10/27

Sometime before March of 1628, Ben Jonson wrote an epigram complimenting the soon-to-be Earl of Newcastle, William Cavendish, on his horsemanship. (Footnote: one MS mentions his Viscount-ness. Clarify date.) Jonson's praise seems to have been well-targeted: later, in Antwerp during the Interregnum, Cavendish would write a book on horse training, and at the Restoration he returned as the king's horse master. [And, during the closing years of Jonson's life, Cavendish proved one of his most important patrons (sponsoring what?)]

Bringing the highest literary models to bear on his quest for patronage, Jonson compares the mounted lord to Perseus on Pegasus, to Castor on Cyllarus, and to Sir Bevis on Arundel, ultimately pronouncing:
-Nay, so your seat his beauties did endorse,
-As I began to wish myself a horse...
This is an odd sort of wish, and one that Jonson quickly spins into a clever appeal for patronage. His wish is "absolved," he says, because Cavendish's horses eat better than the Muses. He then gives the screw a further turn:
-[I] cried, away with the Caesarian bread,
-At these immortal mangers Virgil fed.
Calling to mind Virgil's alleged stint in Augustus's stables, Jonson proposes that Cavendish's patronage could replace royal patronage--not undesirable, given the financial troubles of the monarchy. Moreover, he suggests, Virgil--feeding at the manger rather than on the bread granted him by Augustus--originates a pedigree of poet-horses that culminates in him.

I will return to these issues of patronage and lineage later in the paper. For now, I want to turn to the odd couplet in which Jonson, seeing his patron ride, wishes himself the horse. We have an account, luckily, of what Cavendish looked like on horseback, from a sympathetic observer: Cavendish himself. In the opening pages of the English version of his book on horsemanship, he writes:

-"I Rid first a Spanish-Horse, called Le Superbe, of a Light-Bay, a beautiful Horse; and though Hard to be Rid, yet when he was Hitt Right, he was the Readiest Horse in the World: He went in Corvets forward, backward, sidewayes, on both Hands; made the Cross perfectly upon his Voltoes; and did Change upon his Voltoes so Just, without breaking Time, that no Musitian could keep Time better; and went Terra a Terra Perfectly."

This connection between the forms of horse-riding and those of music or verse is a Renaissance commonplace. Jonson could not have read Cavendish's passage, written many years after his death, but both he and Cavendish would be familiar with the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Philip Sidney--whose name, of course, means horse-lover. There, Pamela describes Mucedorus's horsemanship in similar terms: "[W]ith a kind rather of quick gesture than show of violence, you might see him come towards me beating the ground in so due time as no dancer can observe better measure....[H]e ever going so just with the horse, either forth-right or turning, that it seemed as he borrowed the horse's body so he lent the horse his mind" (CPA 2.5.247-248). The entire passage is too long to quote, but it relates horsemanship on the one hand to a graceful performativity, akin to music or dance, and on the other to a successful Platonism that is itself a sign of Mucedorus's nobility. Readers know that Mucedorus's mind does not in fact control his body as well as the man controls the horse.

Jonson may have borrowed the image of the "centaur" for the union of man and horse from this passage, though the topos is common. The epigram bears the traces of another Sidneyean source, as well. Sidney famously opens his Defence of Poetry by describing the orations of his riding master, John Pietro Pugliano. His praise of horsemanship is so convincing that "if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse." In Sidney's exordium,

10/22

For once, I'm actually writing this today, rather than in the earliest part of tomorrow. I can be proud of this, I think, even though it's always in blogging that I start trying to clean my keyboard. It inflates my statistics, a little, but it also makes my keyboard cleaner.

"I Rid first a Spanish-Horse, called Le Superbe, of a Light-Bay, a beautiful Horse; and though Hard to be Rid, yet when he was Hitt Right, he was the Readiest Horse in the World: He went in Corvets forward, backward, sidewayes, on both Hands; made the Cross perfectly upon his Voltoes; and did Change upon his Voltoes so Just, without breaking Time, that no Musitian could keep Time better; and went Terra a Terra Perfectly."
William, Duke of Newcastle , "A new method, and extraordinary invention, to dress horses, and work them according to nature as also, to perfect nature by the subtility of art, which was never found out, but by ... William Cavendishe ..."


In Underwood 53, Jonson plays an elegant compliment to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle. On horseback, the lord brings to mind Perseus, Castor, and Sir Bevis on their own respective steeds. Together, horse and man are so in unison as to seem a centaur--"Nay, so your seat his beauties did endorse/As I began to wish myself a horse."
This is an odd sort of wish, and one Jonson quickly begins to spin into a clever appeal for patronage. It is worth pausing for a moment, to think about the precise relationship that's wished for. First and foremost, this is a hierarchical relationship along every conceivable axis: a good rider not only owns the horse but masters it. [Cavendish: English King greatest horseman in world, Spanish King greatest horseman in spain]

The ideal rider guides the horse through motions beyond its intellectual capacity to understand--"all the uses of the field and race"--

10/21

I'm still excited about the fact that the word "critic" appears in the mid-1590's. I'd like to tell a story about the beginning of plays about poets, with, say, Cynthia's Revels, and perhaps even about how the development of the neutral position in the humors drama lead to the idea of a neutral critic, as well.

Such a story might take in Poetaster and "Criticus," thinking about how Jonson writes about the relationship between himself and Donne.

One tack: Jonson's Underwood 53 talks about one Renaissance sense of the relationship between artist and spectator. Horseback riding is an art that impresses its viewers with a sense of the nobility of the rider, and Jonson goes one step further and wishes to be the horse. This is natural, given his own sense of the difference in rank between himself and the lord--he wants to take his natural role in the performance.

Meanwhile, the neutral subject of the humors comedy avoids being emmeshed in the schemes of theothers..

How does this work, actually--Donne alone can judge, because Donne alone can write. How is that the same, or different than the lord?

Sidney, too, wishes himself a horse.

The reader, that is, wishes to be mastered, in a particularly graceful and physical sense.


Wishing Myself Your Horse: A change in the erotics of English poetry

10/20/2008

I'm tired and it's late, so don't expect great thoughts out of this, O wise me of the future. I just know that starting now is worth any quantity of wanting to start later.

According to the OED, the modern meaning of the word "critic" appears in my period. I find that inconceivable. What's more, the word basically doesn't exist in any form (besides the medical "cretic" before that.) The critic, as such, seems to appear between 1598 and 1607, with Love's Labor's Lost a slightly earlier outlier--attributed to 1588 in the OED. (1595, according to Wikipedia.)

That's remarkable. And, it seems to be born with a completely modern sense. Biron uses it twice--once as to refer to Timon and once in apposition to "a domineering pedant." Theseus in Midsummer talks about a "satire keen and critical." Iago tries to refuse to deliver an epigram on Desdemona because he, too, is critical:

• Desdemona. What wouldst thou write of me, if thou shouldst
  praise me?

• Iago. O gentle lady, do not put me to't;
  For I am nothing, if not critical.

EEBO is even weirder--the word doesn't even appear until 1596, when it seems already to have the current meaning. I don't know what to make of this--I think what I'm worried about is that I may be on to something.

If the critic first appears as a threat in 1596, it's not obvious that that's instantly a subject position that people can /write/ from. A critic here is just a complainer, on artificial grounds. What does it mean that that word reads so easily in contemporary terms?

What does it mean that everyone started using it all of a sudden? Is it just a fad? Is there an economic explanation? Is it the end of the sonnet tradition?

9/18/08

Today: 6 hours of class. 2 hrs, 15 minutes of typing for Stuart. 1 hr of beers and poetry discussion with the folks from Wayne's class. Also read part of Nigel's assignment.

Tomorrow, ideally: Warburtorn for Stuart. Books for Leonard. Read something for Leonard. Make a little progress on Lovelace.

Actually, I'll probably do less than that. Oh, and I probably don't have a spare shirt. Oh well.


It was really somewhat delightful reading Milton. I'm impressed by the difference that modernized spelling makes, but also he really is somewhat fundamental in how we write, I think.

I want to do more thinking about Aphra Behn and the position of women. What is up with that text? There are three roughly articulated female subjectivities: Angellica (the whore, who is in love with a man she knows doesn't deserve her, but can't quite formulate it in that way, because of her own ignominy); Hellena (the rich Woman of Quality, who is in fact something of a libertine and pursues the captain and finds herself both frustrated and attracted by his unfaithfulness); and Florinda (the stereotypical rich virginal maid who is constantly under duress).

Likewise, I suppose, there are really three male figures that we get full psychological insight into: Blunt (in love with and therefore robbed by a whore); Willmore (the profligate Captain); and Belvile (the counterpart to Florinda, who is constantly saving her and fighting duels and things).

Putting it this way makes me willing to advance a conjecture about the end. Willmore ends up with Hellena and Blunt with Angellica. Perhaps I'm wrong, though--there's lots of other characters, and Antonio may need a woman. They just play similar roles in the sexual economy of the thing, which I hadn't quite realized.

I wonder if we can imagine Florinda as complicit in her own oppression. Certainly the other women aren't treated in the same way. I mean, Callis is locked in a trunk, but the recurring sexual menace seems to be addressed primarily at Florinda. Then again, that menace is overdetermined, because at least in the scene I just read, the male characters think it's acceptable because they think she's a whore.

I have to think that Behn found that detestable even when you imagine a whore in that position. But part of the effect is that this Lady is treated like something less than a lady.

In a sense, too, Willmore is the opposite of Blunt--he's cozened a whore, sexually, while a whore has cozened the latter, financially.

I wonder, too, how much the names matter. Willmore is obvious. Blunt may be an impotence joke. I'm not sure about Belvile or Hellena, unless the second "l" in the latter's name is a reference to her desire to be a bad name. Angellica might be a pun--the angel is a coin and she is angelic in beauty but not behavior. I want to Google "Florinda" and see what results.

Very little. I wonder if we should imagine her connected to Florimel? Or Florida?

There's an argument here, but I don't know what it is. Still, I need to think about complicity whenever I think about oppression, I think. Is the treatment of Florinda a backdrop to the other treatment of women in the play--does it describe an atmosphere of generalized sexual menace--or is it an alternative? And if it's an alternative, what's it an alternative to? Hellena's life seems better, but she's gotten rather unhappy in the last few pages. Angellica too.

Maybe the ending will help this, but there aren't very many man-less possibilities for women that are particularly available...

9/17/08

Good conversations today with Jeff and Leonard. I read the necessary section of Dora and the Ashberry poems. I typed a couple pages of The Rover (45 minutes). And I read the Introduction and the first 20 or so pages of The Rehearsal Transposed. Not a vastly successful day, but I'll take it. Since I have to.

I don't have any ideas today, that I can think of. I talked to Jeff a little about my taste question, and he suggested formulating it in terms of "dis-taste" and "dis-gust" and pointed out that I need to read Denise Gikandi's book. So I shall. He also wants to be invited to the Taste Rave, which is exciting.

I did have one realization that I may work into my presentation for Leonard: the two pieces in the miscellany are both governed by a logic of substitution, and of attempting to negotiate a female-controlled phallic symbol. It seems clear to me that this isn't necessarily about heterosexuality, therefore--it could be about control, about sex + power, etc. At the same time, it suggests two more things:
1) that male-male desire occurs in the context of the broader social setting. Men who desired men were also expected to express desire for women. Shakespeare. Marvell. (Did Piers Gaveston marry?) And many men expressing desire for men also viewed themselves as in competition with women. I want to make this point because it defines one of the limits of the homosocial metaphor for tracking desire.
2) that pastoral gifts bear an uneasy relationship with desire for sex. the absurd border that EK is policing is in fact structurally important. how?

because gifts, like words, are capable of multiple conveyance.

I really should invert these points. What I'm arguing is that gifts in pastoral convey multiple meanings, like words do. When a poet like Spenser or Barnfield (following Virgil and Theocritus) embeds homosexual gift exchange and desire in the poem, he likes to be able to muddle the meaning of the gift a little bit.

The ostensibly heterosexual things in B's commonplace book concern themselves with the nature of this sort of gift exchange. [edit, one year later: this last bit is the important piece!]

9/16/08

I was successful today in reading another section of Dora, several poems, and some Lovelace. Tonight I'll read more poems.

I wish I'd typed The Rover or finished my Columbia piece. Aha! I just went and did it. One more thing out of the way!


So reading Lovelace made it more obvious to me today that I have a lot more thinking to do about how poets talk about other poets. The big claim that I wanted to make doesn't seem to be true--poets are still using friendship as a way of talking about other poets. What's perhaps interesting is that they're policing that friendship in certain ways and restraining the sort of gift-giving that's rampant in, say, Spenser. At the same time, though, Spenser is not exactly unconstraining his relationship descriptions either. Sidney is defiantly hetero.

So I don't have a project again, in some sense. So I guess I just need to keep chipping on. I'm a little disappointed in myself for the amount of time that I'm wasting. I need to get a little more discipline, if I'm going to be able to do this--I can't keep jacking around like this.

Or, to put this more positively, I like the feeling of knowing what I'm talking about. I like being able to contribute in discussion. I like being able to write interesting things that appeal to me. I can do this. I just need to get a little more discipline. After all, realistically, what I did today isn't any worse than what I did most days last year. I just have a higher standard for myself now because I'm beginning to see that I can do more.

I just followed up with Leonard. All work is avoidance of harder work, which is good as long as it isn't always the same work that's hard. If I can just get myself to keep doing some things, I'll stay afloat.

I'm a good RGS. I'm a successful graduate student. And I'm a reliable employee. I just would like to be better at all of those things. I'll have 10-20 more hours a week, minimum, if I can stop wasting Internet time. I think I need to do that.

I'm gonna read a little Ashberry and go to sleep.

Reading:

Thurs--Ashberry, little bit more Dora

Monday--Bible/classics, some theory articles
--Lycidas, Rehearsal Transpos'd, etc

I need to go crazy with printing.

9/15/08

I let it get much later than I had hoped, because I played a round of video games, talked to Ana, read on the Internet, and Googled things. I'm still going to feel confident about my day, though, because in addition to 6 hours of class, I did 1 hour of work for Leonard, I read 56 pages + an article for Diana, I read Astrophel, and now I'm going to write for a few minutes.

From Astrophel, Milton stole two lines which begins the process of casting Sidney into the pastoral world:
"Young Astrophel the pride of shepheards praise,
Young Astrophel the rusticke lasses loue:"

Milton turns these lines into the praise of "young Hyacinth," and mentions that after his death, he's turned into a flower, just as in Spenser's poem, Astrophil and Stella are turned into flowers.

Other features of the verse could have come from Spenser as well: most notably the series of questions and the panegyric.There are other sources as well, of course.

I am fascinated by the invocation of Sidney and Spenser as Hyacinth and Apollo. First of all, because the latter two are a classical example of doomed homosexual love, which seems here to be envisioned as a poetic relationship. One explanation is that Spenser's fine praise of Sidney is equated with Apollo's own rendering of Hyacinth immortal.

I'm interested, too, in the sort of Ovidian/delicate Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet aetiology of the infant's death--it's the sort of thing that would entirely in character for the later Spenserians--Barnfield or Watson, say--except that it's written about death. Or Sidney! Sidney can write like this.

I want to think about the relationships in play.

Aquilo:Orithyia :: winter's force: child
winter's force:child :: Apollo: Hyacinth

In each case, the beloved is royal. But how does the inaugural violence of Boreas relate to the ending violence of Hyacinth?


My argument in class today was that the poem, really, is about poems. The child is of a piece with the child in Shakespeare's sonnets, or Sidney's sonnets, really. Or Daniel's, even--the kid doesn't seem real.



Where Milton is like Ovid and unlike Spenser here is that he's attempting to spin out enough material for his poem. Astrophel is not one long poem--it's a series of short ones that cover similar ground, but Sidney has enough of a life that much can be said that's panegyric but not inaccurate.

Milton needs to spin out hypotheticals in order to have a story to tell, and he does so using the questions that for Spenser were markers of the speaker's emotional state. Here, Milton is praising the child with the questions--the answers to which are almost always actually the opposite of what he implies it is. And he does so, in such a way that he can then rebuke the mother for a fake loss.

But of course the fake loss is what the poem is trying to set up! Milton just doesn't have the guts--to coin a phrase--yet to own the fake loss in the person of the speaker.


The speaker really isn't that far from a sonnet speaker, who doesn't have anything new to say and has to spend all of his ingenuity to say it. From that point of view, Milton's customary rebuke to the genre isn't particularly interesting, because it reads as a rebuke of his own poor writing.

I think one of the things he later learns from Spenser is a different sort of subject position from which to write lyric. Pastoral is a lot of help with that, because it allows the introjection of nature into the discourse AND it allows for thicker speakers, in a way that will eventually complicate the voice of lyric more generally.

I might hypothesize, though, that as pastoral speakers become locations for the lyric I, the dissociation that lets homosexuality work in that genre fades away.


I'm not sure I believe that argument, but it's not bad for right now!

9/13/08

Technically, it's 9/14, but I'm doing my writing for yesterday today. Specifically, an hour into today.

With the advantage of the added perspective of today, I think I'm going to try to write these posts such that they can be published. I'm not entirely convinced I want people to read this--I may password-protect it--but I think it'll be worth writing as if I do. It changes the type of practice I'm giving myself.


For now, here are the rules.
*6 days out of the week, I will write in this space (or elsewhere, if I have to) for 20 minutes.
*I'll do my best not to make one miss become a series of misses.
*Each post will be written with a minimum of editing. The goal is to get my fingers to convert ideas into sentences more quickly. I know that I can edit appropriately and intensify my arguments; the purpose of this space is to generate ideas through building a time in which to think about texts officially, and to train myself to get sentences out of my head and into a space in which I can edit them.
*I will recognize that I am thinking and not blogging. When I want to blog, I can do so elsewhere.

Starting the clock now. It's 12:53 on Sunday morning. I'm thinking about one of Robert Herrick's poems:

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

I'm reading (and at the same time re-reading, because one time through doesn't help me very much) Zizek's /Enjoy Your Symptom/, I suppose as a way of starting to think about Lacan. My goal is to be able to think about how desire works in Lacan and how it works in poetry.

Herrick's poem, if I understand the chapter I just re-read, is a good example of Lacan's interpretation of the the way the death drive works with the pleasure principle. Lacan suggests that the existence of a death drive, in addition to the pleasure principle and the reality principle, implies that the limit to the pleasure principle, that keeps the subject from becoming a closed circuit of self-enjoyment, is internal to the pleasure principle itself. There is, that is, a gap in this circuit, a foreign body blocking the way--the objet petit a.

In light of this foreign body, the pleasure principle takes on the role of enjoying its own failure to complete the circuit--it takes "satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object." (A note on quotations: I'm writing right now after having just put a book down. I suspect that lots of my non-quoted words are actually stolen and my direct quotes are inaccurate.)

Zizek's suggestion, then, is that this gap in the circuit is the origin of the Real, as the pleasure principle tries to posits its own failure as the action of a resisting force.

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness...

The poem pretends to be an exercise in looking: it takes the form of an observation stated generally, what can be presumed to be five examples, and a restatement of the observation. As the eye of the poet reader takes in a series of surfaces, it finds itself captivated by a lawn, a lace, a cuff, a petticoat, or a shoe string. The eye, disturbed by disorder into attention, still caresses its failure to attain order.

But we are not as far into the world of the social as this suggests. Herrick signals towards a sort of projection at work when he writes that disorder kindles wantonness "in clothes," when he describes the lace as "enthrall"ing only the stomacher, the "distraction" of the "lawn," and the "confusion" of the ribbands. These words, slightly misplaced, are the "sweet disorder" of his verse; they suggest the triads poet:poem:reader, women:dress:viewer.

Even still, the first line suggests that a sweet disorder in a poem must kindle a wantonness in a poem. And we know how a poem can be wanton--with this disordered, distracted gaze that runs over the surface of the woman object: poet:poem:reader; woman: dress:poem.

This is a desiring poem, which attempts to understand its desire in conjuring up a details. What's fascinating about these details is that they both matter completely and don't matter at all--like all literary details, it is their specificity that gives substance to the artifact, while it is their arbitrariness that make up the specificity of the artifact. There can be no exhaustive list of disorders. In a sense, each detail seized upon is the same detail; the same noting of the gap in the fulfillment of the pleasure drive.

At the same time, something builds out of the succession. To change metaphors briefly, a pearl crystalizes around the foreign body of disorder, and that pearl is the existence of the outside world. The progression "wantonness," "distraction," "enthrals," "wild civility" mimes the slow evolution of the outside: wantonness is a objectless feeling entirely interior to the subject; distraction implies the existence of precisely one thought-thing which prevents the focusing of attention; to be enthralled requires an external enthraller; and "wild civility" repeats the contrast of "sweet disorder" with two terms that are entirely externalized. [To be wild is not to be under the dictates of law/civility; to be civil is to be around other people.--terrible sentence, but I'm getting too tired to rewrite, and the rules say I can do this.]

The end of the poem is an anticlimax--its content simply restates the opening observation, more plainly with a chiming rhyme. Herrick perhaps thought it was necessary to introduce "art," in order to explain that he was not merely talking about women's clothing, but other than that, the line seems almost simpleheaded.

Except: being "too precise" is (a) another flaw and a potential subject for the same sort of pleasure short-circuit that motivates the poem, and (b) a precise description of the failure of the closing couplet. The couplet falls flat precisely because it lacks the tension and interest of the diction of the previous lines.

It's become a cliche to remark that a given poem thus enacts its own subject matter. Here, though, that re-enactment makes the subject matter more challenging, because we experience the discomfort of the poem's ending much more strongly than we do the disorder of the imagined woman's dress.

In some sense, the ending of any work of art is disappointing. The spell always breaks, eventually, even when the poet makes you follow his last gesture way off into the horizon:
in that dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea

I suppose the sense I'm talking about is one of duration--the poem must end at some time, the time after the poem must be different in some sense, and the felt difference between the two times is what I'm calling disappointment. (I'm aware that there are many different affects that can be involved in this felt difference--excitement, catharsis, in at least one case for me, awakening)

The finitude of an end is the alternative to the poem's treatment of absorption--absorbed by disorder, the eye is either distracted and running freely (and unteleologically) around the surface of something or enthralled and not moving.

Disorder is sweet, in part, because it constitutes the bounds of the aesthetic as something internal to it.

Charm, on the other hand, the typical affect associated with Herrick, deals with perfection maintained within tiny bounds. The power of disorder comes from the fact that its sweetness is not, according to Herrick, located in the object, but generated in and by the subject--"wantonness"--and productive of the Real outside of disorder. I've gotten myself turned around a bit, but I'm interested in the claim in the previous paragraph.

I think I'll bold it and call it a night.

9/12/08

I'm gonna try to start writing again, because it'll help me with Diana's class, with Wayne's paper, and hopefully with papers for Leonard and Nigel. I have a lot on my mind, so I'm going to just start typing and see if what results coheres.

It was useful for me to decide to read Dora as a novel rather than as a scientific document, because it protected the girl Dora from the violence of the text. At the same time, that's not a good way of reading Freud. I'm going to try to slog back through it in the next few days, to see if I can get a better sense of how Freud thinks her condition operates, as opposed to trying to establish the plot of the story.

Diana's point the other day that the language of psychoanalysis /is/ the language of plot I found interesting, because in some ways it's true and in some ways it isn't. Zizek's Lacan is not really about plot, is it?

I'm much more interested in the way that Zizek talks about the constitutiveness of lack than I am in how he talks about the act/signifier/name of the father. I understand that there's a perceptive critique of ideology there, that's at least somewhat in dialogue with the Frankfurt School, but I just can't get myself particularly interested. I mean, I guess I just don't know how it works textually to account for things that I'm interested in the same way that desire does.

I need to start reading and writing about Ted Berrigan for Wayne's class to start generating that talk, as well. Right now, I'm interested in the way that "Dear Margie, it's 5:15 am" is different than "Hurry UP PLEASE IT'S TIME"--both inform others of the time. I may want to think about this in terms of Hegel's bit on "Now it is day."

Hurry Up Please It's Time uses a bit of overheard dialogue to inject a narrative situation into the poem. The speaking ladies are at a bar at closing time. This situation is a schematic of the poem in minature, as well; a version of TS Eliot's view of the now.

Writing a letter, one uses a mention of the time in order to enable the other to understand what position you're writing from. After all, it's not 5:15 am, probably, now. 5:15 am is a measure of the gap between sender and recipient, between letter sending and letter receiving, between what could be said then and what can be said now. At the same time, it's a statement of a precise fact, about as precise as a poem can get.

That tension, between "block-like fact" and the inevitability of its going awry is important for the poems. It's how they work. And, in the last few poems, when that going awry starts in itself to be right, we realize that the letter always arrives at its destination. I'm thinking in the Lacanian sense--more Zizek--it is in reading the letter that we recognize ourselves as its addressee.

It is in reading the Sonnets that we realize that we are the addressee of that letter--that's what happens over the course of the poem, as the private references break out into a code of our own. It is 5:15 am here, rather than 5:15 am there--the gap is there, but the letter has arrived.

Hurry up please it's time, on the other hand, attempts to interpellate everyone as its subjects. The voice of authority--barkeep, Eliot, history--has insisted that everything is ending. One can't start a letter back to Eliot:
Dear Eliot,
Here the bars don't close until 2:00.

The metaphor of voice doesn't work for what I'm describing, I don't think. Certainly a letter-writer's "voice" is different than a barkeeper's voice, except when a bartender writes letters or a writer keeps bar. There's something in these time references that represent a relation to time and society that is mediated by voice but isn't voice. I'm losing the thread here, but it's getting interesting.

to summarize:
In The Sonnets, the repetition of certain blocklike materials that acknowledge their own limitedness help us to begin to understand ourselves as appropriate addressees for them. It's a tentative sort of incorporation of ourselves into the text.

In The Wasteland, on the other hand, if we fail to be interpellated, we have to object to the text. There isn't another subject position available.

7/18/08

I like reckoning with Olson's prose--it seems to me to be a comprehensible, reconcilable, and ultimately worthwhile activity and it makes me jealous that Evan and Greg and John get to engage with it as part of their academic work directly. At the same time, I don't want to become a modernist--there's no doubt there are things left to say there, but I'm not entirely convinced of the value of saying them. That's not quite honest or right--I just don't want to have to read all the boring bad and self-confident stuff that comes with it. I'm not as passionate about bad 20th century as I am about bad 16th century, if partially because what I'm interested in is the frisson of difference.

I like the puzzle of the bad that's far enough away from me that I have to really think it through , and I like the distinctive moments you can only get in the Renaissance because of the way words work. And the distinctive moments you can only get in the Renaissance because that's basically all you read, if you're me. Which I am.

This reminds me, that basically what I'm doing here is blogging. Is there much reason not to turn this into a real blog? I'd lose the benefits of the space to figure out my own head and to free write, but I'd start to write more seriously for an audience. I'm skeptical, though--I feel myself not convinced, so I know I'm not going to do it.

If I'm going to do blogging, I'm going to do it in a separate space--and I WILL not fall back into that trap of blogging about the Internet. It exchanges time for not-time in a way that won't ultimately be productive.

I wouldn't mind blogging about the Renaissance, if I didn't worry that it'd eat up my ideas--like Mr. Berman said that one should go to Japan for months and come back and never tell anyone, so that it has to come back as words. It's an odd thing to say to a student, and perhaps an odder thing to wish you had done. But I can see the appeal, especially because Japan was furtherer then.


These aren't ideas, really--this isn't writing practice so much as training my fingers to produce words as fast as I can think of them. That said, I think this will help me in my work as writer for CU--I need to be able to write faster. That job's almost over, and I haven't done nearly enough.

(My guilt comes back. My recent technique of listing everything I need to do in a given day to count it as a success is useful, but it doesn't work for longer than a day yet. I need practice with that, just like I need finger practice. That'd be an article I'd want to read--how to feel successful.)

Most of my fantasizing recently has been about having read more. How odd is that? I'm coming right along--I guess I need to figure out what's a reasonable amount to have accomplished and try to accomplish more than that--because I don't have goals, I don't have any sense of what I should be doing.

I know that James and I are doing a lot more than most people did last summer. I think that's a good thing--he pushes me to read more and think harder, and I need that.

OH--I should email my buddy. May as well keep building on this network...

7/15/08

I've successfully completed a day's worth of moving. And I did the amount I said I would--I can be proud of that. And I am.

I still feel like I've slacked off a little, but I need to be able to be proud of my success rather than sad because I could have done more.

There's never any advantage in beating myself up over successes--it just trains me to break my own self deadlines. Plus, I'm saving a meal tonight because of the large sandwich I bought at lunch today. And I'll save many more, once the coffee machine is fully operational.

(Palpatine voice: You see, the coffee machine is fully operational....)

I bought cereal for myself. How great is that? And I bought a fan, and sheets, and pillows, and wine. I played one game of Madden, but that's not a bad thing in itself either. Pleasure is a positive good, particularly during busy weeks like this one. Tomorrow I want to do one carload, ideally that's half books, and possibly other half computer/TV/Wii--wouldn't that be exciting? I'd be in a very good place for Thursday, Friday, and so on.

I haven't been thinking much about work, because of moving. That's okay, though--my next assignment will involve retyping Pope, so I'm going to be thinking about him a lot.

I wish I could convince these flies to flea. They seem to particularly like the taste of monitors--my TV and computer screen both attract the buggers. And they bug me.

I'm really just going to type as fast as I can in order to squeeze out five more minutes worht of typing so that I can get on with my life. I guess it should be a revelation to me that whether I type good stuff or bad stuff 5 minutes is five minutes.

Is four minutes.

Shakespeare, Spenser, Keats, and so on really are good, particularly in their good bits. I need to not lose cite of that--Part of the reason I'm afraid of the value question is that I read a lot of boring poetry, and so the interesting things I find, I think are valuable just for that reason. That is, I think I'm better at reading lots than I am at appreciating little bits.

Perhaps that'll make me not cut out for graduate school. More likely, seems like, it'll make me very cut out for graduate school and not cut out for the job market. But, we'll see. For now, I just need to read a little more than I do and write a little better and leave everything else up.. to God.

Success isn't happiness, anyhow. Success is success. Happiness is happiness.

I need to make sure I keep those straight in my head. It's too easy for me to defer thinking about how to make my life happier now and in the future in favor of thinking about how to make myself successful.

Future happiness is not happiness, either I suppose. I guess I need to keep that straight, too.

I have a big pile of self doubt, it seems, that only really comes out when I'm typing here. I wonder why that is.

7/14/08

So, I've been thinking again about evidence-- what I really need is poets thinking about each other under the guise of friendship, when the one writing is from a different generation. I think /The Unfortunate Traveler/ might actually be a place to start--its Surrey is quite different from Drayton's Surrey. Drayton's Surrey is thoroughly heterosexualized and the only poet in the picture. Jack, meanwhile, by becoming a second self, becomes something of a parody friend to Surrey. In that case, it'd also be worth talking about Greene, perhaps Greene's funeral, and then onto Amyntas?

The problem I'm having is that minor poets always die out, don't they? Each generation picks the ones they like, and we go from there--I can't think of any later references to Gascoyne, for instance, though I'll have ot pay more attention--it's always now that's more exciting than the previous generation, because all your contemporaries are actively trying to rewrite what the previous generation did.

But how you imagine your predecessors does change--Surrey is a good idea and one I'm glad ot have gotten free. Drayton historicizes him--the Drayton-Surrey relationship is what exactly? He was a great poet and so am I? (Think about the way that Drayton feminizes anxiety about writing.) Does Surrey in some way become D's Geraldine? I clearly have to reread this, and to think more about the Earl of Surrey in E/n times. And Wyatt, for that matter, and all the mid-century poets that would be the testcase for my theory. (Part of the problem is that I'm dealing with the very beginning of the nonymous production of verse, so there are relatively few precursors that can be identified.

All criticism by poets is choosing a father. (I really don't like the sexism of this discourse--one can have a strong mother that you need to get out of the shadow of, too. And I'm not quite sure the poets get to pick. But that's definitely what Dryden is doing when he starts to trace lineages. One way of doing this project would be a Spenser-Chaucer, Milton-Spenser, and then Dryden talking about those things investigation.

7/13/08

I wasted a good portion of this afternoon playing video games. After driving here from New York and three hours of German I was exhausted, and I haven't been able to get myself to work more than that. I just played video games for three hours, because I got caught up in it. It's amazing how that works, isn't it?

I'm kinda having a struggle, though, because I feel like I need to stop procrastinating in this way--it's very counterproductive, particularly in a week like this one--and yet I do think it's my body telling me to be careful about what it is that I'm doing and what my working pattern is. That sounds vaguely like an excuse, too, though. I need to get my keys as soon as I can and start moving, because I have a lot to do. I'm terrified, honestly--I know I''m going to get it done, but I know it's going to be absolutely awful.

Which I suppose means that I need to just do it. Perhaps tomorrow I can pack up loose things or make a checklist or something--I need to be organized and ready to go when it comes time to get my stuff over there.

Words are flowing more easily--I do like that about this practice--I can get words out my head much more easily, I think, than I could before. Although, actually, now that I think about it, I could do this relatively easily before, too. It's the writing when the words aren't coming that I don't like. The trick to this, I guess, is to type when the words are coming and not worry about when they aren't. (I've noticed that typing this way I insert little phrases like "I guess" in order to give myself time to think as I go along. I've noticed that I can only think about four or five words ahead, except to the extent that I chunk phrases into smaller units, for then I can think ahead counting that as only one. But, it makes me more likely to engage in typos (and, it seems, the further I try to think ahead, the odder my diction becomes. That's really interesting, and an odd thing to know about myself.)

I'm getting less impressed with Fish's reader response thing--it seems like he's just going to show that all texts have contradictions that if you skew correctly make them seem to be riven. It's almost a protodeconstructionist move. I mean, I'm very compelled by bits of his evidence, but I don't think he's right about what he does with it--I think it's too manifestly a Genius Author theory, in that it requires Bacon/Herbert/Donne to have precisely one big idea about hw they wanted their texts to work, and that one idea a weird one, that folks ahve missed for a long time. I wonder if I'd be more comfortable taking it as a statement about one way in which texts like these work to protect themselves from meaning in a way that's utimately boring, futile, or unsatisfying--if that is, one of the dangers an author faces is saying what it is he means, so that everyone realizes that that ain't much.

one of the dangers that an author faces is saying what he means, because the text is a poor simulacrum of the meant thing, and enabling the comparison is counterproductive.

one of the dangers that an author faces is saying what she means, because meaning is the most boring thing that language does, and perhaps some authors are particularly boring therewithin.

one of the dangers that an author faces is saying what she means, because what if her readers would rather she mean something else?

7/11.08

One interesting thing I wrote yesterday: I had meant to write that I'm interested in "language that strains..." but I wrote "language that sprains"--I think that's just about right, isn't it? language that hurts itself--it's body?--a little bit because it does something a little bit off or because of bad luck, but that still isn't shattered beyond repair.

Modern poems often try to sprain language (or to break it, of course) in a way that I find interesting. I'm equally interested, though, in the times that the Elizabethans sprained language, and particuarly those times that they did it that someone objected.

Drayton and Spenser, in particular, are constantly trying to explain what it is they mean and why it is that they are entitled to talk about it in the way that they are. To me, that suggests two things:
1) the poet doesn't assume that the audience will recognize his periphrasis, or metaphor, or allusion
2) the poet believes these things are a more powerful way of achieving whatever goal it is that he wants to achieve

It seems to me that to a large extent they're right on both counts--generally the things they explain are either obvious to modern readers (who have read the poetry of their successors all our lives) or would have been obvious a couple of generations in. In some ways, this is a flip-side of the anxiety of influence--the way poets stretch the language in order to achieve effects that they could not have otherwise. All sorts of poetic practice are justified by reading Shakespeare, who /must/ have been straining his audience's ability to comprehend. Mus'n't he? Or is it just that the /reading/ of Shakespeare encouraged people to start trying to produce effects in writing that Shakespeare did on the stage? That may be an undecidable question.

So what are the ways in which this two-part model can go wrong? One way is to try to sprain English in a way that has classical license and have yur audience not accept it. (Most people working in this fashion don't consider what it is that they're doing to be spraining the language, necessarily.)

One danger is that you won't have considered the consequences of your sprain and bad meaning will break into your text. This is the danger that Puttenham is protecting against--types of devices that preserve meaning versus types that distort it.

You can waste people's time, because your effects don't work, or you can make a Bad Thing because you handle them badly. Goose giblets wrapped in waste paper.

Or, you can have effects that are not the effects you intend, and lock someone in a church, or mess with the pronunciation of words.


My argument is that in the Renaissance, all of these possibilities were available in a way that they weren't for later criticism--people later didn't have quite the same faith in words efficacy and had more sense of an English tradition that could justify usage.

A usage borrowed from the Latin, after all, still needs justification in English, for fear that people will miss what you're doing. A usage borrowed from Jonson, Donne, or Drayton doesn't, really. It's one of the things that allusion within a tradition can do that allusion across traditions does differently.

7/10/08

So self-consuming artifacts is awesome. It's a little repetitive at times, unsurprisingly, but it's just really really good. Fish's readings of the Phaedrus and Augustine are really on point, and I wonder if they're what Sean was getting at in his class. They could not be, but if so, they should be.

It does make me wonder what kind of argument it is that I should be making, given what he says about how it is that rhetoric works. If rhetoric is essentially conservative int he way that he describes, should I be writing differently? Is there any room in the profession for me to be writing differently? Any room in my brain?

I really liked his reading of Donne, too--particularly after I got into it, describing the way Donne continually fell back on the text not as explanation but as rebuttal. I'm looking forward to reading him on Herbert. I'm a little less compelled by his argument about Bacon, if just because it seems quite possibly true that no one besides Fish has ever figured it out. Which makes it a horribly /in/effective way of writing for a reader. But then, I have felt uncomfortable with Bacon's essays before, and felt a strong desire to figure out what his positions really are.

Also: I finished the last Drayton exchange in the heroical epistles. Partially because it got up to the time of Queen Mary, it seemed /much/ more obvious in its politics in a way that annoyed me after his earlier work. At the same time, it did seem to be carving out a space within which those two /villains/ could exist despite their having been both bad --arrogant is his term--and on the wrong side of history. It's like the earlier letters work through badness and wrongsideness separately and this essay combines them, losing some of the credibility of the epistle writers but not all. I do think that space in which their credibility does still operate is the most important space for Daniel.

I'll have to keep thinking about it some, though, because it's not immediately clear to me how I'd argue further from that. I meanwhat exactly is the space that I'm indicating?
I do think that book (Fish) will help me break some of my internet compulsion, if only because it's more interestubg to read and so will attract my distraction bug. That's a technical term.

And if I keep reading, I can let my historical argument fall a little to the backburner, as I begin to explore a lot of things. It's when I'm not reading much that I need to really focus on the things that I am reading or have read.

One of the things that remains on my mind after talking to Mag is the terms "truth" and "argument"--they both seemed to be central but very problematic ideas in the conversation. Maybe a better way of approaching my rhethoric question is--what sorts of things are worth doing with words? And for whom?

That's sorta the crux of my bad poetry interest, isn't it? People trying to do things with words that aren't worth doing or that they can't do? I would never put it that way, but that's what I'm interested in: places where language sprains to say things that it just can't quite do.

I want to figure out what I mean by that "just can't quite do"--is it a failing of the author? It's tempting to generalize it out to the generation or the period, but as Julianne points out, we'd like to still talk about individuals...

07/09/08

I explained my idea to both James and Maggie today--each thought that it sounded promising. Now I need to figure out how to put the idea into an example in 15 pages for Leonard's class and see if it can grow from there. I don't know that it will, but that's clearly the next step.

One locus I could look at is the Barnfield passage in which he talks about Sir Philip Sidney.

I guess, what I need in order to hit a 15 page paper is:

evidence of the two trends:
construction of a canon
changing model of homosexuality

(of the two, the former is perhaps harder than the latter. I don't, however, need primary sources initially--i can read criticism for that)

two texts, in which successorship is linked to male friendship in very different ways
i need a paternal friendship text and i need someone talking about other poets as older shepherds or something.

hmm. i can do this.

i'm just going to run out the clock now, though, because i want to work on german. D'you know what? today is going ot be my day off.

i came back to it. i may as well--it's almost two anyway, and so a few more minutes of typing won't hurt.

i was clearly exhausted, looking at my earlier text. Perhaps it's just my capitalization, but I seemed tired. Or, maybe I'm projecting. It seems like what I need to do is merely to explore the birth of a canon of Elizabethan poets, and to explore the ways the poets who make that canon think about canonicity. I'm not writing a dissertation here, just a 20 or s0 page paper that lays out an /argument/.

where to start? i could do an eebo search for Watson and look at the latest hits. But Watson is a bit of a common name.Hmm. I need to just keep reading and see if I turn up anything, I think. Let me just try to formulate my thesis here, so that I can see what comes out of it.

Over the course of the 17th century, a canon of English poets became to form first in the social networks of the Sons of Ben and the disciples of Donne and Drayton, and then in the development of criticism out of that. I'm interested in the rise of literary discipleship in terms of the relationship between men.

So one good place to start would be to read books on the Drayton circle, the Donne circle, the Jonson circle, and then outward from there. I suspect I'd find that these differ from Elizabethan poetic circles by being organized around a practitioner and marked by stylistic imitation rather than around a patron and marked by the dedicatory epistle and the elegy.

This is actually quite interesting. Fowler, in the intro to the New Oxford 17th Century verse, talks about how repeated imitation of forms helped create links among poets...

7/8/2008

Sean,

New York Times article to the contrary (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html), the "miracle berry" did not make everything taste like a warm Krispy Kreme donut. It did, however, lead to our drinking cranberry concentrate, vodka, and Tabasco cocktails and quite happily eating plain rhubarb and lime.

It was great to see you. I'd like to draft a list of potential papers on which you and Jeff can collaborate, both to keep you around and so that y'all have all the hard stuff figured out by the time I finish generals.

Thank you for the kind (and useful!) words on my paper. It's taken me a long time to reply partially because at your prompting I've been trying to figure out how to consider the question of value seriously. I worry that value criticism fades quickly into either ethics or narcissism, but you're right to point out that arguments made about literature--and high literature in particular--do not necessarily travel easily into other domains.

I don't suspect I'll do much more with this writing as it is, though I'll continue to have recourse to your comments and to the comments that my friends posted there. The Nietzsche sounds great, though, and I may go re-read The Rhizome.

In any case, thanks! I'm sure I'll see you soon.

Matthew

7/7/08

I learned last night that I really do have a greater productivity in doing this at the end of a day rather than at the beginning, partially because I've done a whole day of reading and thinking. Also: that was teh first place I wrote any thoughts about the Baron's War, so I guess I had a lot on my mind.

Before going to bed, I went ahead and read the first section of the Heroick Epistles: the letters between Henry II and Rosamond. I wasn't immensely impressed, but more was as stake here than in the discurscive passages of the BW. And it was interesting how the strings of commonplaces built up towards, if not all the way to, character--I didn't sense much flow to the arguments, really, in the way that I would with Ovid, but I also don't know these stories very well. I believe Rosamond gets killed by the wife shortly after.

Aha. Wikipedia'd it. Wikipedia reminded me that not only does Daniel write a Complaint for Rosamond, Delaney did an earlier Ballad for her. It makes me wonder if part of what Drayton is doing is recasting popular cultural materials into the Ovidian shape. I'll have to keep reading to see who he picks for the others.

I bet this is cribbing from the Mirror for Magistrates. I'm going to have to read that, unpleasant as it will be. It'll give me a better grip on the history, and I'll better be able to position pieces like this in relation to that monstrosity. I do find myself wanting better dates for Drayton's pieces. I mean, I know I'm reading 1619 versions, but I believe these are 1590's pieces, and the difference in dates is throwing me off. I feel like I'm trying to tell myself something with this--that I want to work in a very tightly delineated time period? That, for now, at least, I feel like period is a crucial question? But in what regard is it crucial here? I'm not particularly working on anything in reading this stuff--unlike the verse satire stuff, the ballads, the sonnets, or the bad poetry, this is really an attempt to read the work of a poet that I'm not very familiar with. A very slow attempt, it seems like. I'm going to need to preclude myself from Internet time wasting until I make some progress into this big thick book, I believe.

First, though--German test, article, Joel Stein, and some organization. Tonight I have more translation to do, too. I think I'm going to need to make my no-blogs, no-news rule for the next two weeks except on weekends. Deal? Deal.

Part of what's good about this is that it gets thoughts out of my head so I don't keep dwelling on them. (I wonder why I feel the need to keep talking about the process. It's an easy way of getting words, I suspect, and maybe I'm a little anxious about myself, too? I think it's a too-good-to-be-true feeling.)

As I keep reading, I want to be looking out for how commonplaces get twisted into character.

7/6/08

This, I suspect, will be a perfunctory post. I'm tired, after a day of transit, translation, and a little writing. I have, however, produced most of a draft of an article for CUMC about the SOS. I hope to finish that tomorrow. If I can knock off two of my two do list items as well, I'll be feeling pretty good about myself.

I've been slack thus far, and I'm feeling that motivating bad feeling that I get when I need to swing back into gear. So swing I will.

I did, however, read all but the last couple pages of the Baron's War. I'm quite interested in why it is that Drayton picks this episode to present. That is, it makes sense, but he greatly circumscribes all of the elements that might make reference to James--the minions, the Scots--in favor of a poem that seems generically against strife and interested in the emotions of the doomed. I guess the aesthetic angle makes sense to me--Drayton is interested in how Mortimer, Edward, Isabella, etc react to their own fall--but not the politics. Could it be that Drayton does want to think about James in terms of Edward but he has to soft-shoe it? If so, what's the end-take? Everyone be good? In that reading, it's just a conservative poem, arguing that the internecine warfare is simply more trouble than it's worth.

Is there a way to read this poem as an anti-Edward-->anti-James piece? He certain;y describes Edward's mistakes, even while he's describing the meanness of his opponents in taking action against them. That is, the poem is written as if it would benefit Edward to read it, and therefore that it would behoove James to take advantage of the positions it lays out. Mortimer, too, is allied with the Scot in a way that's interesting.

I guess, my question is, is Drayton throwing fuel or water on the fire? Or could he /conceivably/ be absent from that court culture and simply interested in this episode as a chance to aesthetize emotions on all sides of an issue.

I should make a note that the disposition scene seems to repeat the staging of Richard II. And that at the moment that Edward is murdered by the spit, Drayton makes a WEIRD invocation about the force of his pen. Does the pen/penis pun simply not come to mind there? Does he hope that it'll not be noticed? Or is there something about the writer's penetrating ability that really is relevant here--that might be, for example, a model of how it is that this poem is supposed to work politically?

I've got two more pages to read, I guess. He could surprise me completely.

I can't get over how much this writing changes my experience of my work, my progress, and my psyche. I feel so much more cheerful now that I think things out on the page. I do worry a little that I'll repress things, in an effort to keep my words cheerful, but if I just type as fast as I can, I hope it's impossible to do that. It isn't, of course, but the process of dictating sentences to me as fast as I can type them does keep me from feigning a personality that's the personality I'd like to have. A cheerful one, perhaps.

Sorta.

7/4/08

Things to celebrate: today is my one-month anniversary of doing this on the computer. I haven't done it every day, by any stretch of the imagination, but those days I've missed, I've written on paper somewhere. And my one-day breaks serve as batteries that help me recharge my imagination.

I can be proud of that. And looking back at my writing, in most of them there are some sentences I like, or ideas that intrigue me, or good advice to myself. That's worthwhile.

Yesterday, I was trying to work out what my response to Sean would be. I thought about his problem of value and really broke it into two problems: one is an academic problem--the criticism has focused on high culture texts and so may not be applicable to low culture texts. The solution to that is to think hard about what critics I was using. I think the whatsisface from Yale--Geoffrey Hartman--is pretty generably applicable, since he's alking about the psychic motivation of writing and reading. Well, of "communicating." Bloom is much more of a problem, since he's talking explicitly about strong poets. Is Godzilla a strong poet?

Then again, of course my whole point is that there are worthwhile types of influence that have nothing directly to do with the anxiety of one strong poet about another. The sorts of imaginative extension that trickle into Shakespeare pastiches, painting, performances, and so on do seem to me to connect to the multiply-produced paratexts of modern culture, but that's a historical argument that could go either way.

The more interesting problem for me is how one goes about assigning a value to literature. Yesterday I concluded that value criticism is necessarily either ethical or narcissitic. I think that's probably right, if not already redundant. I wonder, though about the potential of a non-ethical criticism. That's something I'll have to keep considering throughout Diana's class.


Something I haven't been writing about recently--I've started reading Drayton. He seems to be positioning himself very deliberately in the same way that Jonson was with his works--he wants to be a laureate poet, too, and for awhile he seems to have that impact. I wish I could track the respect in which various Elizabethans were held over the course of three or four centuries.

Drayton is fantasically boring at times, but then he'll get going in a lyric dialogueic passage and will excell. I was explaining to James the other day that I thought that that kind of writing in particular was disproportionately good in the E/n/J/n era because of the theater. I don't know whether Drayton wrote for the theater or not, but he certainly would have seen a huge number of plays. I would need to read more about Drayton--wiki hear I come.

I can't wait until I finish the Baron's War and read some of his lyrics. In the new Oxford, he seemed perfectly willing to alk about bad poetry and his poetry, and what he was doing. It occurs to me that as a late sonnetteer he was under particular pressure to do something different. It feels like the beginning of the Cavalier lyric to me, but I don't know that I have a basis for it.

I'll keep reading.

7/2/08

Ten minutes. Here goes.

I can't forget to make a sandwich before I go. I wikipedia'd Fulke Greville and found that it didn't make much sense of the verse. That's disappointing but perhaps unsurprising, considering that he did have a few more important other jobs.

What text was there--he's a mixture of Machiavelli and Sophocles, apparently--did surprise me. It's from the 1911 encyclopedia, though, so it's not surprising that it's out of date. It's amazing how much our concept of literary history has changed over the last hundred years. I suppose that makes it inevitable that it will change again over the next hundred and that our preferences will in turn assist the preferences of hte next generation.

Fulke Greville is a good case, though, of poets not being confined to a decade. Certainly texts released in a given decade have a given character, but that has to be looked at from book to book, not poet to poet. The sort of literary history that's necessary needs to be done longitudinally over the course of one writer's life and... horizontally across a writer's contemporaries. I wish I could remember which was synchronic and which was diachronic. That'd be useful.

I'm really intrigued by Evan's readings on the sociology of the modernists. I want to know more about how he's going about it and what's at stake--I'd love to be able to do a sociology of the early moderns. I just don't think it's possible. For me. To do it.

I wonder if this discipline of writing has been useful to me. I think it has, but in what form? Do I write better now? I guess I chase ideas a little further--into their first complexities rather than into their first potentialities--which is in itself a worthwhile activity. I really need to go back and re-read everything, whether slowly or in a rush. I think it'd help me figure out what work this space is accomplishing--besides just as a psychological valve for me.

I love the ivy outside my indow. It's just so green, in a way that's really relaxing.

I wonder why I'm always using this space to generalize about things I should be doing and am not? It seems like an overactive superego, to use the common parlance. What is there that I can celebrate?

I finished the scanning for Stuart. German seems to be going well, even if I'm always on the verge of falling off the ball. I'm really enjoying reading. I'm ready to dive into reading some criticism. Oops--a things-I should-do jumped in. Go get it!

Resolution: to let my anxiety about my current knowledge and my future motivate concrete achievements rather than stress.

Thing to celebrate: I'm still writing for 10 minutes a day, 6 days a week. Good for me!

7/1/2008

It's bedtime now, and I'm typing here merely to keep up the habit. I love doing this, but I helped Blythe with an email this morning and took a break after seeing Stuart this afternoon and now I'm exhausted.

That's okay. I'm /allowed/ to feel exhausted. What has to happen now, though, is that I have to let myself feel that way and slowly go back to work.

I read a few poems today--I realized the best way to do what I wanted to do was to read slowly through the New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse and think about what I was reading. I can move on to books when I have more energy. For now, I just want to get a hold of my to-do list, my time, and my energy.

I couldn't stand reading the Fulke Greville. I'm very much not interested in the sorts of things that he thinks poetry should be doing. Well, that's not quite true--I liked the sonnets, of course, particularly LV from Caelica which seems a sort of proto-metaphysical/cavalier job. They were published in 1633, years after FG had died. At some point I might like to look up FG's history. (I made a separate note on an index card that I should look him up. I think I'm going to do that more generally--keep a list of facts I want to know by my computer for when I'm procrastinating. It may cost me more time than I want to spend, but that's okay.)

Chapman, though, was much more interesting, and reminded me that I like poetry. Even the long lines didn't bother me--I did notice that he deploys enjambment strategically--it's not all like the Continuation; the piece on Justice, for instance, basically doesn't use it.


I'll keep an eye out for homoerotic bits, but something tells me they won't be included in here much--I guess it was edited in 1991, but still. It feels really old-fashioned!

Oh! the introduction I found very interesting in talking about the re-use of genre and the creation of lines of poetic lineation. Poets emulated each other, all the time. and this is related to the effort to recuscitate classical genres in modern language. I wonder how striving with a predecessor relates to Bloom's influence theory--it's certainly an important way influence works, but..

Hmm--that's an interesting problem--how does competitive emulation work in literature? Presumably it makes you write better, because you have someone to beat, but how does literature imagine the encounter? Is it like the friendship fight in Spenser's version of Chaucer?

The tribe/sons of version imagines one's peers as siblings. The peers of one's predecessors, then, can only be...uncles.

I'm less convinced that 17th century people couldn't claim certain people as forebears because their models for succession didn't offer them a way to have that many forebears. but hmm.

6/30/08

I'm just going to type blindly for a bit to see where this goes. I don't want to work on my other idea just now, and I feel like I should get this done, just to do it. I haven't been reading, of course, so I'm not feeling productive--it's real clear that I need to do some reading every day if I'm going to be able to write. Recently I've been exhausted, so it's hard, but I've got a manageable pile of wonderful books.

Maybe putting women, cannibals, and divorce--or whatever it's called away will help. it's very old new historicism and i'm not convinced I need that right now.

should i switch back to reading about Deloney? I think I might--it'd be nice to get that sort of break from my own thoughts.

i'm worried about my other project because i tried saying it to sarah and she didn't sound interested. that's a silly thing to be motivating this, but there it is. I'm not sure whether I'm worried that th eproject is therefore boring or whether I 'm worried because I cannot explain my ideas such that I get that click of recognition that I'm looking for.

I need click-ideas, psychologically right now. I think it's just a side-effect of how I learned to sell things as a student council person, but that's the kind of thing I'm looking for--an idea that makes people say, "Gee--that's interesting." I have to keep an eye out as a I read for the sorts of things that do that to me, so that I can figure out what it is that works for that purpose in scholarly, as opposed to non-scholarly writing.

i feel a lot better having typed all of this out. it helps me to diagnose my weird mixture of academic-fraud syndrome with i'm-the-best disease.

anyway--i can feel myself about to pile on. books. one entirely worthwhile project for me over the next two days is to come up with a list of the central poets of the periods 1600-1610, 1610-1620, and 1620-1630, and just start reading them. i want to figure out how much i can argue about them, and the best way to do that is to start doing. so i need poet dates, pronto. okay.

in the meantime, i have lots of scanning to do, some sonnet-reading-about to do, and some classic-books to read. so why don't i back away from this idea--it's written down after all, and start on all of that?

i can actually keep a list of writers/books in this space, so I have access to them all the time. it'll help me to build my set of writers. and i can gradually go forward and backwards in time...


OH I have a partial reading list somewhere that I started making! this is a recurrence of earlier feelings of having not read enough. now i can generate a plan, though, and work through everything systematically. And poetry is bite-sized, so I don't have to feel bad about not having much time to read right now.

i'm so glad I did this writing exercise right now--it's actually really helpful. I do worry that I'm training myself to write bad sentences. But, actually, that's not a training I'd mind having--it may make it easier for me to get things on paper so that I can edit them into things that are worthwhile.

I'm just excited that I have this energy to go--do research, and read. I hope that'll help me keep doing the work that I need to do as I move forward. After all, there's a lot of time left, and I need to make meself into an academic.

i started watching the clock, though, so that's no good. i need to start expanding the amount of time, but not such that it begins to feel like a punishment rather than a pleasure.

I'm going to try switching to 11 minutes. I've been doing this for a month, I should be able to write for 11 minutes whenever I want. Next week, I'll think about switching to 12, if I've been able to do enough reading that that feels worthwhile, rather than just an attempt to get myself to keep typing.

Soon, I am going to try to switch my tone to a 3rd person, rather than 1st, though. perhaps. if it gets me rolling...

tomorrow, i want ot talk about my experience reading 10 poems.

6/29/08

Missing Shepherds, Dead Shepherds, Unreciprocating Shepherds

In my last entry, I started outlining a set of issues that need to be worked through in order to think about Vergil's Eclogue 2 as a model for the relationship between poets. I was arguing that there's a difference between the shepherd who won't return your affection and the predeccessor whose works you're able to respond to but who can't (by virtue of his precedence) return yours.

I think that's right, but I want to think a little about similarities, to see if I can make the case. (I'd like to know more about the 17th century adaptations of the eclogue, in order to really make the case, but that's fine.) What's interesting about pastoral is its closed economy--gifts are given to someone, who passed them on to someone else, who doesn't respond to them. The shepherd poet is a medial figure, misusing another person's gifts to an unresponsive audience--that's not all that far off the self-representation of poets in the 1580's, is it? At the same time, pastoral beauty is always a metaphor for the beauty of the pastoral song itself--the song is its own promise.

I reread it--no real revelations. I guess what I'm particularly interested in is returning the element of desire to the friend argument.

6/28/08

So, yesterday I was just writing down an overview of the potential paper/article ideas I had been generating through this weekly writing, and I combined two ideas in a way I found really interesting.

The homoeroticism of lyric starts to change dramatically under James I, because homosexuality now has a deep political valence. (It always had some political implications, of course, but now talking about it attracts attention.) Moreover, as Hammond shows, the work of the poets from (made-up date) 1620 on, carefully attempts to straighten out (ahem) friendship and homosexuality. Marvell is an interesting case, of course--I suppose all the cases are interesting. What I'm interested in is whether the construction of the canon that happens at around the same time is related. That is, if the peer relation charged with desire made available in the homo-eroticism of lyric has to go away, one's models for a relationship with an older male poet are friendship and succession. It's real clear that of those two options, succession ultimately wins--one can't be a friend to Virgil in the equals-of-the-same-age model; one can be Corydon to his Alexis (or is it the other way around).

What I'm interested in now is how to demonstrate this kind of argument. I'm thinking that Barnfield's Affectionate Shepherd & his defense of it are a good first step--the Barnfield--Blount relationship is something of a model for the Barnfield--Sidney relationship. From there, I need to go into Vergil & E/n pastoral's recognition of the fact that there are always other shepherds (Hobbinol, E.K., etc etc)--into Sean Keilen/The Light In Troy. What I'm weak on is the poetry of the very early 1600's. I need to be able to show a change in pastoral, a change in poetics, and the burgeoning of the canon.

In pastoral, of course, there are always other shepherds.

There's a confusion I'm making here, though, between the absent beloved, the nonreciprocating beloved, and the dead beloved.

6/25/08

Oops. I just inadvertently broke my rules. I'm waiting for the Bank of America to tell me what's up with my checking account.

Anyway, for the last few days I've been writing in my notebook, in order to reuse time during German class. As it is, though, I need to figure out how to write more here, because I think I'm more productive here. And it means I can really dedicate my attention. For the last few days, I've been working on Barnfield, and the Shepherd's Confession and "Nut-Brown Wenche" that has been attributed to him.

Hammond's chapter on Shakespeare was fairly good, and I'm into his chapter on "political sodomy" now--descriptions of homoerotic relationships between rulers and their subjects. James II of course comes up for much discussion. What I'm curious about is how exactly the depiction of homoerotic themes changed in the reign of James I. Drayton made his poem straighter; Shakespeare thought he could release his sonnets (according to Hammond). I mean, presumably, it was yet another process of calibration for each individual to adjust his desires to the new regime, and presumably that process of calibration went in many directions at once. I'm not happy with that answer, however. What do we know about Jonson and desire? Marston and desire?

Donne became a minister. Also--he doesn't have many poems with male-male desire as a theme, although I believe he has one projected lesbian poem. Hall keeps writing for a long time. I don't know what happens to Daniel. Sidney and Spenser are dead. It occurs to me that the Cavalier lyric, evolving out the more lyric moments of Jonson and Donne, because of its investment in a particular sort of inwardness therefore needs to have its desires more clearly laid out than early poems. "Come live with me and be my love" could be voiced by a male shepherd to a male or female shepherd--it's not that we don't know what the answer is; it's that the poem works either way. Once people are writing poems that imagine a particular embodied situation, though, that changes.

"Come live with me and be my love" is a lovely poem about pastoral desire, a fantasy of natural abundance that keys in on the overflow of affection in love. 'Raleigh's' response makes it instead about the falsity of sexual persuasion; a more specific concern, to be sure, but still general.

"A sweet disorder in her dress" however, is really caught up in the desire of a particular lyric speaker. It could be that that doesn't appeal to you at all. It could be that you agree with Herrick. Who knows.

I need to return to this--the lyric definitely changes in between 1590 and, say, 1620-1630, and I think it has something to do w/ the specificity of the imagined speaker. but then so many Elizabethan poems imagine speakers--Tottel is not a pre-Cavalier....

06/18/08

I am wearing out. Mostly, I think, from the computer screen. I love having this big screen, but man does it put out a lot of light.

I'm getting back into Juvenal. Or at least, getting back into getting through Juvenal. At least reading him in English makes me realize how much better I like the Marston--I'll have to see how I feel once I've read it all and turn back to it, but at least in this translation, I say eh.

But I see what people were responding to--I wonder if I'd like the Johnson better if I went back to that again. It's a pretty decent rendition I think and it does rhyme, which may well be what I appreciate in the Marston.

I'm trying the red book now, in keeping with my two books per genre theory. It's requiring me to know the Romans, though, so it's kinda a pain. But that's all right, I guess--if I'm going to work on satire, I need to know the Romans anyway--even if neo-classical satire wasn't big until later, it's still important.

Actually, now that I mention it, I'm surprised we didn't get much neo-classical satire in Love's book. I guess that's a field that's pretty thoroughly covered, and so he hasn't felt the need to do so, but I'm curious how Dryden's Juvenal relates to his other satires. I actually think I'm gonna run to Firestone this morning and grab Dryden's Juvenal if I can find it and find that bawdy version of To His Coy Mistress. I need to look up the textual history in the Love to be able to find it--it was in the Haward MS. I can handle that.

And reading Juvenal off a screen won't be bad for me either.

This is the sort of post that's useless to me later, but it's helping me at least to get the words to come out smoothly. In her opening chapter she shows people as having done approximately this for six or seven months and an idea gradually developing. I think that's what I'm gonna try--if I do this for six months and it doesn't help me, I'll stop.

Of course, in a lot of ways, it is already helping me, because it's forcing me to put what I read into an ongoing context. I think figuring out a system for reading can only help that--it'll keep me from getting into those books that don't really relate to my topic but that I refuse to relate to on their own terms.

I'm looking forward to working through the Fineman. I know it's going ot be a huge amount of work, but I think I can handle it. And if not, I can always go read web introductions to Lacanian thought.

That's one of the main things I'm picking up here--a work ethic and the belief that I can go learn anything given a couple weeks of free time. Which is cool. Now I just have to prove it true over and over again over the next five years.

(Tangent:I keep wondering how much of the difficulty of learning German is the oddity of English. This is a topic for another day.)

6/17/08

So June is going quickly. I guess I knew that would happen, but still--I actually really hadn't expected it. It's because of all the work I'm doing--two and a half hours of class and then six hours of homework just takes up most of a day. I keep saying I'm looking forward to being able to read for myself again.

I think I need to stop worrying the problem of genre for a bit, until I've read more--it's an interesting question, and Rosalie Colie is really helpful on it, but it's not something I'm going to resolve by poking at it with a very long stick. I need to develop a very particular question and then chase that down through individual texts. Love has an interesting passage in which he presents the various ways that satire could be studied and says they all would be useful but he's not going to do them. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, but I didn't get the sense that any of them would be all that revelatory. (That's a nonsense sentence--we don't know the results of the investigations; I can't claim that they're not interesting. I certainly don't know enough about the period to project results onto people I don't know and their exploration of a body of work I don't know. Anyway.)

I should read the poems of Marvell's disciples. Just to see what they're like. (That would be a good dissertation topic: the Sons of the Sons of Ben. Or better yet: the Daughters of the Sons of Ben, on mid-17th century female writers. I bet it's been done.)

Popular versions of my book:

Yeah Really? Sarcastic Literature Since Whenever

Anyway. At least the words keep coming out--that's the real benefit of this exercise. I'm becoming much more willing to type what I think. I think.

Jim Shapiro's class may have improved my writing, but it made me neurotic about it, as I tried to write in one-draft what should have taken three or four, at the least. A goal for future writing should be to be able to edit passages that are substantially fine in order to make them significantly better. I feel like that's a crucial test of something. Not quite sure what, but that's okay. I'll figure that out.

Also: I have to resist the urge to append a verdict to the end of these things, especially once I've started watching the clock in order to see how much time is remaining. I may decide that I need to start adding a random number of minutes in order to (a) stop my running out the clock and (b) get more writing done.

I'd worry about that a lot more if the 10 minutes worth of stuff I was producing weren't already lagging at the end often.

6/16/08

I owe Sean a response to his email. As I remember his feedback, and it would behoove me to check that again, he mentioned that he was entertained, complimented some of the points, and posed the question of value.

What do I want my response to accomplish? I want to thank him; I want him to chuckle; and I do want to observe that I differ with him a little on the problem of value. It's not that I don't think, say, Lear is better than A King and No King--it's that I recognize 1) a vast number of people preferred the latter to the former, particularly on the stage and 2) evaluation itself is a phony enterprise and I don't want to be a part of it.

That second bit's the big bit for me--I fundamentally don't think Godzilla is all that great, but I don't want to evaluate it. I want to write about what I want to write about. I have the same problem with Renaissance texts.

Sean's point is that the literary critical texts I was relying upon base themselves on an immense amount of close thought about high literary texts. I simply have no evidence that their methodology or results hold up when applied to a set of texts that even I would agree is systematically different. And I don't try to justify that it might work.

If I were to take on the problem of value, it would be to praise the Godzilla's so that they could merit discussion in the same article as the Shakespeares. Which is a silly enterprise and one that might tack too close to earnestness.

If I'm interested, though, in how words work--how images make meaning or how plot turns into reaction--I get to study all words, don't I? If not necessarily on the exalted level of interpretation. Do I have to go towards psychology? Is it possible for me to go towards psychology?

I can't be that interested in the stuff--I've never read a non-pop psych book. But, then, I'd never read a book of criticism, either.

What interests me, I suppose, is how meanings develop out of conventions, and how conventions relate to economic and social situations. What /happens/ when you have the best playwrights in the world competing to produce plays for you? What happens when your sonneteers all turn into satirists?

6/15/08

It's father's day--I need to call my Dad again. I tried, but got the machine. I guess they're still--out to lunch or something.

I ended my last post by posing the question of how it was that genre was both a transhistorical phenomenon and a generational one--that is, there seems to be something balladlike in all ballads, and sonnetlike in all sonnets, and so on, but which genres are popular at any given time seems, if I believe Helgerson and (kinda) Love, has to do with what earlier poetry was trying to accomplish. Helgerson notes the pendulum swings back and forth between poetry invested in interiority and poetry that aims towards the social--the sonnet--satire--tribe of Ben sequence and the Cavalier lyric--Rochester satire progression both suggest this. One way of answering this dilemma is to point out that the sonnet at any given moment has a lot to do with the tradition, and each generation changes the tradition somewhat. That is, people return to old forms precisely because they want to do the work that they think (they think being key) the old form did, or better yet, some of the work old forms did.

If we wanted to follow up on that, we'd read how a given generation was interpreting old forms a s a guide ot how they thought about the versions of those forms they were producing. I suspect this works well for the Romantics, who thought very intensely about old forms. Does it work for periods that aren't as absorbed by their own relation to tradition, or who thought differently about that relationship?

What does it mean that Marston and Hall weren't influential? What sorts of formal features might one look to in order to determine that? What's at stake in influence? Is it just that satire moved away from the rhyming pentameter couplet? Is there a side-current of Juvenalian-translation that we might consider indebted to them? Has someone studied this?

Sorry--that's just a pet peeve of mine. I need to stop writing rhetorical questions, though--I don't think they help me figure out anything, except when they're about specific things I could look up, like the economic model of balladry. I should study the epigram, too--I wonder if what I'm interested in is the history of epigram impugning upon other forms, as it enters the sonnet and the satire at approximately the same time. Well, Shakespeare's sonnets. Or maybe I want to know the history of rhymed couplets as applied to externally focused writing.

I'm less interested in the middle chapters of the Love book, if only because I don't know who these people are and don't really care what it is they say about each other. Surely it'll get better again if I just keep at it. But I'm reading to start reading lots again--this German and work together are wearing me out.

I must reply to the Mosaic folks today or tomorrow--and keep track of how much I need to bill--I worked 4 hrs, 20 mins on Thursday, 7 hrs on Friday. And no time this weekend yet.

6/14/08

Still reading the Lowe. A couple of points stood out in my reading today. The first, is his discussion of how satire was the way a changing set of values was negotiated in the town. (Negotiated? Maybe created--satire marked a certain set of activities as off-limits or beyond the pale, informed others, described people's activities as motivated in a particular way, and so on.)

I want to think about how this relates to Marston, who is similarly denoting a range of activities that are acceptable--are values up for grabs in this period, too. I get that there's an economic crunch, as the Universities turn out too many people who are not in position to have court positions, but I'm not sure I buy the malecontented stance quite as much as I might should. But, then, I guess it is only writers, rather than other people who are writing satires--still the effort to get other people to write in the way you think is appropriate is interesting.

The figure of Ben Jonson in the satire might be something worth thinking about--and in the satirical play, of course. Another type of satire, Love attributes to arising out of the Elizabethan drama--the satire in which you attribute extreme villainy to a rival of some sort and then narrate his instructions he ties to some lines stolen out of Selimus and attributed to (I believe) Sir Walter Raleigh. The locus classicus, he claims, is the speech of the ghost of Sulla in /Sejanus/--I'll have to look at that passage again. I don't really believe that it's as original as all that. Although, I guess, if the /writers/ are going back to Jonson in particular, it doesn't really matter who Jonson had gone back to. But curiosity makes me wonder.

Over and over again I realize how much I don't know that I need to know before I can do credible scholarship. There's just an /immense/ amount of background that I need to read through--not only on the Civil War, but also even on Elizabeth's reign I'm not nearly familiar enough with either the historiography or the day-to-day changes. I know a few facts about the 1590's, but I don't have a really strong sense of what it is that happens. I don't need to, yet, but it'd still be useful. Particularly if I want to write on "minor" poems. Ahistorical Shakespeare analysis is one thing--frowned upon by some, but allowed. Ahistorical Barnfield scholarship just can't get away with quite as much, if just because fewer people care about Barnfield outside of his role as someone around during the time of Shakespeare.

New Historicists: people who care about Shakespeare in his role as someone around during the lifetime of Shakespeare.

I forgot to look at the clock, so I'm probably writing for too many minutes, but that's probably a good thing. As long as I can keep sentences coming out when I need them.

At some point, I need to develop a reading plan. Switching back and forth among sonnet, satire, and ballad risks leaving me knowing nothing, I'm afraid. Which is fine short-term, but not a great strategy long-term. Maybe I should commit myself to two book clusters--I'll read two books about satire before switching genres and so on. Except, of course, when I'm digging for particular information--like the cost of a ballad.

One more thought--I'm beginning to think of genre in a couple of different ways--each genre arises at a certain moment in time (and changes in time)--1590's sonnets are different from 1580's and 1600's sonnets; sonnets give way to satire, mostly, in the mid-1590's--and transhistorical--what does satire ALWAYS do.

This is worth continuing to think about.

06/12/08

Jeff's article reminded me of the "carpenter" moment in the Spenser-Harvey letters. Spenser wants to let the meter distort the pronunciation of the word, while Harvey won't let him. It's another, albeit slightly more conventional, case of what Gascoigne claims about words that fit into the mter and it's a case where we actually have two people from the period arguing about it. I find that fascinating.

Not sure whether it helps or hurts my thesis--what I really need is another middle case, rather than another linguistic case--something closer to Puttenham, than Gascoigne (Rather my Puttenham example.)

Goose giblets wrapped in waste paper doesn't quite get me there, I don't think. I feel like I'm making no progress, but then, I 'm not reading anything that should get me there. Mostly I'm learning German.

I saw a book that looked good on Sex Between Men--oh, in the Love book--I should maybe read it before Leonard's class. But then, Leonard's class may do that, in which case I shouldn't. I wish I had a syllabus.

This type of writing really is draining when there's nothing on my mind. It makes me want to get out there and read something, except I have this German class. I wonder if I would want to get out there and read if I didn't have it.

I'm making good progress, through. I need to find a German academic article that I can submit. Ideally, something on bad poetry.

Greene's funeral is the other thing I'm thinking about. There's a neat footnote that says (on a potential date for the text) it's hard to believe 2 years would have passed between these verses composition and their printing. That is to say:

1) That the verses seem occasional and like they'd lose interest with time
2)That the verses seem bad and surely would have been revised over two years.

But what the hell is this book? It's egregious, boring poetry, with badly repeated lines. Is it a parody? If so, of what? Is it a false attribution--that I can believe, but it charges me with finding another R.B. poet. Is it just a text thrown together for publication after the death of Greene?

This is something I should look into. I wonder what--Danter, I think is the printer's name?--was printing. And I wonder if there are other Greene funeral volumes coming out at around the same time. Yay empirical questions. They make all the difference/.