6/9/8

First day of class. Hooray, I guess.

I've been paying around with Berger's axiom of limitation in all my talking of fit. I'm not convinced it's helpful, though. One of the perils of poetry is that it might distort this world rather than a safely sealed off other world. I'm not sure I believe it.

Reading Juvenal, on the other hand, has been a delight. I'm definitely going to have to go back to the Marston and maybe go read Dryden's versions--I should be reading Dryden's /Juvenal/ now rather than Ramsay's. That's a good idea. But, if Dryden becomes my base line it'll give me trouble judging his difference from the baseline.

I do have a book about the English reception of Latin satirists. I guess I should just read it, huh. It'll tell me how Dryden does as a baseline.

I was fascinated by the passage in Satire 2 that described (and bemoaned) a same-sex marriage. I wonder how folks read that in the Renaissance--obviously it would have been considered an abomination by many, but were there some for whom it was a source of hope or reassurance? Or, for that matter, of regret or feeling doubly out of time... I wonder how that bit gets translated.

Renaissance pastoral gives space for the expression of male desire. With the end of pastoral, it works its way into a few sonnets--Shakespeare and Barnfield, in particular--but where does it go from there? Are there homo-erotic satires? Is it possible?

Writing that betrayed a too thick sense of the way one genre succeeds another--people were writing all sorts of genres from 1580-1600 and the relative decline of one peak in favor of the next does not mean that the older form was unavailable. And satire was not the only new form, for that matter.


Talking to James, yesterday, I mentioned that humanism in general was a homosocial enterprise, but my argument was just that it was constantly between men. I should have observed that classical friendship--perhaps with the sex allegorized out of it--becomes the key axis of emotional involvement. And, for that matter, that it involved men living in close physical intimacy. (Is this really all I remember from Alan's book? Oh well.)