07/09/08

I explained my idea to both James and Maggie today--each thought that it sounded promising. Now I need to figure out how to put the idea into an example in 15 pages for Leonard's class and see if it can grow from there. I don't know that it will, but that's clearly the next step.

One locus I could look at is the Barnfield passage in which he talks about Sir Philip Sidney.

I guess, what I need in order to hit a 15 page paper is:

evidence of the two trends:
construction of a canon
changing model of homosexuality

(of the two, the former is perhaps harder than the latter. I don't, however, need primary sources initially--i can read criticism for that)

two texts, in which successorship is linked to male friendship in very different ways
i need a paternal friendship text and i need someone talking about other poets as older shepherds or something.

hmm. i can do this.

i'm just going to run out the clock now, though, because i want to work on german. D'you know what? today is going ot be my day off.

i came back to it. i may as well--it's almost two anyway, and so a few more minutes of typing won't hurt.

i was clearly exhausted, looking at my earlier text. Perhaps it's just my capitalization, but I seemed tired. Or, maybe I'm projecting. It seems like what I need to do is merely to explore the birth of a canon of Elizabethan poets, and to explore the ways the poets who make that canon think about canonicity. I'm not writing a dissertation here, just a 20 or s0 page paper that lays out an /argument/.

where to start? i could do an eebo search for Watson and look at the latest hits. But Watson is a bit of a common name.Hmm. I need to just keep reading and see if I turn up anything, I think. Let me just try to formulate my thesis here, so that I can see what comes out of it.

Over the course of the 17th century, a canon of English poets became to form first in the social networks of the Sons of Ben and the disciples of Donne and Drayton, and then in the development of criticism out of that. I'm interested in the rise of literary discipleship in terms of the relationship between men.

So one good place to start would be to read books on the Drayton circle, the Donne circle, the Jonson circle, and then outward from there. I suspect I'd find that these differ from Elizabethan poetic circles by being organized around a practitioner and marked by stylistic imitation rather than around a patron and marked by the dedicatory epistle and the elegy.

This is actually quite interesting. Fowler, in the intro to the New Oxford 17th Century verse, talks about how repeated imitation of forms helped create links among poets...

7/8/2008

Sean,

New York Times article to the contrary (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html), the "miracle berry" did not make everything taste like a warm Krispy Kreme donut. It did, however, lead to our drinking cranberry concentrate, vodka, and Tabasco cocktails and quite happily eating plain rhubarb and lime.

It was great to see you. I'd like to draft a list of potential papers on which you and Jeff can collaborate, both to keep you around and so that y'all have all the hard stuff figured out by the time I finish generals.

Thank you for the kind (and useful!) words on my paper. It's taken me a long time to reply partially because at your prompting I've been trying to figure out how to consider the question of value seriously. I worry that value criticism fades quickly into either ethics or narcissism, but you're right to point out that arguments made about literature--and high literature in particular--do not necessarily travel easily into other domains.

I don't suspect I'll do much more with this writing as it is, though I'll continue to have recourse to your comments and to the comments that my friends posted there. The Nietzsche sounds great, though, and I may go re-read The Rhizome.

In any case, thanks! I'm sure I'll see you soon.

Matthew

7/7/08

I learned last night that I really do have a greater productivity in doing this at the end of a day rather than at the beginning, partially because I've done a whole day of reading and thinking. Also: that was teh first place I wrote any thoughts about the Baron's War, so I guess I had a lot on my mind.

Before going to bed, I went ahead and read the first section of the Heroick Epistles: the letters between Henry II and Rosamond. I wasn't immensely impressed, but more was as stake here than in the discurscive passages of the BW. And it was interesting how the strings of commonplaces built up towards, if not all the way to, character--I didn't sense much flow to the arguments, really, in the way that I would with Ovid, but I also don't know these stories very well. I believe Rosamond gets killed by the wife shortly after.

Aha. Wikipedia'd it. Wikipedia reminded me that not only does Daniel write a Complaint for Rosamond, Delaney did an earlier Ballad for her. It makes me wonder if part of what Drayton is doing is recasting popular cultural materials into the Ovidian shape. I'll have to keep reading to see who he picks for the others.

I bet this is cribbing from the Mirror for Magistrates. I'm going to have to read that, unpleasant as it will be. It'll give me a better grip on the history, and I'll better be able to position pieces like this in relation to that monstrosity. I do find myself wanting better dates for Drayton's pieces. I mean, I know I'm reading 1619 versions, but I believe these are 1590's pieces, and the difference in dates is throwing me off. I feel like I'm trying to tell myself something with this--that I want to work in a very tightly delineated time period? That, for now, at least, I feel like period is a crucial question? But in what regard is it crucial here? I'm not particularly working on anything in reading this stuff--unlike the verse satire stuff, the ballads, the sonnets, or the bad poetry, this is really an attempt to read the work of a poet that I'm not very familiar with. A very slow attempt, it seems like. I'm going to need to preclude myself from Internet time wasting until I make some progress into this big thick book, I believe.

First, though--German test, article, Joel Stein, and some organization. Tonight I have more translation to do, too. I think I'm going to need to make my no-blogs, no-news rule for the next two weeks except on weekends. Deal? Deal.

Part of what's good about this is that it gets thoughts out of my head so I don't keep dwelling on them. (I wonder why I feel the need to keep talking about the process. It's an easy way of getting words, I suspect, and maybe I'm a little anxious about myself, too? I think it's a too-good-to-be-true feeling.)

As I keep reading, I want to be looking out for how commonplaces get twisted into character.

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.

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.

7/2/08

Ten minutes. Here goes.

I can't forget to make a sandwich before I go. I wikipedia'd Fulke Greville and found that it didn't make much sense of the verse. That's disappointing but perhaps unsurprising, considering that he did have a few more important other jobs.

What text was there--he's a mixture of Machiavelli and Sophocles, apparently--did surprise me. It's from the 1911 encyclopedia, though, so it's not surprising that it's out of date. It's amazing how much our concept of literary history has changed over the last hundred years. I suppose that makes it inevitable that it will change again over the next hundred and that our preferences will in turn assist the preferences of hte next generation.

Fulke Greville is a good case, though, of poets not being confined to a decade. Certainly texts released in a given decade have a given character, but that has to be looked at from book to book, not poet to poet. The sort of literary history that's necessary needs to be done longitudinally over the course of one writer's life and... horizontally across a writer's contemporaries. I wish I could remember which was synchronic and which was diachronic. That'd be useful.

I'm really intrigued by Evan's readings on the sociology of the modernists. I want to know more about how he's going about it and what's at stake--I'd love to be able to do a sociology of the early moderns. I just don't think it's possible. For me. To do it.

I wonder if this discipline of writing has been useful to me. I think it has, but in what form? Do I write better now? I guess I chase ideas a little further--into their first complexities rather than into their first potentialities--which is in itself a worthwhile activity. I really need to go back and re-read everything, whether slowly or in a rush. I think it'd help me figure out what work this space is accomplishing--besides just as a psychological valve for me.

I love the ivy outside my indow. It's just so green, in a way that's really relaxing.

I wonder why I'm always using this space to generalize about things I should be doing and am not? It seems like an overactive superego, to use the common parlance. What is there that I can celebrate?

I finished the scanning for Stuart. German seems to be going well, even if I'm always on the verge of falling off the ball. I'm really enjoying reading. I'm ready to dive into reading some criticism. Oops--a things-I should-do jumped in. Go get it!

Resolution: to let my anxiety about my current knowledge and my future motivate concrete achievements rather than stress.

Thing to celebrate: I'm still writing for 10 minutes a day, 6 days a week. Good for me!

7/1/2008

It's bedtime now, and I'm typing here merely to keep up the habit. I love doing this, but I helped Blythe with an email this morning and took a break after seeing Stuart this afternoon and now I'm exhausted.

That's okay. I'm /allowed/ to feel exhausted. What has to happen now, though, is that I have to let myself feel that way and slowly go back to work.

I read a few poems today--I realized the best way to do what I wanted to do was to read slowly through the New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse and think about what I was reading. I can move on to books when I have more energy. For now, I just want to get a hold of my to-do list, my time, and my energy.

I couldn't stand reading the Fulke Greville. I'm very much not interested in the sorts of things that he thinks poetry should be doing. Well, that's not quite true--I liked the sonnets, of course, particularly LV from Caelica which seems a sort of proto-metaphysical/cavalier job. They were published in 1633, years after FG had died. At some point I might like to look up FG's history. (I made a separate note on an index card that I should look him up. I think I'm going to do that more generally--keep a list of facts I want to know by my computer for when I'm procrastinating. It may cost me more time than I want to spend, but that's okay.)

Chapman, though, was much more interesting, and reminded me that I like poetry. Even the long lines didn't bother me--I did notice that he deploys enjambment strategically--it's not all like the Continuation; the piece on Justice, for instance, basically doesn't use it.


I'll keep an eye out for homoerotic bits, but something tells me they won't be included in here much--I guess it was edited in 1991, but still. It feels really old-fashioned!

Oh! the introduction I found very interesting in talking about the re-use of genre and the creation of lines of poetic lineation. Poets emulated each other, all the time. and this is related to the effort to recuscitate classical genres in modern language. I wonder how striving with a predecessor relates to Bloom's influence theory--it's certainly an important way influence works, but..

Hmm--that's an interesting problem--how does competitive emulation work in literature? Presumably it makes you write better, because you have someone to beat, but how does literature imagine the encounter? Is it like the friendship fight in Spenser's version of Chaucer?

The tribe/sons of version imagines one's peers as siblings. The peers of one's predecessors, then, can only be...uncles.

I'm less convinced that 17th century people couldn't claim certain people as forebears because their models for succession didn't offer them a way to have that many forebears. but hmm.