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.