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.