8 May 2008¶ Why I'm not yet sleeping, or the bureaucratic bane
I’m fiddling around here, feeling somewhat guilt about not working directly on my program of study which I should have had done yesterday and today I’m still not yet finished. Why not? Because I’m not. Because I can’t seem to get my head around writing something that describes the world of early modern literature in a broad way that makes any sense in just three paragraphs. I keep defaulting to talking about my research, my questions, my issues because I don’t really think about early modern literature much, just about specific parts of early modern literature.
My program of study has three prose parts,1 each of which are only about a page long. The latter two — one of which describes my “field list” and the other describes what I think my dissertation might be about — are pretty easy for me. The first one, the one that I describe above, is driving me nuts. Every time I sit down to write it — and it’s just a page, one lousy page! — I wind up writing about my specific interests: families, domestic space, conduct books, paternity, religious ritual.
It should be the easy stuff. Why am I struggling so much with the easy stuff? Because deep down, I think, I feel some resentment towards this document. It’s busywork. I do it because the university requires it, and perhaps this page makes sense for some studying, oh I dunno, say lesbian chicana literature. Does that require some justification and description? Probably. But does anyone really question the validity of studying early modern literature? Isn’t Shakespeare sufficiently validated to skip this justifying step? Apparently not. And so I’m bitter towards it and towards the university and I’m writing this blog post rather than it. Maybe I’ll try my trick of distancing myself from y work by writing with loud music playing.
Is this a blog post that serves any purpose other than to give me a (quiet) social space in which I can complain and perhaps reveal my own inadequacies? No, none. You bet that when the time comes to do some job hunting that I’ll delete this one; yes, you betcha.
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1 Prose is not the word I want to use here. What’s the word I’m looking for here? It starts with the letters ex- and is used to describe an essay. Why can’t I come up with it? extemporaneous? No.
When I’m doing my own writing, my work that’s never intended for other people to see, I use lots of footnotes for this kind of thing. I’ll ask “is this true? better check” or “Why isn’t this working?” in addition to questions about the content itself. I should probably take out this footnote, but that might ruin some of the fun.
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17 April 2008¶ Me, publicly.
I think I’ve mentioned before how anonymous academic blogs made me uncomfortable. I think I’ve said how they quickly devolve into kvetching and whinging and one-upping how much more they suffer than everyone else. I’m all for whistle-blowers who will use the welcoming blanket of anonymity to protect their revealing of dangerous truth, but somehow “My advisor is such a dung-head” doesn’t seem quite as worthy. Maybe it’s just me? Still, this is the reason I’ve stopped reading almost all of the pseudonymous blogs I know of.
I thought I’d do my part to support a non-anonymous academic web by making my blogger profile (from whence I occasionally will comment on said blogs as well as their non-anonymous counterparts) with my actual name and a link to this site and some details about me. No more of this empty profile garbage: I’m showing the real me.
I flatly refuse to answer their dopey “random question” at the bottom. Even transparent I have standards.
Well, that quickly turns into me trying to accomplish… what? I’m not sure. I tried to use the full 1200 characters they offer, which turns out to be able to contain a surprising amount of personal information. Finally, I had to just step away and curse my own time-wasting tendencies. Who will see it, anyway? Well, you will, if you choose to click through. I won’t hold it against you for foregoing the pleasure, however.
Comment [3]
16 April 2008¶ Ohio
In Mary’s junior high PE class the coach (or the school? I actually don’t know whence comes this decision) has decided that football is too rough/violent/manly for girls. Only boys get to play football. Hey: this is Ohio.
So what is the appropriately girly sport that takes the place of football’s violence, roughness, and violence? Hockey.
16 April 2008¶ My writing
OK, I slowed down. For a while, I was writing on schedule, but it was on paper and that never transitioned to the website. I’m sorry (I know you are crushed).
I’ll step it up again, OK? Partly because I found it useful even though I never (ever) hit my goal of daily literary scholarship — even at that elementary level I was providing it.
In order to make recompense, I provide you this Discovery Channel commercial. You will have the tune stuck in your head and you will roll your eyes at the tagline “The world is just awesome.” I know I did.
6 April 2008¶ Masterpiece's Sense and Sensibility on PBS
Kate and I have just started watching and wowza: this ain’t Jane Austen for kids. That might be the steamiest opening for a PBS broadcast I’ve ever seen. We had to do a couple of quick turn-offs when the kids walked in the room. Isn’t this public television? Isn’t this Sunday?
4 April 2008¶ Friday: Rzewski's Pocket Symphony - C
I was sitting at my desk just now reading Thomas Harding’s 1565 A Confutation of a booke intituled an Apologie of the Church of England and listening to a contemporary classical piece, Frederic Rzewski’s “Pocket Symphony.” This is the first time I’ve listened to this piece. I suppose there should be some cognitive dissonance, but I had been listening t previously o some music for compline, and it was putting me to sleep. I needed something with a little more oomph to keep my sleep-deprived self focused on Harding’s smack-down of those pesky protestants.
In the middle of the third section (it’s called “C” on the eighth blackbird recording I have, I don’t know if that’s part of the original composition or just a recording thing. I am listening pleasantly, focusing on the reading, until the flute solo in the middle.
Oh. My.
The most intense flute I have ever heard. The flautist was gasping (intentionally? I think perhaps, but still the effect was startling) and the sound distorted (that was intentional, I’m sure). I jerked my head up from my reading and stared at the wall, involuntarily smiling. I got goosebumps.
I’m not recommending the piece1: I get the feeling it is part of a whole acquired thing, like Arvo Part. I hated Part ten years ago, but now I think he’s great. The point isn’t the music, but the experience. How often do I get the serendipity of something like this? Something that forces me to stop everything else and just listen (or watch, or feel, or whatever) is a treat.
I lead a charmed life. I spend my day reading or listening to music and thinking about things I want to think about. Even if what I want to think about is sixteenth century Catholic apologists.
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1 Nor am I not-recommending — but section F includes what I think is a vacuum and a leaky faucet as part of the music. It’s classical Phish!
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1 April 2008¶ Poetry Tuesday: Herbert's "Prayer (I)"
Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Update: (April 2) I’ve reached some new conclusions since writing this and am working them in below…
I told my students that they should plan to spend at least as much time working on a short poem as they would a sudoku puzzle: you don’t read through a poem once and get what you need out of it. But that’s the difficulty, too, because I do read through it once and think that since I’ve discovered all the words there that I’m somehow finished. I have to remind myself that the words are not the poem: the words only communicate the poem. Man, that sounds so fluffy and new-agey. I hate poetry-speak almost as much as I hate poetry-voice.
Sometimes I find Herbert especially easy to dismiss.1 At skim-pace, he’s got only one note and it’s the same note that makes me sometimes look for excuses to skip out on church. I’ve heard this one before, George; it was in your last poem, too. There’s really no excuse for this thinking, not when there’s something so loopy as lines 5-8 of this poem. I mean: what? I’ll look at them one by one, adding italics where I want to add italics, because typography is fun:
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower
Wait: is my goody-two-shoes Herbert somehow positioning prayer in opposition to God? It is a place of refuge and glory for the sinner? That makes no sense. That’s not prayer: that’s, um, not-prayer.
Updated thoughts: Thanks to a smart comment from a student, I have a couple of ideas about this line that I didn’t have before. Students: you rock!
Considering the engine as an object of violence, this line begins a major shift in tone in which the object of prayer becomes doubtful, angry, tense, and violent. In prayer, a Christian can complain to God, can rail against God, can shake his fist at heaven. Like the tower of Babel, it won’t help (it is futile because God is, well, All Mighty).
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The thunder rolls out not from heaven but from beneath: it rolls out from underground, from Hell. And then prayer is the spear that kills Christ. Prayer hurts God: am I reading this correctly?
Updated thoughts: Thunder makes noise but doesn’t actually do anything. The bitter, angry, violent prayer from the previous line is, like thunder, bluster without any effectual force.
One student read the next phrase brilliantly: the spear was used to verify Christ’s death, and prayer, in similar fashion, might be used to verify God’s existence. Either way, it is a violent act that counters the nature of prayer described in the first four and last six lines.
This line now seems a lot cooler than it did last night.
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
This is one of those weird lines, sure. The creation is transposed — that is, re-figured, relocated, construed again — into an hour. Well, at least this isn’t undoing the creation. Instead, it is personalizing it, making it the matter of personal experience. The metaphor is pretty straightforward: my hour of prayer [has the power of or can feel like] the whole six-day creation. Big power, tiny package. Herbert is doing some good selling, here. But how does it connect to the earlier lines? It’s not yet clear.
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,
To think about God’s power as a fearful power is uncontroversial: his terrible, swift sword and all that. But this tune isn’t God’s power (though that’s what I read when I do my skim-speed read, sadly), it’s my prayer. My prayer is music that is heard by all things and they fear it? Why should anything fear my prayer? What is so awful about my prayers?
Or are prayers — my prayers — a manifestation of “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” and that’s what’s so scary? Does that imply that all things, which hear the prayer, are the evil that fears righteousness? I am prayer, hear me roar.
I recognize that the first connotation of “sounding” in line 4 is in the survey sense, using the plumb-bob2 or throwing over the shell-studded line to scrape the bottom to gauge the makeup. In my mind, a deckhand on The Surprise calls out, “white sand and shell, sir!”
But the thunder and the music in the next long phrase invokes (evokes?) the aural quality of the sounding: it explores the depths of heav’n and earth and broadcasts them as well.
Who explores; who broadcasts? Now I notice it: I’m not in this poem at all. I, an offerer of prayer, one who prays, am conspicuously absent. The poem is about the noun prayer not the individual pray-er. That much is pretty obvious from the outset, but it is a shock to discover that I do not play the tune in line 8: I hear and fear it; I am lumped into the “all things.”
Am I? I can’t tell: there’s no verb to guide me along. I’m stuck unable to really tell. There seems to be movement — we do depart from the opposition to God in line 5 to “something understood” in line 14 — but without the verb I see it without feeling it. Herbert moves, the poem moves, but I do not. Or rather, I am not moved. (I’m getting back into poetry-speak again, aren’t I?)
I would love to love this poem. I would love to be able to say that it speaks to me in some deep personal way, but instead it just kinda lies there inert. A couple of lines shimmer a bit, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of magic that deserves to be widely anthologized. What am I missing here?
Updated thoughts: I see the poem in three parts in which Herbert models the flow of a prayer. It begins with a return: the banquet, God’s breath. When the orator3 begins to sound heaven and earth in line 4, the prayer becomes intense, dark, questioning. The orator questions, probes, doubts, aches. This is Jacob’s wrestle with God.
After fear (line 8), comes the hearts-and-flowers: softness, peace, joy, blah-blah. I see now that the juxtaposition of fear and softness isn’t accidental (duh). And that leads to the understanding in the poem’s conclusion. So there is movement in there after all. Dang, that’s subtle.
One of my students today (April 2) said that perhaps this also mirrored the prayerful life of the Christian: bright acceptance and banqueting of the (literal or figurative) child followed by some doubt and questioning, which finally resolves into a recognition and understanding. The “heaven in ordinary” line is particularly nice in this reading.
As often happens, my students say smart things that illuminate and sometimes reveal stuff I hadn’t discovered myself. And then there’s some kind of magic that unlocks only when I’m in front of a class and I’m suddenly much, much smarter than I am otherwise. I found things myself while I was teaching that I didn’t see in my first ten readings of the poem. Somehow being on-the-spot, feeling the pressure to say something smart and to be a not-idiot opens passageways in my brain that I become much less-idiot than I otherwise am.
Maybe I should teach my dissertation before I write it.
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1 I know, Renaissance Girl: there’s no excuse for this. You have just lost half of your respect for me. I admit that I haven’t read nearly enough Herbert and I’m sure I’ll come to love him and all his devotional brethren. Someday. And you’ll have to excuse me just a teensy bit of dramatic license, hokay?
2 If they don’t call it a plumb bob anymore, they should be ashamed of themselves. I do not know who they refers to in this footnote (people who do not use the term “plumb bob”?), but they should beware of colorful disappearing terminology, just in case it really is disappearing, which it might not be doing at all.
3 If my Portuguese is acting as an accurate guide to the latinate roots to words, an orator should be literally, one who prays. (Orar: to pray)
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24 March 2008¶ Mondays on Writing: Cohesion and Coherence
This week I’m going to fall back on some pretty basic writing techniques, with the goal that I’ll get either more esoteric or more specifically tuned to my needs or more advanced in later weeks1. I still plan to keep up some form of daily writing (M-F) for the foreseeable future. This week I’ll be working on some of the stuff taught by Joseph Williams in his excellent book, Style. I’ve used the book as a text in a couple of classes I’ve taught, and I use his language about cohesion and coherence nearly every time I do any writing instruction. This week, I’m going to review and then apply these basic techniques in a very deliberate manner.
So let’s review. Cohesion and coherence are principles of paragraph construction. In a nutshell, coherence is about ensuring each sentence in a paragraph hangs from the same topic and cohesion is a technique to help readers by putting old information behind new information. This deserves a little more description, but in four hundred words I can’t go much more than vague generalities. Both are best described and identified experientially, but I think there’s some value (for me at least) in discovering a general description that doesn’t use any examples.
So this week I’ll be revising occasional paragraphs (though not necessarily the whole post, simply due to time considerations. Unless I discover that I’m getting really fast at both writing and revising. Which isn’t likely, alas.) Based on my clock right now, it appears that I’ll move from talking about cohesion and coherence to revising for cohesion and coherence tomorrow.
Program note: I’ll be traveling on Wednesday and then out of town for the rest of the week. I’ll try my discipline to get my writing done regardless, but I’m not going to beat myself if I don’t. Presuming I won’t be beating myself up for my nearly inevitable failure, I will be back (ha ha) to my planned schedule next week. But I’ll keep my thoughts happy and positive that I’ll still hit W-Th-F: you think happy, too.
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1 I just noticed how exposed I feel writing about writing techniques. Here I am describing what work I plan to do on my writing, and you can all now see how badly I fail. Perhaps this is a very bad idea. Then again, my fear of exposure is part of my motivation, and so I persist however unwisely, though I do feel like I’m the guy who is not only dumb enough to run naked across the baseball field, but then to yell my name into the television camera afterward.
21 March 2008¶ Primary Source Thursdays: A Woman Killed with Kindness
Yes, I am a day late. And this will probably be short. I think it might be stupid to try to write something productive in my one week off between terms, but I thought since I was also trying to write a syllabus that I’d tack some daily writing on — good habits and all, you know. Well, I ain’t got them good habits yet. As an elementary school report card would say, they’re “emerging.”
I read the first five of the seventeen scenes in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and liked it as much as I thought I would, which is to say, considerably. I like most plays of this vintage, so that comes as no surprise. I am surprised as how deftly Heywood has established his characters even right off the bat. Reading the dramatis personae I was afraid it would be a mess of characters all of whom sound alike on the page. On the contrary, even when the personalities are similar as is the case with Sir Charles and Sir Francis, their relationships and their rather quickly developing antagonism make them distinct. It isn’t the constant flipping of pages back to the opening to remember who is related to whom. Not every play with a large set of characters is so easily read.
I was especially interested in the closing lines of scene 41. The man Jenkins is pulled away from his lunch to wait on a friend of Master Frankford’s. After he grumbles about it, he turns to the audience and gives a brief monologue:
You may see, my masters, though it be afternoon with you, ‘tis but early days with us, for we have not dined yet. Stay but a little; I’ll but go in and help to bear up the first course and come to you again presently.
Yes, there’s some fun fourth-wall breaking going on, but while that’s interesting, it’s not novel. Richard III’s opening monologue/soliloquy is equally fourth-wall breaking, if not explicitly (unlike Hamlet, who’s dialog seems much more internal). This is much more Knight of the Burning Pestle in that the audience is brought into the production. In Knight the audience actually participates (well, a scripted part of the audience, but they’re playing the audience), but this is different. Who are we? We’re seeing into the servant’s quarters (it’s like Upstairs/ Downstairs, only two hundred years earlier) but more than that: we are there.
But no. Jenkins is aware that we’re not there, since he recognizes that our time and his time are different. We cannot actually be where we are, nor he where he is. Is Jenkins aware of his own fictionality? Maybe. In my reading, he hasn’t yet returned. Perhaps he’ll take a chorus role, but that’s not yet apparent. Not by scene 5 at least.
So I’ll have to read more and post more later. There’s more interesting stuff going on, like all the objectification of women in i.55-72 or Sir Charles’ wonderful shift in blame from self to others in scene 5. But that’s more than I have time for today. I’ll try to post once more about this play next week.
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1 Scene breaks from Fraser and Rabkin’s Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period. I hope they’re standard. If this weren’t just a blog post, I’d probably look it up.
18 March 2008¶ Poetry Tuesdays: Lycidas
John Milton, Lycidas
I thought I’d try to record my reading of a poem out loud, but it turns out that I make a lot of mistakes when I read out loud and my voice sounds awful and I get the “poetry voice.” I hate poetry voice, but dang, it’s tough to avoid when you’re trying to read something like Milton’s “Lycidas” with enthusiasm and intention. Finally, I realize I have no idea how to pronounce most of the classical names in the poem: Damoetas? Hippotades? Which syllable gets the accent? I just sorta mumbled through them and pretended that I had it right. It’s a ten-minute deal straight through. I did it twice: once where I stop about once a stanza to breathe, and once where I read straight through without stopping, even when I screw up. You can download (about 10MB each) and listen if you want, but I only want gentle feedback if you dare feedback at all. I wouldn’t mind if no one listened, but since I went to the effort of recording them I though I might as well put them online.
Reading aloud has many advantages, however. When I read out loud — I mean read to someone, not just mumble the words with the vocal equivalent of my silent reading — I pay attention to emphasis and try to figure out Milton’s sometimes tough sentence structure. Nothing in Lycidas is really that tough in terms of sentence construction, not like Paradise Lost at least, but it’s not as straight forward as, say, Robert Frost.
The last stanza of the poem is such a let down. When the focus changes from Lycidas to the shepherd-poet, whatever solemnity Milton has constructed evaporates. Lauren Shohet describes the final stanza as a “purification,” in that it represents “the swain quite unrecognizably as a transcendent, autonomous speaker (like St. Peter, like Paradise Regained‘s Jesus, like the canonical Milton)”1. I suppose this alternative perspective in the final lines fits into the larger scheme of the poem, where the reader has to deal with “coexistences of the mythic and the real, the past and the present”2. I can see that: the poem is classical, it’s biblical, it’s elegiac.
If nothing else, however, the final stanza does turn our attention away from the dead Lycidas and onto … where, exactly? While it might be the unknown speaker, there’s not enough there there to warrant our attention, I think we wander, attention-wise. Having our focus thrown up-for-grabs I find a convenient holding place in the headnote, where Milton promises that the poem will foretell “the ruin of our corrupted clergy.” That’s where the fireworks are, anyway.
Look at all those great lines: “Blind mouths!” and “scrannel pipes” — I love that word, “scrannel!” — “swollen with wind” and the famous “two-handed engine.” A two-handed engine? I want me one of them! What is it, again? Rumrich calls it “The single most disputed phrase in Milton”3. Oh really, Mr. Rumrich? Hot diggety.
There’s also something in “Lycidas” that appeals to me historically, too. I want to someday use the opportunity to talk about a dead acquaintance to turn into a major editorial and, in the end, shift all focus from my friend and onto myself. There’s something nice and gutsy in that. I appreciate gutsy.
That, and sporting with Amaryllis and playing with Neaera’s hair. Hello, ladies.
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1 Shohet, Lauren. “Subjects and Objects in Lycidas.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47, no. 2 (2005): 108.
2 Kermode, Lloyd Edward. “To the Shores of Life: Textual Recovery in Lycidas.” Milton Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1997): 11.
3 Rumrich, John Peter, and Gregory Chaplin. Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603-1660 : Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006: 402.
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17 March 2008On writing every day
3 March 2008Anuber Grubber
3 March 2008Grubber
28 February 2008Public Service Announcement
22 February 2008Speakerphone
20 February 2008Election results
19 February 2008Boys and Violence
19 February 2008Mormon Studies
15 February 2008Non-traditional Students
31 January 2008Upon reflection, I blame Huck and Ron Paul
31 January 2008Republican debate
In which I wonder why the Democrat debates are so much more pleasing to watch.
10 January 2008Things I Learned Reading Old Copies of The New Yorker as I Ate My Lunch (probably part of a series)
10 January 2008More Mormons in the News
7 January 2008Stinky Buckeyes
5 January 2008MoJo likes the Momos!