13 ways of looking down

I decided to try a new public forum this summer; it got briefly off the ground, but didn't move much beyond the prototype stage.  I like the varying privacy levels here, and without any pressure to keep a Serious Blog for the General Record, I posted more frequent fluff about food and birds and my own absurdity, all while considering the amazing posts I would put up at the Phoenix Complex when I got around to writing them.  That is the current state of things.

There are plenty of academic bloggers out there, but, I have noticed, very few of the serious, time-intensive blogs I've seen are written by people still doing coursework.  For most people, coursework is a big brain-eater, and unless you're lucky enough to have convergent classes on fascinating topics it doesn't produce a wealth of blog content per se.  Moreover, you have ample opportunities to talk about the material in seminar, or on discussion boards, and so the impulse to blog about it is muffled.  If I were hugely dissatisfied with my program, I might post more; but I love my program, and in this instance love is the less garrulous emotion.

Also: most of you are probably aware by now that I'm a colossal perfectionist, of the quixotic and destructive kind— the ones who won't ever finish stories for fear they might be crap, who would rather not say a thing in class for fear of sounding uninformed, who will not try new things for fear of doing them badly, and who will devote far more energy to cheap self-criticism than to substantial self-improvement.  This means, obviously, that blogging for a sizeable audience is paralyzingly hard.  Even if it's anonymous, the thought of having . . . [I don't even know what— it's more or less an existential terror] . . . as a response to what I write is enough to keep me revising, deleting in frustration, and apologizing for long stretches.  And because part of the fun of reading blogs is the spontaneity, extensive revision is counterproductive (and apologies are tiresome under any circumstances, no matter how readily they leap from your mouth).

Gomorrah

But because I still believe anything worth doing badly is worth doing well, and because I don't think I have it in me to keep two separate blogs going, I'm going to move this endeavor to the Phoenix Complex for 2008 (with a few possible posts this month, including a review of Gomorrah).  I may still post privately here, and for the time being I'll leave the archives up.  I also have a hard time taking it on faith that anyone besides the known reader-commenters read this thing, but the URL has circulated enough that some strangers may be keeping up with it (I don't keep user logs here).  If that's you, thanks for reading.

When the girls out here— and the guy I just held the door for— say "thank you," they in fact say "thenk yow", or "think yo," or something between, and then they shuffle off in their flip-flops.  I can't reproduce this pronunciation at all; I've only ever heard it on this coast.  Got any data on this?

I think I'd feel better with an acorn woodpecker around.  These guys are loud!  Loud, loud, loud, and they look like cartoon birds.  They are all over campus.

AcornWoodpecker23

Like most woodpeckers, they are wholly adorable, and they cache acorns in acorn matrices of their own design.  Image from wikipedia.

Things are basically great.  I wouldn't complain unless I could face the sources of complaint without despair.  It would be much harder to say anything negative about my life if I were still working at the bank— I'd just talk about how much money I was saving up to invest in various socially and environmentally friendly things, and you'd hear from me once a year.

For the sake of context, let that be said.

No, look, I have to shout my little shout, and then I'll bury my little snout back in my 50 books.  I hate writing papers.  Why?  Because I have nothing paper-length to say about any appropriate topic.  I find the form impossible.  What I consider serious intellectual work is fragmentary, catenary, open-ended, allusive, recursive, not MLA-formatted, not 16-25 pages in length, not spelled out in plain terms for the idle reader.  You're picturing a monstrosity, and I understand this, I do.  Work must get done.  But nothing deserves these intellectual subdivisions, these pleasant little tracts of Times New Roman 12-point real estate with their 1.25" white picket margins, their aluminum siding hiding Gothic levels of philosophical decay.  Oh let us excavate a grotto or renovate a warehouse and there build a new way of living with arts and histories and literatures and sweet heady unfinished symphonies; let us leave these New Developments in Literary Studies to those who work close by.  Let the forms live and die!

There.  There may be more of that left in my system.  I'll keep you... all... posted...

If I hadn't gone off on a mad search for a Book Unnecessary For My Research in the middle of my intensive paper-writing week, I would not have stumbled across the cart, hiding in the basement of the library, containing the Primary Source Totally Totally Necessary For My Research which I had foolishly returned (long stupid story).  I knew I'd be able to find it faster than the library staff could, but I didn't know my profligacy would buy me 3-5 extra days! 

About this, too, I do not know what lesson to draw.  I also solemnly promise not to eat only rice cakes for dinner, although they are quite tasty.  Do you guys know about these Lundberg Family Farms Sesame Tamari rice cakes?  My, but they are delicious.  Sesame!  Tamari!  Brown rice!  Not a completely balanced meal: not sufficient, but necessary.  Necessesamari.  Mm.

It can be easy to forget, when reading the Inferno, just how tall an order it was to create a hell that exceeded the extremes of contemporary military and political violence on earth.  The lovely Middle Ages of modern nostalgists aside (no names, but you people know who you are), it was hideous.  I am reading a brief history of the Catalans— alongside desultory reading about Spanish history in general and 14th-century Florence and so forth— and, seriously, yuck.  I'd never have the stomach to work on this period; I don't care how magnificent the troubadours were.  Under the banner of a peculiar seafaring German, a nasty band of Catalan mercenaries, the Almogàvers, sailed to Constantinople in 1303 and briefly overpowered it; on the way back they captured Athens and much of the rest of Greece.  Did you know about this, Catalan hegemony in Greece and Asia Minor?  No?  My source is Jan Read's The Catalans (Faber & Faber, 1978).  It was a bloody, gory, gruesome messy mess, and no one misses the Catalans in Greece today.  From there we move on to a chapter on the great era of Catalan preeminence in the Mediterranean, presided over by a king who made his enemies drink molten metal.  This is all too obvious to be worth mentioning, but it isn't as though Dante was wandering around Bella Tuscany eating goat cheese and dreaming up nightmare scenarios with which to smite his enemies; he needed only to take notes and extrapolate.

It is far from clear what lessons one can derive from this.  The idea of Necessity lurking in the past really does seem dangerous.  Also, Jesús Moncada = good, although I don't know what's been translated etc.  Also, expect me to be an utter sniveling wreck by the end of two weeks or so, when my papers come due.  At least I am learning to conceive of worlds distant in time and space...  even if "when the papers are due" is a misty one...

This cheered me up— from the Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd Edition, in "Dante and the lyric past" by Teodolinda Barolini (p. 27):

The Rime contains the traces of Dante's stylistic and ideological experimentation.  The tenzone of scurrilous sonnets exchanged between Dante and his friend Forese Donati, for instance, was long denied a place among Dante's works because of its base content, considered inappropriate for the refined poet of the Vita nuova; and yet, without it, we would be hard put to trace the passage from the tightly circumscribed world of the Vita nuova to the all-inclusive cosmos of the Commedia.  Nor does the tenzone's lowly content obscure the archetypal signs of Dante's poetic mastery, evidenced by the compact vigor and concise force of his diction, and the effortless energy with which one insult springs from another.  Whereas Forese requires a full sonnet to accuse Dante of being a bounder who lives off the charity of others, Dante characteristically packs an insult into each verse of the opening quatrain of "Bicci novel," which tells Forese that (1) he is a bastard, (2) his mother is dishonored, (3) he is a glutton, and (4) to support his gluttony he is a thief:

Bicci novel, figliuol di non so cui
(s'i' non ne domandasse monna Tessa),
giù per la gola tanta roba hai messa
ch'a forza ti convien tòrre l'altrui.

(Young Bicci, son of I don't know who [short of asking my lady Tessa], you've stuffed so much down your gorge that you're driven to take from others.) (Foster and Boyde, Dante's Lyric Poetry, 1, p. 153)

Also good was David Wallace's "Dante in English," from which I kept reading aloud to P, z.B.:

In [1782], however, William Hayley translated three cantos of the Inferno as a footnote to his Essay on Epic Poetry, and William Rogers published a blank verse translation of the entire Inferno.  Rogers' work is neither accurate nor poetically accomplished; the quality and tenor of Hayley's work may be gauged from an earlier rendition of the famous Hell-gate inscription in his The Triumphs of Temper (1781): "Thro' me ye pass to Spleen's terrific dome" (DEL 1, p. 361). [...]  It was not until 1814... that H.F. Cary, an Anglican clergyman, brought the English-speaking world face to face with a powerful, accurate, and poetically moving translation of Dante.  (289-90)

That was the one Keats hauled around the Lake District and Blake illustrated.  On Wallace's account, with only a few exceptions (Chaucer, Milton, Shelley) the height of Dante's reception in English was the 20th century, although he doesn't speculate on the implications.  I leave this exercise to you readers!  Why would Dante have gone over so well in the age of modernism-and-after, at least in English?  Is it just too upsetting in a less secular world, perhaps?

One of the problems with accumulating five billion books at a pace that far exceeds your ability to read or even skim them is that sometimes— on the days when the Internet is particularly dull— you become aware of them all.  It's one thing to be aware of the long books in languages you don't read well— hello there, Decameron in Italian and impulse-purchased Czech fiction from Prague!  An attachment to books as objects, or a need for exalted goals: such things can easily be forgiven.  What I mean is more the realization that you really wanted and intended to read every book you bought, and you still want and intend to read them, but you have to admit, when pressed, that you have no idea when you'll start or how long it will take or in which order you ought to proceed; that book collecting is a planless and depraved thing to do, a genuinely philosophically interesting vice, perhaps, but a particularly crazy one when you have access to giant university libraries anyway.

Still not clear?  Here are some particulars.

I. Redundancy.  I fall somewhere between preferring to read original Spanish and German texts (almost always more elegant prose, good language practice, etc.) and preferring to read English translations (comprehension still better).  French and Italian I read at a snail's pace.  Trying to improve my skills in all these languages in parallel is a constant struggle.  But I have the will, and, therefore, I also have copies of Stendhal, Proust, Boccaccio, Celine, Baudelaire, Dante, Svevo, Flaubert, et al, in originals and translations.  In German almost everything is doubled.  In Spanish, which I read fairly well, I have a few opportune translations.  Furthermore, in a belief that I would simply learn Latin one day, much as a ptarmigan turns white in winter, I began encouraging the accumulation of Latin Loeb editions.  They are shiny and red like berries.  Any old ptarmigan would bite.  But it creates a dilemma:

Do you:

A) read Ovid in English, glancing at the Latin from time to time?  Advantage: knowing something of Ovid; increasing cultural literacy.  Disadvantage: inauthentic!

B) read Ovid in Latin?  Advantage: authentic!  Disadvantage: you have to fucking learn Latin first.  How hard can it be... when you're learning three other languages simultaneously?  "Impossible" is not a bad guess!

Option A would commit me to approximately three or four hours of concentrated reading.  Option B would commit me to several years of concentrated language study.  Naturally, I choose Option B.  Teach a man to fish, and he'll say, "yeah, I think I've got the hang of it, this is easy, thanks," and then when you go to see him and ask him how the fishing has been going he'll shrug and give an evasive answer and then conspicuously eat potato chips for dinner.  If that analogy isn't quite clear, for "potato chips" read "blogs."

I've been over some of this terrain before, but I don't think I've made it quite clear how much this whole complex represents the ultimate collision of my overweening ambitions and my terrible, terrible time-management skills.  I'm beginning to think that I need to see books not as physical objects on a shelf but as reified units of time: then I'll have a better sense of what exactly I'm trying to do with my life by building this fortress.

II. ADHD.  Some people are not passive learners; when reading, they use a variety of different technologies to interact with the text: they highlight book passages, take copious marginal notes, write computer programs to organize their book notes, etc.  Not me!  I am special.  I am an impatient, scatterbrained, dialogic reader who uses no technology whatsoever to help maintain the dialogue.  When a text makes me think about something, I put it down.  Sometimes I pick up another book and read a few pages of that and then think about it.  Fascinating!  Fascinating, in some profound and ineffable way.  Oh my head.  I had better check my email now.  Where was I?  It is fucking amazing that any ideas get through these buffers at all.  Well, no, it's not, because I can sit still and read when I need to, but the bouncing-around happens quite often, I fear.

III. Rereading.  I have these friends who like books— novels, generally, or poetry— enough to read them several times over.  From the best books, you continue to find wisdom and beauty and humor and pathos with each reading.  Fine.  But I find myself wondering: how many of the books on these shelves, purchased in the hope that they would be good or great, will merit extensive rereading?  If it's even 10%, man, I may as well just stop buying new books now.  Especially if that subset includes the Latin books.

Now, what was the point of all that?  That I wish I had more time to read?  Well then, off we go—

No, I'm not going up to Napa to work on my novel.  If only.  Rather, this month must necessarily be devoted to writing papers, and I figure I might as well make a game of it.  I wonder if there's a way to keep a page count going on Vox?

There are three papers.  They should be between 16 and 20 pages long.  The topics are, um, mostly, um, largely, they are kind of targeted at this point.  I will say at the outset that I really don't know if I can make this interesting for the rest of you to read, and that if it seems like it ain't working after a few days, I'll give it up.  But papers are potentially more discussable than novels.  "Ergh, I am having trouble developing this one character!  I'm just not sure how to get them all on the pirate ship with the indie bands!  (Well, I mean, they're sort of Renaissance-era indie bands, but they're based on my favorite bands.)"

Also, more Peter Szondi.  Badass!  Do you think that's a real forest, or is it just a painted backdrop he carried with him everywhere?  Theory of modern drama, indeed!