ASECS bound

Heading to Williamsburg on the train tomorrow for the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I am on an interesting panel called "How to Read an Eighteenth-Century Page" - this is my page (borrowed from ECCO - need to get in to office early this morning to make a better handout/scan from the reproduction of the 1729 Dunciad Variorum!):

My father had to go into hospital last week in Philadelphia, and is still there (hopefully he'll get out early next week). I was there briefly over the weekend to visit, but am feeling very guilty for not being on-site to help out with stuff. It is the nature of the school year that March and April are particularly demanding - I will hope to be able to go down when he's released and settle him back in at home....

Midweek brain fog

I feel that I am operating at only about 60% functionality due to fatigue - it is not good! My Friday meeting this week is canceled, which gives me a bit of a breather (usually I have a Wednesday morning deadline for initial round of reading and reports), but on the other hand I have to write up some thoughts for my other committee by late morning today, if I can pull myself together sufficiently. Hoping to fit in a run at some point, but it has been a disastrous winter for exercise, and it's not quite as warm today as I had hoped....

No Exit at the Pearl was thoroughly enjoyable (tasty dinner afterwards at Ktchn - it is bizarre that there should be a restaurant of that ilk on that block, times have changed!).

Two funny things later today: first of all, at three some people are coming to my apartment to film interview footage for Aaron Brookner's documentary about his uncle Howard Brookner, a documentary filmmaker and admirer of William Burroughs; Brookner did not live in my actual apartment while he was at Columbia in the 70s, but it was one with similar layout in the same building, and the notion is that it can be used to capture the flavor of life here at that time.

Then at 6:15 it's the Rape of the Lock reading! Hmmm, must not forget to prepare a few introductory remarks - I am speaking briefly beforehand then reading the opening stretch of lines.

"Tickling, Vociferating, Diving"

Post title from The Dunciad, selected early this morning - only I got too busy to actually write a post!  It is a good sequence of words, though....

Light reading from the end of last week: Richard Kadrey's latest Sandman Slim novel, Aloha From Hell (great voice, but feels a bit undermotivated in terms of plot and purpose); and Amy Waldman's The Submission.  I could criticize many things about this one, but that would be to ignore the fact that I started reading it as the plane taxied to takeoff (it was my non-Kindle book, and I expected to put it aside once the pilot gave the OK on electronic devices - the trick with these things is to choose something not so gripping that one can't have it for the landing also, i.e. that can be read in 15-minute stints over a couple of flights!) and couldn't put it down.  I finished reading pretty much exactly as the plane touched down at JFK (it's about a 3.5hr flight).  Highly immersive, despite some shallowness in the portraiture and occasional awkwardness in the writing.

Delay, deferral

From Johnson's "Life of Pope," on Pope's Iliad translation:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

Home again

Really I do not have much of an urge to eat at Per Se: multi-hour multi-course meals are not my cup of tea, it is too much money in any case. But - "the stray ends of exquisite donuts"!

I survived Ottawa, I survived yesterday's long teaching day, I survived today's also long day of miscellaneous meetings: really I am about to collapse with exhaustion, but barring a couple of small but important tasks that are pressing, I can now afford to take it easy for a day or so. I have a curiously huge accumulation of work-related stuff that I've been slightly in denial about (internal reviews of colleagues, external tenure letter sorts of thing), but it can probably be done in a day and a half of extended effort if I can get myself back up to normal levels of fatigue first. Tomorrow morning I will go to boot camp and gentle yoga and read a novel, I think - it will be beneficial.

I had a funny and incongruous pair of texts to teach yesterday: Roland Barthes's The Neutral (I am enchanted by this book) and Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". The master's seminar is a good deal of fun: I am enjoying it perhaps even more than I expected to.

Saw Helen DeWitt and Dale Peck's very good joint reading last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge, and will be back there on Thursday for Nico's gig (I had already planned to go with adopted grandfather G., but my brother M. is going to come also, he is working in Brooklyn again!); and my dad is coming up from Philadelphia on Saturday for dinner and a BAM show I found intriguing enough to buy tickets for without knowing anything in particular about it.

Light reading around the edges: Marisa de los Santos's Falling Together.

Swift and Pope

I've taught Swift and Burke as a seminar, and I've taught satire very regularly with Swift and Pope prominently featured, but I've never taught an undergraduate seminar under this particular rubric. There is something almost perverse about teaching a course so traditionally defined in this day and age, but I think it should be very interesting: again, this is just the course description and week-by-week readings, assignments excluded.

Intensive reading of two major writers in the satirical mode. Some topics of interest: satire as a secondary or parasitic genre; satire and political argument; satire and gender; deformed or disabled bodies; miniaturization and problems of scale; the anthropological pre-history of satire as violence (words that kill); epic versus mock-epic; tensions between orality, manuscript and print culture; the cultural and intellectual implications of the choice between tetrameter and pentameter couplets. No background in authors or period required; we will do a large amount of ‘close reading’ of primary texts, with critical readings to supplement in most weeks.

9/12 Introduction: the battle of the books

9/19 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704)

9/26 Swift, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708, 1711)

*Samuel Johnson, life of Swift, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), vol. 3, 189-214

10/3 Pope, “An Essay on Criticism” (written 1709, pub. 1711), Windsor-Forest (written 1704-13, pub. 1713)

*James McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1-13; *John Sitter, “Pope’s versification and voice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37-48; *Dustin Griffin, Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1-12

10/10 Pope, “The Rape of the Lock” (two-canto version 1712, five-canto version 1714)

*Claude Rawson, “Pope’s Waste Land: Reflections on Mock-Heroic,” in Order From Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 201-221

10/17 Pope, “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation” (written 1714, pub. 1717), “Eloisa to Abelard” (written 1716, pub. 1717), “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717); Swift, Stella poems (details TBA)

*Samuel Johnson, life of Pope, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), vol. 4, 1-93

10/24 Swift, “Cadenus and Vanessa” (written 1713, pub. 1726), “The Progress of Beauty” (1719, 1728), “The Lady’s Dressing-Room” (1730, 1732), “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731, 1734)

*Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1-21

10/31 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

*Terry Castle, “Why the Houyhnhnms Don’t Write: Swift, Satire and the Fear of the Text,” in Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Frank Palmeri (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993), 57-71

11/7 Election holiday – no class

11/14 Pope, The Dunciad Variorum (written 1719-28, pub. 1728, Variorum 1729)

*James McLaverty, “The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum,” in Pope, ed. Brean Hammond (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 220-32; *McLaverty, “The Dunciad Variorum: The Limits of Dialogue,” in Pope, Print, and Meaning, 82-106; *Pat Rogers, “The name and nature of Dulness: proper nouns in The Dunciad,” in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98-128

11/21 Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729), A Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars (1737)

*James McLaverty, “Swift and the art of political publication: hints and title pages, 1711-1714,” in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 116-39

11/28 Pope, “An Essay on Man” (written 1730-32, pub. 1733-34); Swift, “On Poetry: A Rapsody” (1733), “Strephon and Chloe” (1731, 1734)

12/5 Pope, “Moral Essays” (written 1730-33, pub. 1734)

*Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 1-15; *Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1-39; *Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,2000), 57-93

12/12 Swift, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (written 1731-32, pub. 1739); Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (written 1731-4, pub. 1735)

*Victoria Glendinning, Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 1-15; *David Womersley, “‘now deaf 1740’: Entrapment, foreboding, and exorcism in late Swift,” in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift, 162-84

"She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks"

At Slate, Robert Pinsky on Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount, on Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation."

Impedimenta

Samuel Johnson, from the Life of Pope, on why it took Pope five years to translate Homer:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performance and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow – but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

The happy medium?

From David Hume, "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing":

That though excesses of both kinds are to be avoided, and though a proper medium ought to be studied in all productions; yet this medium lies not in a point, but admits of a considerable latitude. Consider the wide distance, in this respect, between Mr. POPE and LUCRETIUS. These seem to lie in the two greatest extremes of refinement and simplicity, in which a poet can indulge himself, without being guilty of any blameable excess. All this interval may be filled with poets, who may differ from each other, but may be equally admirable, each in his peculiar stile and manner. CORNEILLE and CONGREVE, who carry their wit and refinement somewhat farther than Mr. POPE (if poets of so different a kind can be compared together), and SOPHOCLES and TERENCE, who are more simple than LUCRETIUS, seem to have gone out of that medium, in which the most perfect productions are found, and to be guilty of some excess in these opposite characters. Of all the great poets, VIRGIL and RACINE, in my opinion, lie nearest the center, and are the farthest removed from both the extremities.