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!]