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.