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.