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...