"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.”

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!

Fancy Work on the Typewriter

Maria Popova on a new anthology of typewriter art.

Fluff

The distillery cat tradition.

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

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!

Red pants

At the NYRB blog, Adam Hochschild on a new book of color photographs of WWI.

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.)

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

Outbreak

MSF nurse Anja Wolz on life and death in a Sierra Leone Ebola case management center. (Via Seth Mnookin.)

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.

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.

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....

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....