottoned onto the fact that, as Full Professor, Professor S. hasn't really been properly put thru his paces administration-wise. Oh boy I love committee work. (And here I tip my glasses down on my nose, the signal to my undergrads that I'm speaking ironically.)

This afternoon was the semester's first department meeting. And boy I love those too. (tip) A visit from the Dean, who relays his impressions of the new President of OFU – some of 'em creepy as shit – but wait, let's try and give them the most generous interpretation possible, okay? Are there going to be more budget cuts this year? Only God and the Shadow know, and there's no Lamont Cranston in sight to ask.

Here's the new faculty members, smiling and handsome and heartbreakingly young. (Definite chili peppers to be dispensed on Ratemyprofessors. But for yr humble blogger, sliding inexorably down the slope of portly middle age? Nope.) Here's the various shit we'll be tackling over the semester. Here's the mildly contentious issue saved for the end of the meeting, which ends up burning more time than anyone expected. End of meeting. The cool kids head for the pub. We head out to pick up the kids and make dinner.
***
But all told it's off on the right foot, or some foot, this semester. I'm a week ahead with class reading, have a decent handle on the scholarly work I should be doing. At the moment I'm powering thru volume 12 of the Ruskin Library Edition (Lectures on Art & Architecture & miscellaneous stuff from the late 40s–early 50s); Anselm Jappe's book on Guy Debord; Hello Cruel World, selected lyrics of the Mekons (I don't really read that one, but follow along with the recordings).

After spending much of the summer rereading all (!) of Milton's poetry, I'm dipping back into Geoffrey Hill's Scenes from Comus, & making yet another attempt at Simon Jarvis's The Unconditional (which is breathtaking in its verbal mastery, but just beyond my comprehension as yet); Middlemarch; bits of Badiou and Zizek.

There's been a soupçon of coolness in the breeze lately; the pool water is perfect; the girls, fresh from a week and a half at a new school, are alarmingly sweet and distractingly, surprisingly pretty (where'd they get those genes? not from my side of the tree...). Food tastes good, and the SodaStream provides an endless supply of environmentally sound seltzer. Things could be worse.

Ruskin lectures

The first day of classes – well, the 1st class, day 1 of Milton – is over, & went fairly well. You know: I read the syllabus, made them turn off their little electronic toys, read them the riot act about getting up & going out for potty breaks, & tried to assure them that they wouldn't be spending the next 15 weeks in the presence of a lunatic (at least not me; I can't vouch for Milton). And then launched into a 45-minute capsule summary of Western cultural history from the birth of Xrist thru the beginning of the 17th century.

The aim was not wholly to drive away those of lesser fortitude, but if I lose a few folks who aren't interested in Renaissance Humanism or the politics of the Reformation or the doctrines of Calvinism & Arminianism – well, I won't shed too many tears.
***
I seem to have reached a watershed in the Ruskin reading, having finished the 3rd & final volume of The Stones of Venice the other day. (I'm reading roughly chronologically, by the way, so I will return to Modern Painters III – V.) And suddenly, mirabile dictu, the shape of the man's career & thought is falling into place for me. Now I've always admitted to being a really slow learner: I've read some of these books a couple of times now, & have read a half-shelf of Ruskin studies & biographies – but only now do I feel firmly in grasp of the direction of the career. So, to recap:

Modern Painters I (1843): everybody who's ever painted landscape has traduced its actual appearance – until JMW Turner, who is the greatest landscape painter of all time; acres of examples of how things really look, & how they've been faked by Poussin et al.

Modern Painters II (1846): an aesthetic theory to buttress the art criticism of the previous book: things are beautiful to our eyes because they possess certain relationships/shapes/colors that manifest aspects of the deity ("ideal beauty"); and they're beautiful because they manifest healthy life ("vital beauty")

Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Stones of Venice (Part I, 1851, II & III, 1853): architecture is meant to delight the eye, to provide visual pleasure – therefore the mere act of putting up buildings is not architecture at all but "building": true architecture lies in ornament, sculpture, coloring; Gothic architecture is the true Xtian architecture, debased by Renaissance neo-Classicism; we can trace the spiritual course of the Venetian republic thru its architecture, at its greatest when the city is pious, falling into Renaissance decay when the city becomes decadent; modern architecture turns the eye of the beholder away from nature, deprives him of the vital aesthetic pleasure; and simultaneously, in its insistence on repetition and uniformity, it reduces the workman to a machine, rather than a fully autonomous human being (“Nature of Gothic”)

So it's here, in the "Nature of Gothic" chapter of Stones II, that one sees the beginnings of Ruskin's decisive turn towards social issues that will flower in the magnificent Unto This Last and find its dotty apotheosis in Fors Clavigera. A kind of cusp in his thinking.

To tell the truth, much of this is summed up beautifully & in a very user-friendly manner in his 1853 Lectures on Architecture and Painting, which he delivered in Edinburgh. Ruskin was by no means a practiced lecturer at this point (tho later in his life the lecture would become his preferred format of communication, and his books became largely collections of his lectures – like Helen Vendler's, say): this was his first go, & he was surprised at his success.

There are four lectures in the 1853 series. The first two present the kernel of both Seven Lamps and Stones in a handy two-hour stretch. The third reiterates his assessment of Turner (ie summarizing much of Modern Painters thus far). And the fourth represents his latest "find," the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais, etc. In the face of all sorts of public rejection of the PRB, Ruskin asserts that they are in essence pursuing the same goal as Turner (whom he calls "the first Pre-Raphaelite"): the accurate representation of visual reality. While Turner was going after the appearance of things thru something like proto-Impressionism, the PRB were doing a sort of photorealism avant la lettre: but the ultimate goal is the same – to get at what God's creation actually looks like.

I'm hankering to get a few volumes further down the line to where Ruskin finally sheds his rather irritating Evangelicism, stops beating on the Whore of Babylon and so forth. But these lectures, after the rather heavy going of some of Stones of Venice (volume I, after all, is a sort of extended primer on the principles of architecture, from the floor to the roof), are really an energizing breath of fresh air. Heaven knows why they aren't in print somewhere.

Ruskin speaks!

Bravo! someone else out there is reading Ruskin. And phrasing the attraction beautifully: "the prose style which dazzles as it persuades.... a mind so wide in its enthusiasms and penetrative in its way of looking - creatively perceiving - which is a poetry of its own."
***
Just listened, with delight, to Geoffrey Hill on Milton at the 400th birthday celebrations at Christ's two years ago. The talk – a bit of analysis, reading of some Milton & some Hill, & a good deal of portentous rambling – reminds me weirdly of LZ's Wallace Stevens lecture at U Conn in April 1971 (later published as "For Wallace Stevens" in Prepositions, & looming large in my own reading of LZ). Maybe expand on this at some point – tho I do want to write about the WS lecture, "duration," a sentence from Badiou's Spinoza essay, & mortality.

experiment over

So how'd that "experimental decoupling" thing work out?, you're wondering. You know, when I stopped linking blog posts to my Facebook page, just to see whether anyone would actually come by & read Culture Industry without being jogged by an announcement on FB. Well, the answer is a resounding ambiguity.

Didn't help matters that I just restarted regular blogging after a considerable summer hiatus, during which time I lost most of the regular readers I ever had. But the numbers would suggest that out of my 8 regular readers, at least 5 of them have totally switched over to FB for their browser homepage. The loyal 3 kept coming back, & there was the regular Google-directed random traffic (you know, people searching for "Ruskin pubic hair" [hit #4 on Google] or "Richard Thompson Henry the Human Fly" [#3] or "Diana Kirke nipple" [#1] or other weirdness).

But the more I thought about it, the more I missed those 5 people who weren't visiting because I wasn't telling them to visit on my FB updates. They're smart, neat people whose reading eyes I value; it's not their fault that the digital world has become so busy & complicated that my humble blog isn't their first browsing stop after the coffee hits the cup.

And hey, I'm not proud – none of that "fit tho few" shit around here, I'll take any reader who wants to read what I've strung together. And thank them for it.