Oh dear, it is now officially the time in the semester when I admit that I am never going to get on top of all this work and that I'd better just stay calm and ride it out!
So busy this week that (most unusually!) I have not even had a chance to write my race report from the Princeton 70.3 on Sunday. (Short description: fun but hot; bicycle woes, ultimately transcended; sore feet!)
About to head out of town again to see friends and family but more particularly to go to the memorial concert for my mother's dear friend and longtime colleague Don Kawash.
Next two weekends will be mercifully at home, then on Oct. 15 I head to Dublin for the Swift symposium (paper not yet written - that, the overdue tenure letter and a letter of recommendation due Oct. 1 are the three work bits most immediately and guiltily on my mind!).
I'm teaching a graduate seminar this semester that basically features a novel a week, so less light reading than usual (on the bright side, work I can do on trains). Up Monday: Godwin's Caleb Williams, a favorite of mine. Train reading?
Symptom of being overly busy: huge number of unclosed tabs!
Here goes:
Manhattan swimmer replicates fictional Cheever feat! (Sort of.)
Heath Lowrance's ten favorite Westerns.
Lavie Tidhar's selfie horror story.
What makes for a brilliant book cover?
A conference I really would be keen to go to!
Helen DeWitt's library on display at the Artists Space on Greene St. through early November.
"Go to Work on an Egg."
Coach David's wife Megan takes the 50K trail championship!
Anna Deveare Smith on artists' discipline.
Eighteenth-century maven Devoney Looser (a.k.a. "Stone Cold Jane Austen) on the roller derby revival.
Good tip from Nico about an upcoming Britten performance: I have a ticket for Oct. 30.
Ebola watch: we ain't seen nothin' yet.... (More Ebola - that story's from a couple weeks ago and already feels ominously out of date.)
Meager light reading around the edges of an extremely busy September: Willy Voet, Breaking the Chain: Drugs and Cycling - The True Story (Voet is a remarkably unsympathetic character, but it is a fascinating account regardless); Darryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine (I really like this guy's books!); M. M. Kaye's The Ordinary Princess, which Katharine Beutner made me think of; and Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters. Was alternating this week between Kipling's stories and the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (shuttling back and forth between different bits of light reading is pretty invariably a sign of deep fatigue), but fell back last night in state of utter exhaustion on Seanan McGuire's new October Daye novel, which was more what I was in the mood for.
Wonderful but overly busy schedule has also included breakfast with the author of a favorite book of mine, a black-tie Johnsonian gala at the Knickerbocker Club, a class visit from and dinner with the excellent author of an excellent book I taught last week in LTCM and the second meeting of the Manhattan Supper Club (we convene at G.'s place on Greene St. - we being me and my brother, sister-in-law and niece - and dine on pizza and associated delicacies at Arturo's, with optional add-on ice-cream module to follow!).
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Monday, September 22, 2014
On eating and being eaten
The changing diet of polar bears, with a new emphasis on the eggs of snow geese:
David Iles, a graduate student at Utah State University, who has been working at La Pérouse Bay for several years, set out cameras to observe goose nests and caught the bears in the act. He now has 40 cameras set up over a stretch of tundra. They take photographs every two minutes and shoot a burst of 30 images when an animal walks in front of the camera.
In addition to capturing photographs of bears consuming eggs last season, the cameras caught cranes, wolves, eagles and foxes eating. “Everything seems to love eggs out here,” he said.
One goose or one nest may not seem like much. But polar bears are gluttons. Dr, Rockwell described one case in which a bear ate about 1,200 eggs — of eider ducks, in this case — in four days. He said Dr. Gormezano had calculated that a clutch of four eggs would amount to 825 calories, the equivalent of one and a half Big Macs. Three hundred four-egg clutches would be 247,500 calories, or about 10 percent of a bear’s yearly nutritional needs.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Week three
Happy with yesterday evening's Wordsworth lecture for LTCM - I am getting a better handle on how to use the time (I only lecture once a week, for seventy-five minutes, and the other class meeting is in smaller-group seminars taught by advanced doctoral students). "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," a few pages of John Hollander's delightful discussion of accentual-syllabic verse in English from Rhyme's Reason, some thoughts on "The Idiot Boy" and a bit of Geoffrey Hartman at the end: it was fun.
Readings:
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1802): “Preface” (95-115), “The Thorn” (and Wordsworth’s note on 199-200), “We Are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Hart-Leap Well,” “‘Strange fits of passion,’” “‘She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways,’” “‘A slumber did my spirit seal,” “Lucy Gray,” “‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’”
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 141-162
Paul De Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics 17:4 (1987): 4-17
Here is the first assignment, due in seminar this week:
1. Choose a favorite stanza of “The Thorn” and type it up in your assignment. Then read it out loud and mark in boldface where you think the stresses fall in each line.
We will talk about this in lecture Tuesday, and I’ll give you a supplementary handout, but a good deal of English poetry doesn’t fall into clear and easy feet: you don’t need to identify a specific meter or mark iambs and trochees and spondees as per our Virgil/Milton discussion last week, just start to get the feel for the rhythm of the lines.
2. How many lines are in the stanza, and what is the pattern of the rhyme scheme?
Use letters A, B, etc.: a Shakespearean sonnet in this system would be ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, while a Petrarchan sonnet would be ABBA ABBA with the last six lines – the “sestet” following the “octave” – generally following the pattern either CDECDE or CDCCDC.
3. How would you describe the diction of the poem (vocabulary, turns of phrase, habits of speech and style)? How would you describe the voice of the poem’s speaker?
4. In Wordsworth’s own note to “The Thorn,” he gives a detailed description of the character who speaks the poem. How does this affect your reading of the poem? Would the poem stand more effectively on its own without it, or does the note augment and amplify aspects of the poem as we have it? What does Hartman say about this narrator, and do you agree with his assessment? If not, why not?
5. One stanza that provoked mirth in some readers is XVII (ll. 177-187). What is inappropriate or embarrassing about the language here? Why does Wordworth court the risk of becoming ludicrous here and elsewhere in the poem? How does this relate to the defense of repetition he offers in his note to the poem?
6. Why might Hartman call “The Thorn” “Wordsworth’s most experimental poem” (140) and “one of the strangest poems in Lyrical Ballads” (146)? You can give a few quotations from his discussion or offer your own thoughts and speculations; it will be valuable if you can step outside his terminology and argument and offer your own account of why this should be so.
7. Write three to five separate assertions about “The Thorn” that you are willing to stand by. They can range from description (the kind of thing you wrote in answer to the first question above) to argument (making a case about the effects or meaning of some choice Wordsworth has made, as Hartman and De Man often do). Mark each with an A or a D depending on where you see it falling – you can mark it D/A if you feel that it falls equally under the two headings.
Readings:
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1802): “Preface” (95-115), “The Thorn” (and Wordsworth’s note on 199-200), “We Are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Hart-Leap Well,” “‘Strange fits of passion,’” “‘She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways,’” “‘A slumber did my spirit seal,” “Lucy Gray,” “‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’”
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 141-162
Paul De Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics 17:4 (1987): 4-17
Here is the first assignment, due in seminar this week:
1. Choose a favorite stanza of “The Thorn” and type it up in your assignment. Then read it out loud and mark in boldface where you think the stresses fall in each line.
We will talk about this in lecture Tuesday, and I’ll give you a supplementary handout, but a good deal of English poetry doesn’t fall into clear and easy feet: you don’t need to identify a specific meter or mark iambs and trochees and spondees as per our Virgil/Milton discussion last week, just start to get the feel for the rhythm of the lines.
2. How many lines are in the stanza, and what is the pattern of the rhyme scheme?
Use letters A, B, etc.: a Shakespearean sonnet in this system would be ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, while a Petrarchan sonnet would be ABBA ABBA with the last six lines – the “sestet” following the “octave” – generally following the pattern either CDECDE or CDCCDC.
3. How would you describe the diction of the poem (vocabulary, turns of phrase, habits of speech and style)? How would you describe the voice of the poem’s speaker?
4. In Wordsworth’s own note to “The Thorn,” he gives a detailed description of the character who speaks the poem. How does this affect your reading of the poem? Would the poem stand more effectively on its own without it, or does the note augment and amplify aspects of the poem as we have it? What does Hartman say about this narrator, and do you agree with his assessment? If not, why not?
5. One stanza that provoked mirth in some readers is XVII (ll. 177-187). What is inappropriate or embarrassing about the language here? Why does Wordworth court the risk of becoming ludicrous here and elsewhere in the poem? How does this relate to the defense of repetition he offers in his note to the poem?
6. Why might Hartman call “The Thorn” “Wordsworth’s most experimental poem” (140) and “one of the strangest poems in Lyrical Ballads” (146)? You can give a few quotations from his discussion or offer your own thoughts and speculations; it will be valuable if you can step outside his terminology and argument and offer your own account of why this should be so.
7. Write three to five separate assertions about “The Thorn” that you are willing to stand by. They can range from description (the kind of thing you wrote in answer to the first question above) to argument (making a case about the effects or meaning of some choice Wordsworth has made, as Hartman and De Man often do). Mark each with an A or a D depending on where you see it falling – you can mark it D/A if you feel that it falls equally under the two headings.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Austenian aphorism
Up today in the graduate seminar is a favorite novel of mine, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story. It is not really a legitimate mode of academic argument, but it's always interesting to see where Austen saw certain techniques in action - here's a passage that always catches my attention:
Not to admire Miss Fenton was impossible--to find a fault in her person or sentiments was equally impossible--and yet to love her, was very unlikely.Also up: Terry Castle's chapter “Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald’s ‘A Simple Story,’” from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 290-330; and Marcie Frank's essay “Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
That serenity of mind which kept her features in a continual placid form, though enchanting at the first glance, upon a second, or third, fatigued the sight for a want of variety; and to have seen her distorted with rage, convulsed with mirth, or in deep dejection had been to her advantage.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Cake fest
One of the toys I most coveted as a child, though I think in reality baking real cakes in a real oven is preferable!
Quincunciall Lozenges
Oliver Sacks' personal history in libraries (courtesy of Dave Lull), with a call for keeping books on shelves. This piece should be read in its entirety by anyone who loves books - it is heavenly - but I was especially captivated by this bit, for obvious reasons:
But the library I most loved at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, were the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me—I particularly adored Gesner’s Historiae Animalium (1551), richly illustrated with Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros and Agassiz’s four-volume work on fossil fishes. It was there, too, that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions, and it was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut-and-thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions. While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works that my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—Johnson, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.(Note to my mother: make sure you read this one, you will like it in any case but the Willesden public library makes a star appearance!)
"Sleekit things"
Mixed feelings about this piece as a whole (the rhetoric at the end made me laugh!), but this bit of John Lloyd's essay for the FT about his childhood in East Fife strongly reminded me of my Scottish grandfather, an educator, a lover of language and literature and an ardent Scotophile (FT site registration required):
At school, English was taught by two Aberdonians, Alastair Leslie and Alastair Mackie, pouring their enthusiasm into those of us in the thin stream that didn’t leave at 15. Mackie was a poet who followed MacDiarmid’s path, wrote almost wholly in Scots and took us to the medieval Scots poets, especially Dunbar. At nights, after homework corrections, and at weekends, he would teach himself French, German, Italian and Russian so that he could translate Akhmatova, von Eichendorff, Quasimodo and Rimbaud into Scots: imagine what audience there was for that!
Like his master, he was Anglophobic: a poem on Princes Street describes Edinburgh’s central thoroughfare as “chained like a convict tae your English stores”. Another, “Wimbledon”, notes: “The guff o’ Eton in the commentator’s breath/‘Thet woz eh maavellous beck-hend by Bawg [Borg].’”
Mackie’s translation of Osip Mandelstam’s famous Stalin Epigram showed what we lost: the lines describing the dictator’s circle in English – “Around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen/He plays with the services of these half-men” became – “A clamjanfrie o’ spurtle-neckit heid-bummers/sleekit things, playthings, kiss-my-doups, half men.”
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Happiness!
My dear friend Jane Yeh has been chosen for the Poetry Society's Next Generation list, issued once a decade. Not so well-known in the US as in the UK, but this is a BIG DEAL! These are poems that everyone who loves language and play should be reading.
Catch-up
It is hard to believe I've only been back in New York for two weeks. Once the semester starts it is a roller-coaster, all you can do is hang on and wait for it to stop! I guess it is about one-twelfth of the way done?!? Hmmmm, better pace myself for the remaining eleven-twelfths....
Did an amazing triathlon on Sunday (race report here). One more next weekend and then I just need to get on a regular exercise schedule. I've been resting all week due to tired legs, scraped-up elbow and knee and general insanity of school!
Some good light reading around the edges (weeks worth, really - I am annoyed with myself when I go so long without posting it as it becomes tedious to paste in a good many links at once!):
My friend Marco posted a picture drawn by his ten-year-old daughter that reminded me of my passion for Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl. I checked Amazon and there was indeed a new installment of this utterly enthralling series: The Anxiety of Kalix the Werewolf! It is just as good as the previous two. Imagine Jilly Cooper (he has her rare gift for writing funny appealing characters you care about & being able to spool off stories about them at nearly infinite length) as rewritten with input from Stephen Elliott and Francesca Lia Block - these books are frankly just ridiculously appealing!
Then I read Millar's pseudonymously published Thraxas, but it is not as much to my taste (if you want to try Millar without werewolves, a good place to start is the hilarious Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me).
I liked Declare so much that I downloaded a few more books by Tim Powers; The Drawing of the Dark and Three Days to Never are bot good reads but neither is as much to my taste as Declare.
A cycling-related recommendation from my friend Troy: Richard Moore, Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault and the Greatest Tour de France.
I got Gwenda Bond's Girl on a Wire as an electronic advance reading copy via Amazon Prime. It is delightful! Gave me happy memories of reading again and again from the school library a Noel Streatfeild book that was not one of my absolute favorites (theaters being more exciting places to me than circuses!) but that still captivated me like all her others, Circus Shoes. (It was clear even to optimistic childhood self that I could not have a career as an acrobat or a trick horse rider if I had to run away and join the circus, but I thought there was a good chance that I could play in the band!)
Amazing two-fer that got me blissfully through the knackered evenings of the first week of classes: Lee Child, Personal and Tana French, The Secret Place. These two books are perfect of their respective kinds, and they are appealing kinds at that. I would teach these on a syllabus to show the equal importance of voice, character and plotting to perfect popular fiction! The Tana French in particular is just remarkably good, I am sure I will read it again very soon - shades of Miss Pym Disposes! Especially impressive is the way the whole thing really depends on the creation of a grimly intense mood - it is really like a much more effective and amazing version of what I was trying to do in The Magic Circle.
A very appealing SF novel by Daryl Gregory called The Devil's Alphabet (reminded me of another underrated old favorite of mine, Peter Dickinson's The Green Gene).
Finally, devastatingly (I finished it an hour ago and can't quite imagine what novel I could read immediately following it - might have to turn to some nonfiction instead?): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.
One more tenure letter to write this weekend, and a letter of recommendation I should have done already (many others hard on its heels!); meetings tomorrow morning, but after that mostly just plans to do a lot of work and some exercise. Had to get this post written this evening because light reading catch-up is one of the throat-clearing procrastinatory things I do when I have to write something that takes attention but that I don't really feel like doing, and it will be better to have gotten it out of the way this evening!
Did an amazing triathlon on Sunday (race report here). One more next weekend and then I just need to get on a regular exercise schedule. I've been resting all week due to tired legs, scraped-up elbow and knee and general insanity of school!
Some good light reading around the edges (weeks worth, really - I am annoyed with myself when I go so long without posting it as it becomes tedious to paste in a good many links at once!):
My friend Marco posted a picture drawn by his ten-year-old daughter that reminded me of my passion for Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl. I checked Amazon and there was indeed a new installment of this utterly enthralling series: The Anxiety of Kalix the Werewolf! It is just as good as the previous two. Imagine Jilly Cooper (he has her rare gift for writing funny appealing characters you care about & being able to spool off stories about them at nearly infinite length) as rewritten with input from Stephen Elliott and Francesca Lia Block - these books are frankly just ridiculously appealing!
Then I read Millar's pseudonymously published Thraxas, but it is not as much to my taste (if you want to try Millar without werewolves, a good place to start is the hilarious Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me).
I liked Declare so much that I downloaded a few more books by Tim Powers; The Drawing of the Dark and Three Days to Never are bot good reads but neither is as much to my taste as Declare.
A cycling-related recommendation from my friend Troy: Richard Moore, Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault and the Greatest Tour de France.
I got Gwenda Bond's Girl on a Wire as an electronic advance reading copy via Amazon Prime. It is delightful! Gave me happy memories of reading again and again from the school library a Noel Streatfeild book that was not one of my absolute favorites (theaters being more exciting places to me than circuses!) but that still captivated me like all her others, Circus Shoes. (It was clear even to optimistic childhood self that I could not have a career as an acrobat or a trick horse rider if I had to run away and join the circus, but I thought there was a good chance that I could play in the band!)
Amazing two-fer that got me blissfully through the knackered evenings of the first week of classes: Lee Child, Personal and Tana French, The Secret Place. These two books are perfect of their respective kinds, and they are appealing kinds at that. I would teach these on a syllabus to show the equal importance of voice, character and plotting to perfect popular fiction! The Tana French in particular is just remarkably good, I am sure I will read it again very soon - shades of Miss Pym Disposes! Especially impressive is the way the whole thing really depends on the creation of a grimly intense mood - it is really like a much more effective and amazing version of what I was trying to do in The Magic Circle.
A very appealing SF novel by Daryl Gregory called The Devil's Alphabet (reminded me of another underrated old favorite of mine, Peter Dickinson's The Green Gene).
Finally, devastatingly (I finished it an hour ago and can't quite imagine what novel I could read immediately following it - might have to turn to some nonfiction instead?): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.
One more tenure letter to write this weekend, and a letter of recommendation I should have done already (many others hard on its heels!); meetings tomorrow morning, but after that mostly just plans to do a lot of work and some exercise. Had to get this post written this evening because light reading catch-up is one of the throat-clearing procrastinatory things I do when I have to write something that takes attention but that I don't really feel like doing, and it will be better to have gotten it out of the way this evening!
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Up today
in LTCM: Milton!
Milton, books 1-4 of Paradise Lost
Critical readings:
#Stanley Fish, from Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (1967; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22-37
#Christopher Ricks, from Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 118-138
#Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 187-207
Milton, books 1-4 of Paradise Lost
Critical readings:
#Stanley Fish, from Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (1967; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22-37
#Christopher Ricks, from Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 118-138
#Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 187-207
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Weekend chaos!
In minor chaos and disarray at this end! I am having a very good month: my only complaint about it is that all the good things are happening in a very compressed time period, whereas I know there will be long dull stretches at other points that would have benefited from this kind of stimulus!
(New Tana French was so good that I just wanted to read it all over again when I finished. Also enjoying Vikram Chandra's new book - excerpt here - but fuller light reading log will have to await some more leisurely moment. Had a great meeting Thursday with an editor I'm keen to write for, found a very good dress yesterday to wear for my one annual professional black-tie event, new semester still has the glow on it, etc. etc.)
Heading off in a couple hours to New Paltz for the SOS Triathlon. My brother and his family are crewing for me - niece GG just had her first day of kindergarten on Thursday, as well as her fifth birthday on Tuesday, so I am excited to hear all about it on the car on the way there! I'm taking NJ Transit out to where they are - they have just moved into a new house in Rutherford, this will be my first visit (of many I hope!).
Haven't finished everything for Monday's initial seminar meeting, but the syllabus is finalized and I don't teach till late afternoon, so that should be OK - ditto Tuesday's class on Milton. One letter of recommendation that I will try and squeeze out this morning if I can get tidied up and packed in sufficiently good time. One more tenure letter due the 15th, but it was slightly amazing that I got two of the other ones done over the holiday weekend.
Triathlon: sport of stuff!
Syllabus design also breeds an accumulation of things:
And then there's the OTHER syllabus!
(New Tana French was so good that I just wanted to read it all over again when I finished. Also enjoying Vikram Chandra's new book - excerpt here - but fuller light reading log will have to await some more leisurely moment. Had a great meeting Thursday with an editor I'm keen to write for, found a very good dress yesterday to wear for my one annual professional black-tie event, new semester still has the glow on it, etc. etc.)
Heading off in a couple hours to New Paltz for the SOS Triathlon. My brother and his family are crewing for me - niece GG just had her first day of kindergarten on Thursday, as well as her fifth birthday on Tuesday, so I am excited to hear all about it on the car on the way there! I'm taking NJ Transit out to where they are - they have just moved into a new house in Rutherford, this will be my first visit (of many I hope!).
Haven't finished everything for Monday's initial seminar meeting, but the syllabus is finalized and I don't teach till late afternoon, so that should be OK - ditto Tuesday's class on Milton. One letter of recommendation that I will try and squeeze out this morning if I can get tidied up and packed in sufficiently good time. One more tenure letter due the 15th, but it was slightly amazing that I got two of the other ones done over the holiday weekend.
Triathlon: sport of stuff!
Syllabus design also breeds an accumulation of things:
And then there's the OTHER syllabus!
Friday, September 05, 2014
Dipterocarp forest
Armand Marie Leroi has a good diary piece at the FT (I am excited to read his new book) - here's a nice bit about visiting Borneo, FT site registration required:
There was a canopy walk, a series of metal towers that led to the arboreal world where most of the forest lives. We set out in the dark, climbed at first light, and watched morning mist dissolve to reveal a sea of green. You could also pick up a mobile signal there. As we got to the top, the chimes of iPhones springing to life competed with the bird song and the distant whoops of macaques.
Unparalleled serpents
At the FT, Madeleine Albright's symbolic brooches (site registration required). (Courtesy of I.H.D.)
Thursday, September 04, 2014
4 books
Diana Athill on the books that made her (all four of these are important for me too):
The first two are obvious: War and Peace and Middlemarch. All novels create places and people; those two create whole worlds. To both I return repeatedly. In Tolstoy’s case it was some time before I bothered with War, because the love stories were more important to the teenager I was then, and even in my twenties I rather sheepishly edged back into Peace about halfway through. Not until much later did I see how wonderful the War part of the book is. Now the only parts I skip are the few passages in which Tolstoy pontificates. The more one knows about his life the clearer it is that in many ways he was maddening, and there are tiny chinks in the book through which this can be glimpsed; but the miracle is that in War and Peace his genius prevailed over his human failings.I had the opposite experience reading War and Peace as a teenager: I had imagined of course that the drawing-room/love chapters would be what would enthrall me, but really I was completely captivated by the war sequences and considerably less interested in the home front (really this makes sense given how mentally involved I was with historical fiction along the lines of Mary Renault, Robert Graves, Gore Vidal etc.). It is probably a failing of readerly sentiment, but I still don't see how any novel-reader could possibly prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace - in fact one reason I love Clarissa so much is that really it is much more like War and Peace avant la lettre than like any novel of adultery! I should try and write something sometime about Austen and Tolstoy, it is a counter-intuitive but compelling pairing....
Syllabus revamp
I first taught this graduate seminar about ten years ago - I wasn't that long out of graduate school, and though it's not exactly classic eighteenth-century studies, it made more sense at that time, since there were no eighteenth-century graduate students and I was more hoping to woo a few nineteenth-centuryists over the romantic divide, to teach something like this that complemented the lecture course I also offered on the eighteenth-century novel more traditionally conceived. In that iteration (the list of novels was a little different too), I gave a big critical bibliography and had each student write a report one week on a work of criticism or history that would summarize & make accessible that essay or book's arguments for classmates.
It was a late curriculum decision to add this course for the fall semester (leaves and departures left us undersupplied with graduate seminar in 18th- and 19th-century literature). This is an easy and fun one for me to bring out for the occasion, and we again have a strong incoming cohort of nineteenth-centuryists who may find these readings interesting and useful. But I really wanted to do a fuller job with the criticism.
It's not true for all graduate seminars, and I would consider my particular strength as a teacher and scholar being more my ability to make even the oddest and most obscure of 18th-century books come alive than any particular affinity for big-picture critical thinking, but it is very useful if a seminar like this can provide an introduction to the sub-discipline, touching on a few big critical controversies that extend even outside the subfield (here, say, the Sedgwick-Miller axis and also the Moretti) and that would put the student in a better position to write a dissertation chapter or an article on a constellation of comparable primary texts.
Now the class is telling two different stories in counterpoint, something I enjoy!
I love Facebook these days for crowdsourcing questions of this sort - I got some great recommendations from friends and colleagues. Here is the retooled list of readings (special thanks to Anahid Nersessian, who suggested a couple things I never would have thought of, and to Marcie Frank for sharing her in-press essay on Inchbald):
WOMEN, POLITICS AND THE NOVEL, 1790-1818
9/8 Introductory class
9/15 Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791)
#Terry Castle, “Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald’s ‘A Simple Story,’”from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 290-330
#Marcie Frank, “Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
9/22 Charlotte Smith, Desmond (1792)
#Gary Kelly, “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelising the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6:4 (July 1994): 369-88
#Claudia L. Johnson, “The Age of Chivalry and the Crisis of Gender,” from Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-19
9/29 William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)
#Jon Mee, “Critical Conversation in the 1790s: Godwin, Hays, and Wollstonecraft,” from Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137-167
#John Bender, "Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams," in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Roger B. Henkle and Robert M. Polhemus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 111-126
#Andrew Franta, “Godwin’s Handshake,” PMLA 122:3 (2007): 696-710
10/6 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798)
#Claudia L. Johnson, “Embodying the Sentiments: Mary and The Wrongs of Woman,” in Equivocal Beings, 47-69
#Miranda J. Burgess, “Wollstonecraft and the revolution of economic history,” from British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113-49
10/13 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication (1798)
#Tilottama Rajan, “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” Studies in Romanticism 32:2 (Summer 1993): 149-76
#Clara Tuite, “Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity,” ELH 74.1 (2007): 59-88
#James Chandler, “Sentimental Journeys, Vehicular States,“ from An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 176-202
10/20 Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
#Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (1798)
# M. O. Grenby, “Novels reproved and reprieved,” from The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13-27
#Claire Grogan, Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756-1816 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 51-89
#David Simpson, from Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 104-125
10/27 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (1805)
#Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740-1850),” Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009): 134-158
#Katie Trumpener, “Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti,” Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009): 159-171
#Kenneth Johnston, “Whose History? My Place or Yours? Republican Assumptions and Romantic Traditions,” in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 79-102
11/3 Election holiday: no class
11/10 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801)
#Clifford Siskin, “What We Remember: The Case of Austen,” from The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 193-209
#Clara Tuite, “Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion,” in Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 56-97
11/17 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
#Claudia L. Johnson, “A ‘Sweet Face as White as Death’: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility,” Novel 22:2 (1989): 159-174
#Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 818-837
#D. A. Miller, “Secret Love,” from Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1-29
Paper proposal and annotated bibliography due Friday 11/21 to my mailbox in 602
11/24 Sir Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian (1818)
#Beth Newman, “The Heart of Midlothian and the Masculinization of Fiction,” Criticism 36:4 (1994): 521-540
#Katie Trumpener, “National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806-1830,” ELH 60:3 (1993): 685-731
12/1 Final class meeting: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
#Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” ELH 48:3 (1981): 532-554
#Maureen McLane, “Literate species,” from Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84-108
Carolyn Steedman, “Nelly’s Version,” from Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 193-216
12/8 No class
Final paper due Monday 12/15 to my mailbox in 602
It was a late curriculum decision to add this course for the fall semester (leaves and departures left us undersupplied with graduate seminar in 18th- and 19th-century literature). This is an easy and fun one for me to bring out for the occasion, and we again have a strong incoming cohort of nineteenth-centuryists who may find these readings interesting and useful. But I really wanted to do a fuller job with the criticism.
It's not true for all graduate seminars, and I would consider my particular strength as a teacher and scholar being more my ability to make even the oddest and most obscure of 18th-century books come alive than any particular affinity for big-picture critical thinking, but it is very useful if a seminar like this can provide an introduction to the sub-discipline, touching on a few big critical controversies that extend even outside the subfield (here, say, the Sedgwick-Miller axis and also the Moretti) and that would put the student in a better position to write a dissertation chapter or an article on a constellation of comparable primary texts.
Now the class is telling two different stories in counterpoint, something I enjoy!
I love Facebook these days for crowdsourcing questions of this sort - I got some great recommendations from friends and colleagues. Here is the retooled list of readings (special thanks to Anahid Nersessian, who suggested a couple things I never would have thought of, and to Marcie Frank for sharing her in-press essay on Inchbald):
WOMEN, POLITICS AND THE NOVEL, 1790-1818
9/8 Introductory class
9/15 Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791)
#Terry Castle, “Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald’s ‘A Simple Story,’”from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 290-330
#Marcie Frank, “Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
9/22 Charlotte Smith, Desmond (1792)
#Gary Kelly, “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelising the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6:4 (July 1994): 369-88
#Claudia L. Johnson, “The Age of Chivalry and the Crisis of Gender,” from Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-19
9/29 William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)
#Jon Mee, “Critical Conversation in the 1790s: Godwin, Hays, and Wollstonecraft,” from Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137-167
#John Bender, "Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams," in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Roger B. Henkle and Robert M. Polhemus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 111-126
#Andrew Franta, “Godwin’s Handshake,” PMLA 122:3 (2007): 696-710
10/6 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798)
#Claudia L. Johnson, “Embodying the Sentiments: Mary and The Wrongs of Woman,” in Equivocal Beings, 47-69
#Miranda J. Burgess, “Wollstonecraft and the revolution of economic history,” from British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113-49
10/13 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication (1798)
#Tilottama Rajan, “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” Studies in Romanticism 32:2 (Summer 1993): 149-76
#Clara Tuite, “Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity,” ELH 74.1 (2007): 59-88
#James Chandler, “Sentimental Journeys, Vehicular States,“ from An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 176-202
10/20 Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
#Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (1798)
# M. O. Grenby, “Novels reproved and reprieved,” from The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13-27
#Claire Grogan, Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756-1816 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 51-89
#David Simpson, from Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 104-125
10/27 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (1805)
#Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740-1850),” Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009): 134-158
#Katie Trumpener, “Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti,” Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009): 159-171
#Kenneth Johnston, “Whose History? My Place or Yours? Republican Assumptions and Romantic Traditions,” in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 79-102
11/3 Election holiday: no class
11/10 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801)
#Clifford Siskin, “What We Remember: The Case of Austen,” from The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 193-209
#Clara Tuite, “Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion,” in Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 56-97
11/17 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
#Claudia L. Johnson, “A ‘Sweet Face as White as Death’: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility,” Novel 22:2 (1989): 159-174
#Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 818-837
#D. A. Miller, “Secret Love,” from Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1-29
Paper proposal and annotated bibliography due Friday 11/21 to my mailbox in 602
11/24 Sir Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian (1818)
#Beth Newman, “The Heart of Midlothian and the Masculinization of Fiction,” Criticism 36:4 (1994): 521-540
#Katie Trumpener, “National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806-1830,” ELH 60:3 (1993): 685-731
12/1 Final class meeting: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
#Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” ELH 48:3 (1981): 532-554
#Maureen McLane, “Literate species,” from Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84-108
Carolyn Steedman, “Nelly’s Version,” from Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 193-216
12/8 No class
Final paper due Monday 12/15 to my mailbox in 602
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Tuesday, September 02, 2014
In defense of the corporate behemoth
Neal Pollack in defense of Amazon:
When Amazon picked me up off the slush pile in 2011, my decade-long, five-book career was effectively dead. I had a modest contract with a legacy publisher for a pseudo-self-help book, but I didn’t want to write it, they no longer wanted put it out, and I’m pretty certain nobody would have wanted to read it. My antiquated dream was to write novels, but my previous and only novel had sold so poorly that I wouldn’t have been able to give away the next one for free, to any publisher.As a reader, I have to say that Amazon has been an incredible boon to me. And what Pollack says seems to me very true - for what was formerly known as a mid-list author (and for readers who want to have access to books that are written to "commercial" standards of excellence but are not sufficiently commercial/mainstream in their appeal to hit the buttons for the big publishers - I am thinking of Neil Smith, Charlie Williams, et al. - often these books are just too demented and violent for, say, readers of conventional police procedurals, but they are absolutely brilliant!), Amazon's publishing wing - and what it can do in terms of making backlist titles easily available to ordinary readers - has been a force for good....
Instead, through Amazon, I’ve published three full-length novels—a historical action comedy set in the very specific world of 1930s Jewish basketball and two detective stories set in the L.A. yoga scene, originally written in serialized form—as well as three 10,000-word novellas, including an extended piece of Kurt Vonnegut “fan fiction,” all in the last 30 months. I have another novel, a time-travel romantic comedy, coming out next March and I’m under contract to write still another novel, subject yet to be determined. It’s been the most enjoyable creative burst of my career, a gleeful hack’s sprint toward nowhere in particular.
Monday, September 01, 2014
10 books
The "10 books" meme is spreading like wildfire in my Facebook feed! Really I have done this too many times already, so I am linking to three different ones I've posted here before that capture three different through-lines of my reading life....
First and most fundamentally, my ideal bookshelf!
The ten books that most influenced me intellectually.
Ten non-fiction books that have stayed with me.
Perhaps if I get all my work done today I will write up a 10 books of childhood list....
First and most fundamentally, my ideal bookshelf!
The ten books that most influenced me intellectually.
Ten non-fiction books that have stayed with me.
Perhaps if I get all my work done today I will write up a 10 books of childhood list....
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