Heel-dragging morning update

It is taking me a ridiculously long time this morning to get out the door for my run, the run I should have done yesterday but didn't get it together to do then at all! It is still grotesquely humid, but much cooler than yesterday, so that's something....

The fourth of July makes me grumpy, from a strictly personal point of view - the library is closed, and there is less interesting news than usual on the USian part of the internet. On the bright side, as it is a holiday I feel justified in blowing a large chunk of morning and midday on exercise - will hope to get in a few good hours of work on the wretched article revisions (which are enjoyable now that I am actually immersed in them, only I am waiting on some BorrowDirect sources that are delayed because of the holiday!) later on in the afternoon.

A few tabs to close:

King Lear with sheep! (Via John Kuhn. Amazingly reminds me of the exhilarating brief moment when I thought the Clydesdale Hamlet at Busch Gardens was going to feature a production of Hamlet performed by gigantic drayhorses - it was one of those fantastical glitches. Ditto, in a weaker version, my onetime quest for the Penguin Euripides....)

The reading habits of tennis players.

Jordan Ellenberg on the summer's most unread books as glimpsed by Kindle highlights.

A really nice piece by Mark Halliday on Kenneth Koch.

The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson! I have something exciting coming up next year, by the way: I need to write a really good talk for this (it is going to be a good chance to delve into my battle-of-ancients-and-moderns project, which I think I haven't yet written about here as I am trying to stay focused on the still-unwritten Ten-Week Clarissa proposal - Johnson is not directly in that one, but the question of textual editing and commentary looms large throughout, thus Spinoza and other recent dipping into Grafton on Poliziano etc.)....

(Also excited that I have two rewarding minor work trips coming up in the fall - I like the feeling that my career is enabling me to have interesting travel experiences I wouldn't have otherwise: Dublin, for this year's edition of the Swift symposium conducted at the Deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral; and Paris, in December, for a dissertation defense. I am excited about the latter for various reasons, one of which is that I will finally be able to go and get a cupcake at a bakery I have long admired from afar!)

Spinoza!

Just a taste, to whet the appetite (I am hungry to be back at the library so that I can check out a huge pile of books about biblical criticism), from the Theological-Political Treatise:

Possibly someone will say that I am completely undermining Scripture by my manner of proceeding, since it may lead everyone to suspect that the Bible is everywhere full of mistakes. But on the contrary, I have shown that my methodology works in favour of Scripture by preventing passages which are clear and pure from being corrupted to fit defective passages and simply because some passages are defective, we are not justified in placing every passage under suspicion. There has never ever been a book without mistakes: has anyone (I ask) therefore ever supposed that they were defective throughout? Of course not, especially when the expression is lucid and the meaning of the author is clearly evident.

Tractor, truck-like vehicle

Enjoyable week of reading here: Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (I was recently almost overwhelmed with a yen to read books by and about Spinoza, and obtained some immediately, but this was the first week it was practical to dig in); the first half of the Kimpel and Eaves Richardson biography, which I have dipped into but never before read straight through from start to finish, and which I am thinking will put me in the right mood to plunge into my Clarissa project (about which, more soon, along with the other more notional projects that also have me in sway to them); and My Struggle vol. 3, which I have just finished.

It is hard to explain why the Knausgaard is so mesmerizing, but I was again absolutely riveted. Here's a bit I especially liked:

Even though history didn't exist for me when I went there as a child and everything belonged to the moment, I could still feel its presence. Grandad had lived there all his life, and in some way or other that influenced the image I had of him. But if there was one image or notion that embodied Grandad, it was not everything he had done in his life, of that I knew very little, and the little I did know, I had nothing to compare it with, no, the one thing that embodied Grandad was the little two-stroke tractor he used for a multitude of purposes. That tractor was the very essence of Grandad. It was red and a bit rusty, needed to be kick-started, and had a small gear stick, a column with a black ball on top, on one hand lever, while the accelerator was on the other. He used it for mowing, walking behind it while an enormous scissor-like attachment on the front cut down the grass in its path. And he used it to transport heavy items; then he put a trailer on the back with a green seat, from which he steered what all of a sudden had become a truck-like vehicle. There was little I rated higher than being with him then, sitting on the back and chugging toward the two shops in Vagen, for example, where he would collect cans of formic acid or sacks of feed or artificial manure. The vehicle was so slow you could walk beside it, but that didn't matter, speed wasn't of any consequence, all the rest was: the rattle of the engine, the exhaust fumes that smelled so god and wafted across the road as we drove, the feeling of freedom in the trailer, being able to hang over one side, then the other, all the things there were to see on the journey, including Grandad's slight figure and his peaked cap in front of me, and getting out at the shop, where the Bergen boat docked, and being able to walk around, often with an ice cream in our hands while Grandad did whatever he had to do.

I am a little worried about the way my summer is slipping away from me! Have had a truly lovely quiet week here, homemade Spa Week with yoga and running and green smoothies and a lot of reading time - only problem is distinct shortage of cats! - but we are already in the middle of June, and I haven't at all gotten started on proper work. I have 3 dissertation defenses in the next four weeks, and rashly also agreed to write four tenure letters - the first two because they came in first, the second two because they are people I know and want to help - and 3 PhD students going on the job market for the first time. I need to make the syllabus for the "Literary Texts, Critical Methods" class I'm teaching for the first time in the fall - this is much more complex than usual syllabus-making. I also want to write a proposal and some pages for the Clarissa book and do substantial reading and thinking about my ancients-and-moderns book; this may be cumulatively unrealistic, as there are of course all sorts of other bits and bobs that must be taken care of too....

A digression in the modern kind

An odd, almost eerily matched pair of readings for my two different independent studies meetings this week (fortunately I have read both very recently and will not need to do any particular preparation): Swift's Tale of a Tub and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow....

Closing tabs

Yesterday was a complex and rewarding day (got up at 5:45, rode my bike downtown for 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, then back uptown to teach Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in the morning and Swift's Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and Johnson's Life of Swift in the afternoon, then musings on Helen Hill's film "The Florestine Collection" and a pizza party at my place afterwards for colleagues, friends and family, my own and Helen's, lay my head down on the pillow around 1am).

Today I am knackered!

Had a very productive afternoon appointment with a pulmonary specialist who has a number of thoughts on how I might tackle the exercise-induced asthma (he also recommends a mighty tome that I have ordered through BorrowDirect; it is prohibitively - comically! - expensive, it is for clinicians!), took a long nap and have spent the rest of the evening devouring Lee Child's The Affair.

I have some treats for upcoming days: the book party for Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (here's a good interview at Bookforum, and I am delighted to say that Helen is also going to catsit for me next week while I am in Ottawa next week for a visit with Brent's parental units); a production of The Bald Soprano...

Miscellaneous linkage:

Benjamin Weiss defends the Cambridge History of the American Novel against Joseph Epstein's depredations. (These controversies make me throw up my hands in perplexity, I see that they are still 'live' in some sense but they bear no relation to my own personal lived experience of reading and writing and teaching in the academy, so it is hard for me to take them seriously as an account of true living intellectual controversies as opposed to some sort of late-stage playing-out of a long battle between ancients and moderns. I really am going to teach a class on the battle of ancients and moderns one of these days, by the way...)

B. R. Myers at the Atlantic on Peter Temple's crime fiction.

Leftovers

In the modern version of the university library, with on-line renewals a matter of ease rather than the physical inconvenience of lugging a huge bag of books back in to the physical place of the library itself, it is common to think of library books as being in one's possession for a matter of years (five years, to be more precise - at Columbia one is able to renew for up to 10 semesters online before needing to bring the books in in person to "reset" the borrowing period!).

But a spell out of town prompts purging of the home library collection - I am going to keep some library books in my office, but mostly I must get rid of 'em all for now...

Thus the leftover phenomenon - it is like eating things out of the fridge, they may have been very good in the first place but there is a sense of duty in their later consumption.

I became mesmerized the other evening, though, as I reread Richard Altick's The English Common Reader. My Columbia colleague Gerald Cloud mentioned it in a discussion earlier this year, and it reminded me that I wanted to revisit it - I think I last read it (or perhaps "dipped into it" is the apter phrase?) as an undergraduate researching the forms of serial publication adopted and developed by Dickens.

It really is a great read! I couldn't put it down - the point about the strange convergence of utilitarian and evangelical anti-fiction movements in the nineteenth century is extremely well taken - but here are a few bits I particularly enjoyed, the first one just for fun and for the pleasures of regional spelling and the second because it picks up on my previous post.

An opponent of Edinburgh 18th-century lending-library pioneer Allen Ramsay's practices:

"... this profannes is come to a great hight, all the villanous profane and obscene books and playes . . . are gote doun from London by Allen Ramsay, and lent out, for an easy price, to young boyes, servant weemin of the better sort, and gentlemen, and vice and obscenity dreadfully propagated. Ramsay has a booke in his shope wherein all the names of those that borrou his playes and bookes, for two pence a night, or some such rate, are sett doun; and by these, wickedness of all kins are dreadfully propagat among the youth of all sorts."

And here is William Cobbett's description (as given by his nineteenth-century biographer) of seeing a copy of A Tale of a Tub in a bookseller's window at Richmond (for 3d.) and purchasing it and reading it behind a haystack at Kew Gardens:

The book was so different from any thing that I had ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when I started to Kew, reading my little book.

Ether, ethics, anesthetics

Lots of things recently have been conspiring to make me want to reread T.S. Eliot, in whose writings I was absolutely steeped as a teenager but who I have only briefly revisited since; aside from more casual prompts, I am contemplating a future class on the battle of the ancients and moderns, to be built around Swift's Tale of a Tub but taking in everything from Hamlet and Montaigne and Descartes up to David Markson's Reader's Block. (In my office the other day after an unusual and interesting oral exam I was rereading Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, which I think laziness would induce me to teach instead of the Cantos.) "The Waste Land" is crucial here, of course...

Anyway, a very appealing piece at the TLS by Eric Griffiths on the latest volume of Eliot's letters. Here is a good bit:

These letters are awash with complaints, mostly nervous – “neuralgia”, “neuritis”, “nerve-storms” – but also, among others, hemicranial migraine, anaemia, toothache, trouble with “glands”, malnutrition and “suppressed influenza”. Husband and wife shadowed each other through an intent, valetudinarian tango, one shuffling in retreat when the other strode forward (“I had influenza just after Christmas and I was scarcely out of bed before Vivien suddenly rushed into bed and refused to get up any more”, to Charles Haigh-Wood, July 1925). While they were associates in dismay, they might listen to the roster of each other’s ailments with sympathy, participation even, but at any time they could go out of tune with one another and start hearing the tales of woe as wheedling, extortion or connivance. They became third parties to their own experience, reciprocally suspicious, as Eliot’s brother suspected Vivien (“she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns”), as Eliot in 1926 suspected John Donne: “this deliberate over-stimulation, exploitation of the nerves – for such it is – has in it, to me, something unscrupulous”. What struck her as the unstable straining of their lives for effect – “life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time” (1918) – came across to him bearing the force of an artistic convention like revenge tragedy, with its routines, its precarious “mixture of tedious discourse and sudden reality” (1927), ambivalently powerful either to flatten out or throw into high relief the interactions which it frames.