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. . . Yale |
. . . 1999-06-20 |
I dreamt last night that I was at Yale. The event calendar for incoming students listed "Randy Newman. Earthquake - 8 PM." I was impressed that they knew when the earthquake was going to be, but then someone told me it was the name of a club.
. . . 1999-12-21 |
Who needs food when the menu's so delicious? Department:
"Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind" - EmersonOtherwise the quotes themselves are bring-downs. But the table of contents for the online Concordance to the Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson makes the best poem Charles Bernstein never appropriated:
Adequate to Adults Advance to Affairs Altered to Amatory Amphibious to Anglo-Saxons Arbiters to Army Army to Artery Atmosphere to Attire Attitude to Autobiography B--, Aunt to Banquets Beast, Beauty and the to Becky Stow's Swamp Birth to Blurs Bonny to Bosses Boston Advertiser to Brazier Budgets to Byzantium Chilblain to Christ's Jesus Class to Cloisters Close to Coldness Coleridge, Samuel Taylor to Combustion Compliance to Conducts Cones to Consciousnesses* Consubstantiation to Contriving Control to Copula Copy to Countless Court to Creature's Cuba to Czars Day, Commencement to Deadness Deaf to Declaring Degenerate to Demonstrator Desirable to Devotions Distemper to Doctrines Drank to Driving Droll to Dyspeptic Effeminacy to Elicits Eligible to Employs Emporium to Enemy's Energetic to Englishwomen Eustachius to Everywhere Evidence to Excessive First to Fitting Flowing to Forborne * Link via Juliet Clark |
Foundation to Fowls Gladiators to Go-Carts God, Almighty to Goitre Gold to Good Good (continued) to Grab Graze to Great Desert Habeas Corpus to Handling Hand-Looms to Harms Heat to Hemispheres Hole to Hooted Hung to Hysterical Infantry to Inmates Intrusion to Intelligences Jabber to Joyfully Joying to Juxtapositions Law to Lax Leather to Leg Librarian to Life Line to Littleton Look to Lost M. C. to Magnanimously Maladies to Man Meal to Mechi Medal to Memphis, Egypt Menace to Methuselah Mince-Meat to Minded Negotation to Nevermore Nothing to Nymphs Once to Opium-Shop Opponent to Organisms Organization to Overwork Ovid to Oysters Passenger to Pays Peace to Penury Permutation to Perspire Poets to Polls Pollute to Positives Proprietary to Puberty Public to Purlieus |
Quack to Questions Remedies to Replying Restricted to Revolutions Revolve to Rigging Romes to Ruling Rum to Rylstone Doe Sail to Samos Samples to Saxons Seize to Sensations Separable to Set-To Shatter to Short-Sighted Shot to Sidewise Sinful to Skills Sockets to Sometimes Spirits to Squid Squint to Stars Steady to Stimulus Strong to Subduing Subject to Suetonius Surprises to Sweeps Taverns to Tempestuous Templars to Testify Testimonies to Thin Tidal to Timely Toledo to Tow-Head Town to Trains Truth to Turnips Ubiquitous to Unexhausted Unexpected to University, Yale Unjust to Usages Vat to Victory Wave to Wealth Wept to Whithersoever Wit to Wolves Woman to Woo World Fairs to Wormy Worn to Writings Writs to Wyman, Jeffries Yeoman, Middlesex to Yunani |
. . . 2003-10-26 |
Movie comment: Lost in Translation
After the California recall I didn't think it was possible to feel any more alienated, but seeing this movie did the job. Now I feel alienated from New York, too.
Imagine Larger Than Life devoting half its running time to the elephant, solo. Now imagine the elephant, solo, shot full of tranquilizers and stumbling around in pink panties. Well, Lost in Translation's not even that good, unless you find Gap ads more entertaining than elephants.
Doesn't anyone remember Bill Murray's Rushmore interviews? When he said he took a salary cut because Wes Anderson's screenplay assured him he wouldn't have to work as hard as usual? Whereas he was usually paid to pump life into otherwise barren scenes? Haven't any reviewers noticed that their favorite Lost in Translation moments are precisely what Murray was talking about? "OK, Bill -- do karaoke!" "Stupid Japanese commercial -- take fifty-four!" No wonder he looks trapped.
Aside from leaving improv room for Murray, the script is only what you'd fear from a comfortably wealthy arts major, complete with a voice-of-authority encouraging the protagonist to keep on writing, she'll be great someday. Very much Life Without Zoe, Part Deux, and almost enough to make me watch Storytelling again -- now there's an unwelcome impulse.
Sofia Coppola wants to make herself look good the way Woody Allen used to make himself look good, but she's unable or unwilling to provide her stand-in with any distinguishing marks. Scarlett Johansson's dialog is just as vapid as Anna Faris's, her stare even more vacant. The movie's one attempt at wit is so clumsily executed that it took a minute to work out the point: The heroine's Hollywood rival says merrily that she's registered under the pseudonym, "Evelyn Waugh." (OK, so the rival has a sense of humor.) Sofia/Zoe/Mary Sue looks sulky and objects, "But Evelyn Waugh was a man." (OK, so Sofia's got no sense of humor...?) Then Sofia's husband complains that Sofia is too aggressively intelligent and well-educated, having gone to Yale. (OK, so... uh... we're supposed to have assumed that someone would use the name "Evelyn Waugh" without knowing who he is? And shouldn't Yale have warned her that English isn't the official language of Japan?)
Coppola's blind faith in our blind faith in her POV's superiority puzzled me, but here's my tentative solution: Having been told all her life she's a genius, she interprets lack of interest in her ass as a sign of intellectual shallowness. "Daddy doesn't act like that."
At this point the only future I see for humanity is if the entire species goes sterile except for Kimberly Chun and some guy who hasn't yet expressed his opinion in print.
As for Sofia Coppola, call me when she remakes The Furies.
. . . 2003-10-29 |
Elvis Dead at Budokan
The scope of our eugenics proposal has been reduced thanks to intervention by Ross Nelson:
I believe my first comment to the missus upon exiting that "film" was, "Was that a rich girl's movie, or what?" Leaving aside the complete and utter implausibility of Charlotte as Yale Philosophy major, I really can't imagine anyone who's not clinically depressed suffering from terminal ennui as much as she does, unless we assume (and we also assume this is true of Ms. Coppola), that Japanese luxury hotels and weeklong trips to other continents are so common as to be unworthy of any attention what so ever. I did like the whiskey ads, though.Or a lot less time in the end product.I knew I had to see Bubba Ho-Tep when I heard the plot, though I didn't have high hopes. My low expectations were not really exceeded, though I thought there were some flashes of brilliance, mostly in the filming of the time-dilation and decrepitude of the home. I was reminded of a line of dialog in Urinetown when Officer Lockstock say, "Be careful, Little Sally, too much exposition can ruin a show." Not to mention repetitive voice-over narration. Still, this feels like a show that deserves a remake. One where the writers get a little more time and money.
. . . 2004-04-24 |
If I know you, you're most likely to have encountered (and immediately forgotten) W. H. Mallock as the unwitting source of A HUMUMENT, which paints over his ponderous three-decker, A Human Document. In his own time, however, Mallock's name was made by his first novel, The New Republic, a best-selling satire à clef consisting almost entirely of dialog.
Its timing was right. His targets (Jowett, Huxley, Arnold, Ruskin) were in the ascendant, and their tones would remain recognizable well into the next century. Mallock himself established at least one long-lasting Victorian reputation: Most of his readers came to the book already holding some image of Thomas Carlyle, which Mallock's timid "Donald Gordon" wasn't likely to reshape, but most would first encounter Walter Pater, then at the start of his unprolific publishing career, as "Mr. Rose," and "Mr. Rose" Pater would stay for the rest of their lives.
Mallock obtained his B.A. from Oxford in 1874. Two years later, still hanging around Oxford, he began serializing the book. It's the work of a clever and vindictive student, a vicious mimic with little experience of life outside home or school. The New Republic's deflating and punctured monologues, drawn from close observation of college lectures and sermons, match his gifts perfectly. (Its gauche attempts at poetry and man-of-the-worldliness match his limitations just as strikingly.)
Contemporaries naturally saw Mallock as the successor to Thomas Love Peacock. But Peacock's mockery was affectionate, based on the long drop from his friends' grand hot air balloons to their farcically messy private lives. In contrast, there's real venom in Mallock — and little else of potency — and so I'm more inclined to see him as the founder of that new line of satire which was to include Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis. George Orwell was equally inclined to see him as the founder of the endemic "silly-clever religious book, which goes on the principle not of threatening the unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass."
Mallock was a pioneer in still another way. It's only a rumor that Carlyle bid him farewell with "Can ye hear me, Mr. Mallock? I didna enjoy your veesit, and I dinna want to see ye again." And it's only a rumor that, before Mallock's homophobia ruined Pater's reputation in the world at large, he ruined Pater's career at Oxford by fetching stolen private letters to the Master of the College, Benjamin Jowett. But we have sufficient proof before us that Mallock was unscrupulous in the spreading of rumors — a piece of work, as they say. Willing to allow for the doctrines of might makes right (when he has the might) and survival of the fittest (while the rankings stay frozen in his favor), courageously resolved to manipulate the foolish masses for the benefit of the greater good (that is, himself), vehemently defending all the privilege of noblesse and none of the oblige, combining the social conscience of a libertine and the self-righteousness of a roundhead, Mallock's a recognizably contemporary conservative. It's easy to picture him as a Young Republican at Yale, blitzing out a novel which tells off PC and poststructuralism and women's studies to great acclaim and publicity....
And it might be pretty funny. He might actually do a book or two worth reading before his toothsomely juicy contempt shrivelled into a Buckleyish (or even Bennetish) bore. The New Republic is often (always at its nastiest) very funny. God forsake me, a few times I even squirmed. As David Daiches wrote for a newer moribund Republic in 1951:
If we can read through The New Republic without at one point or another being made to feel a little foolish, we are wise indeed. On questions of religion, culture and progress the view of the modern liberal intellectual tends to be a conflation of Benjamin Jowett and Matthew Arnold, and it is salutary (to use a favorite word of Arnold's) to have it so cunningly challenged.
(This on-line edition is dedicated to The Happy Tutor.)
Your link to the Tribune columns led me to think, Orwell would have made a great blogger. Or is that going too far? I do like reading Orwell & thinking about his right-wing advocates. When I'm reading him gleefully fantasizing about the underclass training machine guns on the army, what is Roger Kimball reading?
For that matter, what is Roger Kimball wearing? Did his mom buy those clothes?
and ann coulter will be remembered more for her bosom than her buddies
Hey, that's unfair!
even constant vigilance may not be enough (dan reynolds)
Good thing, 'cause I need some sleep.
Gosse on Pater is wonderful!
Gosse may have been a dull critic but as an easy-going late Victorian raconteur he was excellent. From the same essay collection, I pulled the more personal comments on Walt Whitman and Christina Rossetti.
Lawrence White likes those too:
The Gosse on Whitman is quite beautiful. I guess I'm just a sap at heart but it was the sweetest thing.
In honor of all this Gosse love, I've just posted a portrait of the man himself.
tell them all how it really is
I used to have a blue guitar,
Till I smashed it one green day.
It would not play things as they are,
As Peter Townshend may....
. . . 2004-10-13 |
Someone who reaches over the chessboard before their opponent can make a move, snatches the king, and dashes out the door with it doesn't understand the point of playing chess. Introduced to baseball, someone might remark on the sad padding of the whole affair: to determine a winning team, one inning would probably be enough. (Indeed, when TV summarizes a game, it's typically with the score and a single pitch.) Or a baseball fan might deprecate cricket's misuse of balls and bats.
These mistake the goal of a game for the point of the game.
In contemporary anglophone culture, poetry is that form which explicitly marks the workings of language over the work to be done with language. This nonutilitarian position has advantages and disadvantages, freedom among them. However, someone who's ascribed to a particular historical variant of the poetry games may measure other variants against its goal posts and touch lines and find them lacking.
Or someone may wonder why we'd fuss with philosophy. Verified truth is science's job, and the science du jour knows how to get it (with wide tolerance of exceptions, embarrassments, and half-assed explanations).
But the point of studying philosophy isn't verifiable truth any more than the point of eating is chestnut soup with foie gras custard. The discipline's founded on dialogue. What we gain from it is the pleasure of the exercise and (possibly) some ability to handle multiple systems of abstraction more coherently, flexibly, and sincerely — sincerity being what distinguishes the philosophy game from sophism.
A well-lubricated shift between the gears of dogmatism and cynicism takes care of most social contigencies, and so "Develop heartfelt abstract multiformity" isn't on everybody's to-do list. As a natural born bible-thumper, though, I've found the effort to my benefit. Left to its own devices, a love for abstract reasoning can grow narrowminded, vicious, and eventually delusional.
So, no, I don't know if most philosophy departments are useful to most students — in which uncertainty they're no different from any other academic department — but one did supply the two or three classrooms in which I learned something.
There were other classrooms even within that department, of course.
There's no law of noncontradiction in the history of thought: Plato and Nietzsche, Descartes and Kant, Pierce and Popper all are valid. But such a law may well be enforced by a particular school or a particular teacher. Sadly for philosophy, the most common instigator of sincere discourse, even among philosophers, is self-promotion.
They told me poetry was naming things. And that all the basics were covered, so now the poets were naming really abstruse stuff, like the way it feels to go to work with a hangover under a totalitarian regime when you're in love with a waitress who wants to move to Milan.
Poets' children might disagree about their knack for names.
If chestnut soup with foie gras custard isn't the point of eating, what is?
Pecan-encrusted whitefish with braised greens and a Sancerres on the side, of course.
No, no, no, fried peanut butter and banana sandwhiches!
. . . 2005-05-28 |
I suppose many readers of The Valve eventually get around to The Yale Journal of Criticism on their own, but if un-lit blogs can point you to the New York Times front page, it must be OK for me to point you to "Petted Things" by Ivan Kreilkamp, starring the Brontë sisters as animal rights pioneers.
Kreilkamp's essay pleasingly draws from history, the authors themselves, and recent Derrida in the service of (to me) a novel, amusing, and evocative association of realism with anthropomorphism. The critic even shows good reason for having treated "the Brontës" as a group rather than as individual novelists.
Potential Disney adaptors of Jane Eyre should especially note the story of Clumsy, A Dog:
"Tell how he grows ugly in growing up;... Madam's disgust for him; the rebuffs he suffers.... Clumsy, for that is what she calls him now, banished to the yard; his degradation; detail his privations, the change in food and company."
Everyone else should especially note that Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog carries far more entertainment value than its equivalent in Lucas-movie-and-junk-food.
Afterthought: The Brontës as potential writers of noble-dog stories reminds me of one of my own favorite alternate-literary-history scenarios: What if, rather than giving up their shared fantasy worlds, the Brontë sisters had successfully brought their mature styles and concerns into Gondal and Angria, weirdly anticipating Joanna Russ's Alyx, M. John Harrison's ret-conning of Viriconium, Samuel R. Delany's Nevèrÿon...?
Pointless, I know, but at least it's a break from imagining the rest of Emma.
. . . 2005-06-27 |
Leonard Maltin mentions the lame story, the flashy direction, and Robert Benchley's brilliant screen debut, not looking as puffy-fishlike-thing-on-the-beach as he would a few years later but already blatantly inserted, as America's worst color commentator ("And it should be a great Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth game today at Yale Stadium, here in Cambridge, Massachusetts...").
True, true, all true. But it says something probably not worth saying about heterosexual hegemony and the all-male capsule review business that unmentioned goes the most eyeboggling aspect of the movie, young pre-Code Joel McCrea. I always accepted on faith that this sullen, stubborn, humorless, not-too-bright character was sexually attractive, but I never really understood why till I saw him with no clothes on.
OK, he's not completely nude on screen. But I gotta say if Jean Harlow or Myrna Loy had spent a sizable portion of a movie greased up and wearing only tighty-whities, Leonard Maltin sure as hell would've found it fit to mention.
Plus: "Skeets" Gallagher!
Speaking of het. heg., last night I dreamt I visited Patricia Highsmith's home around dinnertime. She threatened to turn testy at times, but her adoring husband and son maintained a sort of stoic cheer through the distraction of baseball. Whether pitching, batting, or fielding, Highsmith was an astonishingly graceful player, and seemed to derive comfort from her own easy precision on the field.
Others dream differently:
All kidding aside, being Patricia Highsmith's son, the Patricia Highsmith of literature as opposed to of earth, and they are different, would be I think, less like The Natural and more than a little like being Betty Topper of Norco.
. . . 2007-03-18 |
Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel
by Lennard J. Davis, 1983 (2nd ed. 1996)
Both Tom Jones's hero and genre were mysterious bastards. Unlike the hero, the genre's parentage remained open to question, and, in '83, Davis ambitiously aimed to prune classical romances (and even the mock-heroic anti-romance) from its family tree.
In place of that noble lineage, he proposed a three-act structure:
In his own storytelling, Davis sometimes stumbled — most painfully, he blew the punchline — and I wished he'd included a chapter on "secret histories", whose length, legal issues, and formatting (memoirs, correspondence, oddly well-informed third-person narrators) all seem to make them at least as germane as ballads. Most of all, without broad quantitative analysis to back them up, such ventures can always be suspected of cherry-picking the evidence.
But I'm an irresponsibly speculative collagist myself, and these cherries are delicious. I already understood how framing narratives relieve pressure, how they establish both authenticity and deniability: "I don't know, but I been told." But I hadn't realized how often pre-fictional writers had felt the need for such relief. Not having read a life of Daniel Defoe, I hadn't known how brazenly he forged even his own letters. And, speaking of letters, I hadn't read Samuel Richardson's flip-flops on the question of his real-world sources.
The sheer number of examples convinces us that something was shifting uncomfortably, tangled in the sheets of the zeitgeist. How else explain, across decades and forms and class boundaries, this increasingly vexed compulsion to face the old question head on, like a custard pie?
And by the end of the book, we still haven't found fully satisfying answers; the process continues. Recently and orally, for example, our impulse to simultaneously avow and disavow narrative discovered a felicitous formula in the adverbial interjections "like" and "all like".
We haven't even fully agreed to accept the terms of the problem. Remember those quaint easy-going characters in Lennard Davis's Act I? Believe it or not, living fossils of unperplexed truthiness roamed the Lost World of rural America during our lifetimes! My own grandmother sought out no journalism and no novels; she read only True Confessions and watched only her "stories" — that is, soap operas, "just like real life" they were, another quotidian reconfiguration.
* * *
All novelists descend from Epimenides.
Well, OK, if you want to get technical about it, so do novel readers ("All Cretans know my belief is false"), and so does everyone else.
That's the problem with getting technical. (Or, Why I Am Not an Analytic Philosopher, Again.)
But what about memory retrieval??In contrast to common past-future activity in the left hippocampus, the right hippocampus was differentially recruited by future event construction. This finding is notable, not only because others report right hippocampal activity to be common to both past and future events (Okuda et al., 2003) but also because it is surprising that future events engage a structure more than the very task it is thought to be crucial for: retrieval of past autobiographical events....It does seem strange that no regions were more active for memory than for imagination. So memory doesn't differ from fiction? At the very least, it didn't result in greater brain activity than fiction, not in this particular study (an important point).There was no evidence of any regions engaged uniquely by past events, not only in the PFC but across the entire brain. This outcome was unexpected in light of previous results (Okuda et al., 2003). Moreover, regions mediating retrieval processes (e.g., cue-specification, Fletcher et al., 1998) such right ventrolateral PFC (e.g., BA 47) should be engaged by a pure retrieval task (i.e., past events) more than a generation task (i.e., future events). More surprising was the finding that right BA47 showed more activity for future than past events, and that past events did not engage this region significantly more than control tasks.
(I should admit, even though that re-citation honestly conveys what's on my mind — I happened to read it while writing this, and so there it is — it doesn't honestly convey what I consider a strong argument. Like The Neurocritic, I'm skeptical about the functional neuroimaging fad; it seems too much like listening to a heart pound and deducing that's where emotion comes from. Reaching just a bit farther, then — from my keyboard to my bookshelf....)
For researchers in the cognitive sciences, a narrative works like a narrative, whether fictional or not:
... with respect to the cognitive activities of readers, the experience of narratives is largely unaffected by their announced correspondence with reality. [...] This is exactly why readers need not learn any new "rules" (in Searle's sense) to experience language in narrative worlds: the informatives are well formed, and readers can treat them as such.- Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds
According to Davis, modern mainstream genres partly result from legal changes which forced propositionally ambiguous narratives to face courtroom standards of truth. I didn't find his evidence completely convincing, but there's something that felt right about his tale.
A narrative is not a proposition. When narrative is brought into a courtroom, interrogation attempts to smash it into propositional pieces.
But any hapless intellectual who's made a genuine effort to avoid perjury can testify how well that works. We don't normally judge narratives: we participate in them, even if only as what Gerrig calls (following H. H. Clark) a side-participant. If we restricted ourselves to "deciding to tell a lie" or "trying to tell the truth," there wouldn't be much discourse left. Depending on personal taste, you may consider that a worthwhile outcome; nevertheless, you have to admit it's not the outcome we have.
We've been bred in the meat to notice the Recognizable and the Wondrous. The True and the False are cultural afterthoughts: easily shaken off by some, a maddening itch for others, hard to pin down, and a pleasure to lay aside:
At the tone, it will not be midnight. In today's weather, it was not raining.
January 2009: Since I haven't found anyplace better to note it, I'll note here that the best academic book I read in 2008 (unless Victor Klemperer's The Language of the Third Reich counts) was Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture, by Kate Loveman, whose metanarrative convincingly allows for (and relies on) pre-"novel" hoaxes and satires while not erasing generic distinctions.
. . . 2008-04-15 |
Since I know some readers share my interest in the sub-subgenre of academic endnotes, I'd like to share the belated highlight of Lee Zimmerman's "Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon", Biography 30.4 (2007):
17. Noonday Demon's website — www.noondaydemon.com/biography — announces it "has won . . . fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and is being published in 22 languages. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list in both hardback and paperback; it has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries. Among the honors garnered by The Noonday Demon are the Books for a Better Life Award, the Ken Award of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the QPB New Visions Award, the Voice of Mental Health award of the Jed Foundation and the National Mental Health Association, the Lammy for the best nonfiction of 2001, the Mind Book of the Year for Great Britain, the Prism Award of the NDMDA, the Charles T. Rubey LOSS award, the Silvano Arieti Award, the Dede Hirsch Community Service Award, and the Erasing The Stigma Leadership Award. It was chosen an American Library Association Notable Book of 2001 and a New York Times Notable Book. . . . Mr. Solomon has lectured on depression around the world, including recent stints at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress." The collection of those offering high praise in book-jacket blurbs is especially high-powered: Styron, Harold Bloom, Louise Erdrich, Larry McMurtry, Naomi Wolf, Adam Gopnik, and Kay Redfield Jamison.
18. The book's claim to mastery has been widely accepted. In a New York Times book review, Richard Bernstein writes: "'The Noonday Demon' is one of those rare volumes that deserve the adjective 'definitive.'"
19. See, for example, works by J. B. Harley and by Jeremy Black.
20. It is tempting to regard this infliction upon the reader in light of what Solomon calls his "several episodes of violence" against other people (179). In one such episode, feeling "cruelly betrayed" by someone he "loved very much," Solomon "attacked him . . . threw him against a wall, and socked him repeatedly, breaking both his jaw and his nose. He was later hospitalized for loss of blood."
21. In considering Solomon's representation of antidepressant medication, I should make mention of an unusual circumstance that Solomon only hints at. He does acknowledge that "It is hard for me to write without bias about the pharmaceutical companies because my father has worked in the pharmaceutical field for most of my adult life," and that "His company, Forest Laboratories, is now the U.S. distributor of Celexa" (13). But such cautious phrasing omits significant information that would seem to bear on the question of possible "bias." Since 1977, Howard Solomon has been the CEO, and since 1998 the CEO and Chairman, of Forest Labs, and according to Business Week in May 2002, "since its U.S. launch in September, 1998, Celexa has come to account for almost 70% of Forest's overall sales — about $1.6 billion in the fiscal year that ended on Mar. 31" (Berfield 74). (Forest now also produces another major antidepressant, Lexapro.) For 2005, the Forbes list of the most highly paid CEOs of American companies ranks him as fourth, with a compensation for that year of $92,115,000; for the five-year period ending that year, his compensation is listed as $294,895,000 ("Executive Pay").
(Should anyone now be nervously eyeing their melancholic loved ones, please be assured that bloody fisticuffs are not a typical symptom of depression — although, as I recall, fury is a side-effect of some antidepressants....)
Well, it takes all kinds of affective disorders. Solomon sounds bipolar; I started on Lexapro to treat my own anxiety and found that it helped a little but was really effective in mitigating my anger problem. At least for the first twenty-two hours after my daily pill . . .
Dr. Josh Lukin cites:
Celebrity right-wing psychiatrist Paul McHugh, reviewing The Noonday Demon in Commentary, singled that passage out as exemplary of what's amiss in Solomon's thinking:In one scene of this book, Solomon describes, and excuses, a vicious assault on one of his homosexual partners in which he broke the man's nose and jaw and sent him to the hospital in need of blood transfusions. Some of the physical sensations he felt as he delivered his bone-crushing blows were, he freely admits, pleasurable. More: even today, "part of me does not rue what happened, because I sincerely believe that [without it] I would have gone irretrievable crazy." And a bit later, he adds: "Engaging in violent acts is not a good way to treat depression. It is, however, effective. To deny the inbred curative power of violence would be a terrible mistake."Sontag, thou shouldst be living at this hour!At least one admiring reviewer of The Noonday Demon paused to point out that these statements might appear to justify acts that were, well, criminal. They certainly do that, not to mention that they conjure up images of brownshirt thuggery. But they also happen to flow naturally from Solomon's conception of depression less as an illness than as a stage on which to enact a heroic drama of the self.
Hey, when is it not a good time for Sontag to be living?
. . . 2012-01-15 |
Rosemund Tuve to William Empson, Valentine's Day 1953:
Obviously I've not been writing an 'answer' to that article you enclosed, in any usual sense. About the practical matter you mentioned... 'saying this had led to my altering my remarks' — I don't imagine you'll want to alter them much of any. It's too hard to alter things. I'm so much more pleased that you'll take a stand on 'the reader ought to try to make out what the author...' (etc. p. 4, all of that sentence) than I am unpleased by what touches me, that that's worth the rest whether just or not, given present critical assumptions in many quarters. (Often unadmitted; just practised). I find that I don't care a hang (so I don't rootle them out here and argue) whether you say dreadful things about me that I don't think true, and so far as I can tell this is because you go at the poetry so hard. I would normally think we'd 'both look rather more sensible' if you took out some of the arguments From Character of Author; I believe they'll cause mirth to those who know me. Sometimes I laugh too. I'm just not the kind you envisage. Anyhow I can't seem to get angry about any of it, neither in 1950 or now. Maybe that's the kind of complacent you say the book is. Did you in your heart (or wherever you think these incautious things) think that? Then either long-practiced suspending judgement ruins the capacity of words to carry the tone of voice, or I'm George Herbert's greatest failure in that lesson, or it's you, and you're angrier than I think. You write excessive, but I don't think you are.
If we ever meet, which wouldn't be so odd, I'll find out. When you come to America again, stop in New London. It's no jump from N.Y., the Thames is handsome here, we'd get whomever you picked down from Yale, the whisky is good enough and the conversation provocative. Or serene; as you choose.
Sarang follows up.
. . . 2017-11-09 |
The flip(-off) punk side of Imposture Syndrome Blues, genteely put by Stephen Greenblatt:
I was eager to expand my horizons, not to retreat into a defensive crouch. Prowling the stacks of Yale's vast library, I sometimes felt giddy with excitement. I had a right to all of it, or, at least, to as much of it as I could seize and chew upon.
Less giddily, there's my forever-adolescent fury at credential-based blockage. (Fifteen years of university dirt-shifting finally tunneled me behind those walls — but what an absurd pretext!) And the disconcerting violence with which I met AB's and XZ's curiosity about why I follow John Crowley's career as closely as Jack Womack's, or why I should squander attention on sixteenth century literature and other hifalutin' highbrow longhair moldies when birthright entitled me to such a wealth of TV, junk food, ephemeral gadgets, and respectable edginess. The This-is-mine! snarl of a poorly disciplined cur.
Mememeister Josh Lukin fills me in:
Thanks for calling my attention to Greenblatt's sentimental essay. I like its atavism: one can imagine Howe or Fiedler or some other midcentury cosmopolitan recounting similar adventures and sentiments. Indeed, I expect Greenblatt's approach owes something to the novelists whom those Intellectuals influenced. My uncle would have enjoyed the piece, and I'm sure Greenblatt's friend Natalie ate it up.Anent respectable edginess, the erstwhile Miss Spentyouth recently began a Facebook conversation that culminated in people discussing whether they were edgelords or edgevassals . . . I should have staked a claim for the nascent edgebourgoisie.
. . . 2020-07-02 |
Thus further constraints need to be applied to attempt to separate useful information (to be retained) from noise (to be discarded). This will naturally translate to non-zero reconstruction error.- "Stacked Denoising Autoencoders" by Pascal Vincent, Hugo Larochelle, Isabelle Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
Braymer C-4 High School offered no advanced placement classes and no foreign language instruction. (Although librarian Mary Margaret McAllister could've taught French, doing so would have forced the school to raise her salary.) The irresistibly caricaturable math teacher, Russell Clodfelter (affectionately called "Felter" after he forbade us to affectionately call him "Clod"), only rehashed what I'd already learned, but that was enough to fetch us yearly trophies from the state mathematics championship. (Yes, there was such a thing.) The English teacher's favorite works of literature were Mandingo and Gone with the Wind; most of the other teachers were far worse. Aside from one touch-typing course, formal education had come to an end and I was left to my own devices.
Devices were thin on the ground. The bulk of the school library was assembled at the turn of the century, as close to a heyday as Braymer ever got — Artemus Ward and William Dean Howells; Thomson, Cowper, Whittier, and Longfellow — although somehow one paperback of Leonard Cohen's pre-crooner verse had slunk in; I read the sauciest bits aloud to prove that Poetry Is Cool.
The nearest public library was in Chillicothe, population 9500, about forty minutes away, and I relied on my parents' occasional shopping trips to get there. They were usually willing to drop me off for an hour or more, though, the collection was surprisingly ambitious,1 and the person responsible, Ms. DesMarias, became a supportive friend, gifting me with castoffs and lending Finnegans Wake unstamped from a locked cabinet. (Because local book-burners relied on a list last updated in the 1930s, filth-monger James Joyce needed to be kept off shelves where Berger, Pynchon, and Updike were safe.)
My own collection lacked funding. The queue for a grocery store job was years long, and the only farm chore I could handle was slapstick comedy: set the hook in the bale and get yanked off the flatbed; set the hook in the bale and get yanked off the flatbed.... The year before it closed for good, I picked up some cash as a substitute projectionist at my uncle's and aunt's movie theater. (A kid with a tremor maintaining a carbon-arc projector was probably more suspenseful than anything on the screen.) Then I pitched a local history column to the Braymer Bee.2 None of these ventures brought in much.
Walks or cycling offered little escape, since the town was empty of scenery but rife with untrained, unleashed, unfenced dogs. If I wasn't in the back yard with our own unleashed and unfenced dogs, I could sit with Grandma next door while she read her stories (True Confessions) or watched her stories (General Hospital, Beverly Hillbillies, All My Children). On a weekend, I might play chess with a friend at his family farm. Or, and mostly, I could pace my basement bedroom.
In short (ha!) I'd been sentenced to four years in a minimum security prison. And as a prisoner I now had two duties:
For the first time, then, my ambitions coincided with those of my classmates. Bullying dwindled from a minute-by-minute concern to an occasional issue in gym.
I'd tried to keep my musical tastes on the can't-wait-to-grow-up straight-and-narrow — classical, lounge, and show tunes — but Braymer wasn't reached by the necessary radio stations. No matter how I studied Conrad L. Osborne in Chillicothe discards, I couldn't listen to what I couldn't hear, and I needed to hear something other than my chorus of inner hecklers.
The early-1970s rock market welcomed cynicism, petulance, and gossip. Since satire was a traditionally mixed genre with wide allowances for crudity and sketchiness, I wisely advised myself that satirical top-of-the-pops entries made aesthetic sense even if the rest of it was philistine garbage.
After a few months, having already directed my geek gaze away from artifacts as pure virtuosic-thingies-in-a-vacuum and towards a shared outside, I widened it to include more of their implied worlds: jealous songs ethnographically sampled the alien workings and sales of jealousy, boastful songs demonstrated the alien workings of confidence, and so on.
As for having a good beat and being able (or at least eager) to dance to it, I'd always bobbed like a parrot to Gould's Bach and Toscanini's Beethoven, so no issues there.
Aside from any immediate and intermediate gains, the autodidactic approach I'd used — search for an unlocked window or easily jimmied door; enter; make yourself at home; start dropping in on the neighbors — was applicable to other new territories, even if, for political reasons or out of pure cussedness, I didn't always apply it.
And a few months later still, I found discursive models in the Meltzered/Bangsian school of rock-crit, which acknowledged — celebrated, even, in its morose or desperate way — the triune of historical context, tenacious artifact, and fleshly encounter: indissoluble in itself; remixable as fresh context.
While pacing through my third year of exile, I had what might be described as an original thought, the first of my life and the most rewarding:3
The time capsule of my high school library established that America's nineteenth-century canon as currently defined differed in almost every respect from the canon chosen by the nineteenth century itself.
And in my limited wandering through the realms of what I'll call for convenience "Modernism" and "1970s New York Times Book Review recommendations," I repeatedly felt a deflation of energy, of risk, of interest in the latter, a diagnosis that even its practitioners sometimes admitted.
Rather than contemporary literature having attained a unique and history-ending exhaustion, what if it was merely the latest in a long sequence of self-inflicted delusions of exhaustion? In the twentieth century, the nineteenth century canon had been sweetened by sources distrusted or inaccessible in their own time: failed or trivial genre exercises; self-published, barely published, or manuscript-only oddities. What would I find if I looked for their contemporary equivalents — not in search of "lively junk" or "mind candy," not with the condescension of Leslie Fiedler's nod to science fiction or Gilbert Seldes's nod to jazz, but instead by granting ambitious practitioners their self-awareness?
Would-be-vocational pride 4 suggested poetry as a starting point, but gathering a critical mass of publications smaller-pressed than APR was impossible from central Missouri. (In fact, I didn't find an opportunity until life placed me and disposable income within walking distance of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop.) Westerns, romances, spy thrillers, and porn were almost as daunting. It seemed more efficient to survey one of the genres I'd read in prepubescence — mysteries and science fiction — since I already had some idea (even if inadequate) of the lay of their lands, both were well represented in the Chillicothe library, and both were widely available in relatively affordable paperbacks.
From mysteries, I remembered a noticeable mid-career shift in my childhood favorite, Ellery Queen, towards — to overstate the case in the way of latter-day superhero comics — maturity, realism, complexity, and relevance.5 That didn't give much to go on, though, and it would be another year before I bought a battered copy of The Long Goodbye (from the same garage sale as a battered copy of The Golden Hits of Leslie Gore; that garage had good taste), and another decade before I first read Patricia Highsmith.
On the other hand, my junior-high transition from science fiction had carried over more than one intriguing oddity — Dangerous Visions and Fun With Your New Head, for example — and its anthologies were easy to find and easy to track leads from.
As it happened, the world science fiction convention was being held in Kansas City later that year. If I could arrange transport, that might make a nice follow-up to the summer session classes I'd gotten permission to take at Mizzou.
Timing was good in another way as well: for sf as well as film, broad distribution of experimental work crested in the mid-1970s, and both New Waves would soon meet breakwaters engineered, in part, by some other MidAmeriCon attendees.
1 An error long since rectified.
2 When I reached the only interesting thing that had ever happened, I strove to maintain journalistic/scholarly objectivity, and succeeded so well that Mormons slimed me with grateful letters for years afterward. Thus I learned that journalistic/scholarly objectivity is really not my thing.
3 Directly or indirectly it brought me good reading, a social media presence, a lover, admittance to college, and, twenty years later, a shortlived (but paid!) monthly column.
4 I presumed that anyone as word-obsessed as myself must be a poet, following a line of thought similar to Lord Wendover's "Any gentleman with an estate and ten thousand a year should have a peerage."
5 Later I learned that this shift occurred around the same time the partnership behind "Ellery Queen" began farming their pseudonym to other artisans, including Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson.
When I and another dorm resident pilgrimaged to the Columbia Anarchist League that summer, we found it sharing quarters with a naked woman who avoided conversation and with a member (or possibly the entirety) of the local Communist Party, who jovially assured me that Come the Revolution my sort would be first in front of the firing squad.
I saw both their points, and still do.
This is intended to be the origin story of an "image," not a Pooteriad, a Real-Life Top Ten-Zillion, an Apologia Pro Vita Mea, or My Life & Loves. It concerns the development of a survival tactic rather than what I did while surviving. Accordingly I'll knapp the wantons down.
Even if I don't inappropriately-touch on sexual practices, though, I at least need to skirt them. As lawyers and reviewers used to say, they are "essential to the storyline."
When my first lover launched herself at me in reassuringly unambiguous (if inexplicable)1 fashion, I anticipated some sort of relief. But solo training hadn't prepared me for the immersive expanse of that relief: a hitherto unknown knowledge of acceptance, affection, and communication, both verbal and not; an anything-fits-anywhere! security as incontestably Real as a low-hanging ceiling or an unexpected step, and yet not painful. Love served as shelter and shield even from a distance: my final oral surgeries were far less nerve-wracking than earlier installments.
Most unexpectedly, love brought silence. Throughout my life, my skull's been occupied by a 24-hour-theater unspooling and respooling an ever-extended can't-stop-won't-stop shuffle play of blooper reels with commentary — every private or public shame, every slight whether deservedly received by me or unjustly given by me, every mild embarrassment or grievous crime or grevious mispronunciation — sometimes deafening, sometimes subsiding to tinnitus, but always, always ready to intrude. And for the first time, rather than drowning it out or yelling over it, I could walk away.
In my senior year, Braymer C-4 dropped even the pretense of education. Mr. Clodfelter tried to prepare me and a few other students for calculus, an effort which proved about as effective as Charlie Chaplin's pre-fight warm-up. Otherwise it was gym and four study halls. I read, or I chatted with Mary Margaret McAllister, or we mocked the white-supremacist propaganda sheet someone had subscribed the library to, or I wrote letters to my lover or to zines, or I searched for a college.
My slot for a grocery job had finally come up, providing some financial relief. Even so I could only afford two final-application fees for out-of-state schools. I winnowed the target list to Haverford (as a twofer with Bryn Mawr) and Vassar.
Vassar's alumna decided on a group interview and hosted an afternoon garden party of applicants, most of whom dressed in some indefinably alien fashion, kept their hands steady near the glassware, and (I later came to understand) attended private schools. I suppose she meant to learn which of us would be "a good match," who would best "fit in" at Vassar, and I suppose she did so.
The Haverford alumnus met me at a diner, and then drove us around the neighborhood to extend the conversation. Topics ranged widely, but included a compare-and-contrast between modes of feminist satire in Russ's Female Man and Delany's Triton.
In his congratulatory letter after acceptance, the alum hoped I'd be able to sustain my idealism. In turn I hope that good-hearted man never found out.
The summer of '77 was glorious: I'd escaped high school, I'd finalized financial aid for Haverford, and I attended summer sessions in my lover's home city, just a bike ride away from Planned Parenthood. A survey class which included Chekhov and Ibsen was particularly enjoyable, even when its teacher tried to guilt-trip me about intellectuals who deserted their homeland in its hour (or centuries) of need.
In contrast, I don't remember I and my lover worrying much about it. Her parents were academics, mine were military, and so the thought of extended separations was maybe less alien than it would've been to our neighbors. I hadn't yet read enough Burroughs to predict what symptoms might accompany abrupt cessation of a universal anodyne. And neither of us could have imagined the grotesque mash-up of Goodbye Columbus and The Rocky Horror Show at our relationship's terminus. We were far too clever to risk anything so humiliating.
1 Turns out she was a Bud Cort fan. More generally, this was the era when Woody Allen and David Bowie were male sex symbols, and body-builders were considered asexual freaks created for the delectation of gay guys. "Golden Years" indeed....
Fear of the irrational undoubtedly feeds on our lack of knowledge, but above all on those points of omission, on a certain impatience that keeps us from penetrating to the heart of the operative by confusing learning with the talent for rapidly consuming an "informational content." But to learn is to prepare oneself to learn what one in some way already knows. and to put oneself into such a state where the connection between things reverberates in the connection of the mind. The operation is not at first given as an arrow that links a source to a target, but rather emerges in the places where variables become merged and get tangled up without being policed by parentheses.- Figuring Space (Les enjeux du mobile) by Gilles Châtelet
Have I no weapon-word for thee — some message brief and fierce?
(Have I fought out and done indeed the battle?) Is there no shot left,
For all thy affectations, lisps, scorns, manifold silliness?
Nor for myself — my own rebellious self in thee?- "To the Pending Year" by Walt Whitman
The next few years were the most intellectually transformative, emotionally mercurial, and socially toxic of my existence, which I suppose is only to be expected when an eighteen-year-old autodidact is removed from years of rural seclusion (but not the gentlemanly sort) and deposited in two of America's finest colleges and near one of America's largest cities.
In that despised and now inconceivable final phase of public support for education, financial aid flowed but first-gen student advising did not. Ten years after I graduated, I discovered that my fellow students considered collaborative reverse-engineering of textbook-and-chalkboard proofs as essential for mathematics as language drills were for French or German classes. If I'd known, maybe I wouldn't have squandered so many opportunities.
On the other hand, who am I kidding? I was a stubborn cuss, and my introduction to the mores of prep-schooled young men — the differences money made and the differences it didn't — had started me on the cynical foot, a stance reinforced when Haverford's presidency passed from two-fisted activist Jack Coleman to dispiriting English toad Robert Bocking Stevens. Told what could be gained from a study group, I'd have said, "Who wants to hang out with math majors? It's bad enough I have to hang out with myself."
As was, I envisioned "college" as that phase of life in which massive blunders incur relatively minor penalties, and I behaved accordingly.
The result was the Great Work advertised by my self-assigned Yeats-and-Joyce-centered curriculum (pursued alongside a full externally-assigned course load): mortared and pestled; flamed and boiled in shit; buried to ferment; seasoned to taste. The most practiced of my little loves once confided on our way out of bed that she'd described me to her mother, a research psychologist, as "probably psychotic," and what shocked me about that was the idea of anyone disclosing their own life to their own parents.
If only to warn young people against the dangers of unsupervised reading, I suppose I should mention the precipitant of my greatest tumble, after which I saw only a choice of downhill slides: an all-out unrequited amour fou, an experience never to be repeated and best avoided in the first place. It's not that the Tudor poets and Baudelaire and Dowson and Yeats and the Confessionals and so on made the idea sound exactly desirable; more, I think, that there are only so many times you can rehearse a part before you put on the show.
Let's keep the rest on ice; there's way too much here for one meal. As a placeholder, though, and because COVID-19 isolation's got me nervy, and because I'm sick to death of writing without any identifiable human beings other than "I" and "me," and most people skip Acknowledgments anyway so no harm done, I'd like to cite some names. Bless this bed that I lie on.
After college, I disappointed her by ignoring the possibility of graduate school — she'd somehow imagined my monolingual sunstroked carcass conducting anthropological field studies — and we lost touch.
A dozen years later, when web search engines began to appear, hers was the first name I entered. I've tried again every year since then and never found results outside one digitization of an old Haverford course catalog.
I found his go-to examples of basic human impulses — rape; shitting in public — a bit alienating, and he didn't fuss much with inclusiveness: in the midst of a dithyramb honoring athletics, he took care to except weightlifting because "it makes the mind slower," while a blush raised on the one weightlifter in our class. (I felt sorry for the guy until later that year I heard him trying to take offense at a WASP joke.) And I believed Desjardins when he (and Gangadean afterwards) said it would've been helpful for me to meet the department's representative pessimist-skeptic, Tink Thompson.
Still, yes, he did sort of change my life.
A+ pour la beauté de tes idées
C- pour la grammaire et le vocabulaire
= B
And his was the only class whose final exam led me to request a meeting. When I entered his office he seemed atypically grim, but brightened up considerable when I explained that I was there to request the source of the anti-poetical yet completely gorgeous prose translation exercise. (Answer: the opening of Madame Bovary.) He seemed sincere in regretting that I didn't continue French studies — « Gérard a toujours gardé pour les « gens curieux » — ces Ulysse inquiets et touche-à-tout condamnés par une certaine tradition chrétienne et par les livres de Rabelais lui-même — une sympathie profonde » — but one of my scholarships had a GPA requirement and mathematics represented risk enough.
And I should add, I wasn't their main project, or even a special focal point! That's just how darn nice they all were.
(My closest male friendship came to too gruesome an end to risk reconnection. Perhaps a shared ambition to mutter "Usurper" wasn't an ideal foundation on which to build.)
This interview from 2000 may convey some of his charm and intelligence, and some of what he confirmed or encouraged in me, and where I was unable to follow.
Husemoller was far too distanced a personality (or I was far too mathematically unambitious) to support any illusion of friendship, but he so blatantly resided in mathematics, roaming a lushly self-sufficient world of comforts and novelties, that his willingness to exhibit material presence was in itself inspiring.
It was my misfortune to take a leave of absence one year before Husemoller left for his own sabbatical, landing me with far too much of the worse-than-nothing Mr. T in my final years. But I understand: he had somewhere else to be.
- A Furnace, by Roy Fisher |
No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge to take up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity
As my dropout year drew to its close, I took inventory:
This was as soft as a hardscrabble bohemian life was ever going to get. And I had not found the experience productive; it was not conducive to inspiration. All I'd achieved was that list of unpleasantries.
There was no way around it. Insofar as I had anything to offer existence (and we'll set that question aside for the nonce), I'd need a steady income.
Entry to the allegedly non-capitalist sanctuary of tenured Academe was barred by its Customs department: I considered grades and required classes cruel mockeries of education, and had resolved never to become a perpetrator.
Thanks to my tremor and lack of sustain, physical labor was out, as were (due to different uncorrectable flaws) most of the worthwhile jobs open to mouthy intellectuals. (Nowadays I guess I might find hire as the concern troll equivalent of an agent provocateur, but that sounds even less attractive than grifting throwaway money from a venture capitalist.)
I was rarely picked for retail positions, and when I won one, I'd be fired within the month. Having been cursed with a rubber, stage-ready face that exaggerates any fleeting emotion, I couldn't hide contempt and hostility well enough to keep any other sort of service job, either.
It would have to be some sort of clerical position, then, and I'd need a degree to paper over my too-evident defects. Petite bourgeoisie or bust!
And to obtain that degree, I'd need to clean up my act for the sake of the kiddies, stop flinging my Sad-Harpo-Marx seduction technique at all and sundry, buckle down more and under less.
But before and beyond all that, I needed then — as I needed later, as I need now — to invent some — "justification" is too presumptuous a word — some motivation which could be reconciled with my life as stubbornly lived: one which has always compulsively extracted, deformed, misapplied, modified, inverted, ripped, and generally not-left-the-fuck-alone abstract verbal models which then, in their own right, tend to go all Frankenstein's monster on my sorry ass.
Before the fiction grew threadbare, announcing myself as poet was meant to signal harmless redundancy. If asked to elaborate, I'd declare an ambition to be a minor poet — not a prophet, not a School-of-Me founder — with a job at the Post Office 1 and an apartment which could host friends. A downscale Eddie FitzGerald rather than a shitkickin' Al Tennyson.
Later, stripped of laurel and intimates, I sought guidance in others from that narrow intersection of people I admired and people I felt akin to: the exceptionists, the easily ignored; those who pursued eccentric interests or contributed to essential goals in oddly irrelevant ways; amusements or annoyances to more important names.
But I anticipate. Returning to 1980:
I'm only of use as a persuasively dissenting voice, but I must never be so persuasive as to dominate.2 If I couldn't talk I had nothing to contribute, but left unmuzzled I was a menace to the community. Well! A short leash, then, and a fenced yard for exercise. Try to avoid battlegrounds which might incur meaningful casualties. Reserve untrammeled discourse for nearest-and-dearests, preferably — as I decided not long afterward, post facto, based on new evidence, per SOP — preferably within the safe all-accepting bounds of a monogamous sexual relationship, where static build-ups and short circuits could be grounded by bed.
I didn't necessarily want to be worthless, but if that was the price of pointlessness, so be it.
The advent of this story's shaggy "Rosebud" dogsled, the "image", wasn't memorable. As previously admitted, it's been a cheap sturdy utilitarian thing for daily use, like my father's CPO mug, not a major purchase or knock-me-down Damascan reveal.
I know for certain that by the fall of 1980 I was keeping it within reach: an easily graspable and transportable geometric reminder of the insufficiency of logical discourse, and geometric hint as to how that insufficiency might be addressed and deployed, and then subjected to reminder. A surveying tool for local maxima.I re-entered college and lightened my course load.
With fewer sins to confess, there was less impetus to poeticize, and I diverted attention to my role as lyricist and lead vocalist in my friends' rock band. (I was lead vocalist because I had the least semblance of talent and the most brazen disregard for public humiliation. It was a very traditional rock band.)
Early in 1981 I wrote a song paying homage to my new lover. In honor of those of her friends and family who quite reasonably doubted my worth as boyfriend material, I also drew imagery from those exemplars of disappointing promise, Orson Welles and John Barth. That referential weave kept the lyrics memorable, and on long walks the happy yowl of its third verse still sometimes sets my pace:
After she hits the end of the funhouse or gets lost in the road,
The mirrors will be dusted and the ditches will be mowed.
Oh, but anything worthwhile must be empty, base, and vain!
Extremities are foolish. Even fools get paid.
1 Reagan's cuts erased those dreams, along with some of my friends.
2 Fellow Delanyites may here be reminded of the double-bind of Bron Helstrom's female destination in Trouble on Triton. And I've never denied the resemblance. Identity is not endorsement.
- "The Place of the Solitaires" by Wallace Stevens |
Eight years later the naysayers were proven right. In our last meeting, my newly-ex cheerfully remarked, "I feel like it's been years since I did my own thinking" (a hot roar flooded my ears) — that's not true! —
— how had I broken so much? —
Predictably enough, I fell apart — substance-abused, fecklessly self-harmed, shucked my duties, composed formal verse, rock-n-rolled all night (well, occasionally past midnight, anyway), re-entered social media (now including a new medium), made some friends, and received far more comfort than I gave.
But this new cycle of breakdown and crawl-from-the-wreckage didn't weaken my faith or smash the icon of my "image." It merely persuaded me to modify some expectations and some habits. (Massless sheets don't provide much warmth but they layer well.)
One of the latter modifications brought us together here today.
Hi. How are you?
- The Astropastorals by Douglas Crase |
. . . 2021-01-10 |
Descended from the plaguey polis, we see stretched before us an expanse of flyblown Hot Takes baked and blanched by the sun, while patchy ungroomed Long Tails twitch and glimmer beneath the rainless orange horizon like a great lake of fuzzy caterpillars. By the barren banks of Babylon, let us sit down.
In this round of Pin the Longer Tail on the Caterpillar, I shall weep of Algernon Charles Swinburne, carrier of the Swinburne verse which infected a broad swathe of English speakers during the late nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth, herd resistance was achieved, and recent studies confirm that a fresh outbreak is unlikely.1
1. What's the deal with Swinburne?
Fifty-five years ago, my eye first passed over Swinburne's peculiar name atop "The Garden of Proserpine," the penultimate of the Little Leather Library's Fifty Best Poems of England (followed by that ne plus ultra in ultra-moderne verse, Francis Thompson's "Arab Love Song": "And thou — what needest with thy tribe's black tents / Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?"). It should've made a fine introduction: characteristic in mood and music yet uncharacteristically easy to parse. But until puberty I had no notion of oral pleasure, and I feared sleep (and immersion in cold water, and cats, and children, and beatings — pretty much all the Swinburnean goods really), and I preferred the cod-Ecclesiastes of Olive Schreiner's Dreams.
In maturity, however, I was impressed by Henry Adams's introduction to the not-yet-famous poet, at a small dinner hosted by Monckton Milnes:
The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action [...] a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humor, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. [...]That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediæval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads — "Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of Burdens" — which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad. [...]
The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.
Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its uttermost flights, was never moyenâgeux. One felt the horror of Longfellow and Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of Holmes, at the wild Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even to offer.
(Fifty-four years later into his own life, Adams still mumbled Swinburne's tenacious word-tunes:
Today, the death of Harry James makes me feel the need of a let-up;2 I must speak to some one.... Not only was he a friend of mine for more than forty years, but he also belonged to the circle of my wife's set long before I knew him or her, and you know how I have clung to all that belonged to my wife. I have been living all day in the seventies. Swallow, sister! sweet sister swallow! indeed and indeed, we really were happy then.- Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron,
1 March 1916)
Then, in late middle age, I was moved by Jerome McGann's career-long efforts — from 1972's Experiment in Criticism through 2004's massive (and discriminatorily priced) selected works — to rehabilitate Swinburne's reputation. I encountered his parodies, which displayed self-awareness and made a pleasing noise, and was encouraged.
And so, upon senescence and retirement, I resolved to figure out what was up with Algernon Charles Swinburne anyway huh?
2. What's the deal with Swinburne?
I started as usual: top of the body of the text, subvocalizing down the lines, letting them dictate the pace. It quickly became manifest that Swinburne, like the Stooges, wanted to be played loud, and so I and my new playmate moved outside, where occasional bursts of muttering or worse would cause less disruption.
Pace presented a stickier problem. Each afternoon I'd set out well, with a measure of swing, and then, within a page or two, go off track. As one who seeks the spiritual renewal of a scenic walk, and ventures into a monotonous landscape in which every second step skids against ice or flat-foots into a sinkhole of slush, and who pauses again and increasingly again to reconfirm the obstinate distance yet to travel before one's targeted landmark, and who finally gives way and retreats, unrefreshed and a bit demoralized, so was I before Major Poems and Selected Prose.
This went on for weeks before I found the problem.
Swinburne's poetic themes are few. Swinburne's poetic vocabulary is slightly archaic, mostly monosyllabic, and very limited. (All soft things are snow-soft; snow has no attributes other than softness.) Swinburne's verbal music — rhythms, alliterations, rhymes, elaborate set patterns, the whole shebang and shboom — is in your face and all over the place; more insistent than Yeats, than Spenser, than Edgar Allen Poe or Vachel Lindsay for chrissakes. And Swinburne plays that music long; once he got started, the guy would not stop; he just keeps blowing, good stanza, vapid stanza, pivot-on-an-ambiguous-pronoun stanza, doesn't matter so long as they're coming.
All of which encourages the clueless reader to accelerate. And that's how the clueless reader stumbles, because Swinburne allowed himself one complexity amidst all this simplicity: sentence structure. While the syntax stayed transparent, I'd drift into the warm fuzz of noise, start to nod off, then be jolted awake and realize I'd completely lost my way.
Other Swinburne readers have struggled in similar fashion, and some would have warned me, given half a chance. I'll cite Morse Peckham's 1970 account at length since it's otherwise inaccessible:
Swinburne is at once an extraordinarily seductive poet and an extraordinarily difficult one. Because of this his charm has been dismissed over and over again, an untold number of times, as simply a matter of “word-music”: in Swinburne, it is alleged, there is nothing but a leaping rhythm that hurls you along and a completely irresponsible use of the various devices of euphony (or more precisely, phonic over-determination), particularly alliteration. He is recognized to be the greatest virtuoso of sound in English poetry, but that prodigious technique, it is asserted, is entirely without foundation or justification, for Swinburne says nothing.It is not always recognized that the major Victorian poets are in fact difficult poets. To be sure, everyone knows that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ work is difficult; so difficult that many think of him still as a “modern poet,” though what of his technique he did not learn from Browning he learned from Swinburne. Arnold is admittedly quite transparent; Tennyson seems to be transparent to the point of simple-mindedness, but in fact is an exceedingly subtle, devious, and baffling writer. It is obvious that much of Browning is very difficult indeed, but the most difficult works of Browning are, for the most part, unread even by Victorian specialists, and are generally, though quite unjustifiably, dismissed. But the advantage of Browning over Tennyson is that he looks difficult, and over Swinburne that it is obvious that he is saying something. Swinburne, by contrast, seems to be almost contentless. Yet he is not. Quite the contrary . The difficulty of Browning, like the difficulty of Hopkins, is a difficulty of syntactic compression and distortion. Swinburne also offers a syntactic difficulty, but one of quite a different order. The effect of monotony comes not primarily from the unflagging splendor of the rhythm or the obviously beautiful sound, but rather from the fact that Swinburne constructs his sentences by building them up of long syntactic sub-units; the first sentence of Atalanta, for example, is sixteen lines long. What he exploits are the possibilities of parallel syntactic structure. The effect is that the unpracticed reader loses control over the syntax. In Hopkins and Browning the extreme use of elision and syntactic distortion confuses the reader. There is not, so to speak, enough syntactic redundance to keep the reader oriented. But in Swinburne there is too much syntactic redundance. In this he resembles to a certain extent Milton; but the difficulty of reading Milton comes from trying to follow a syntactic style of dependent syntactic units, while Swinburne exploits the possibilities of disorienting the reader by presenting him with parallel structures so far apart that it is difficult to remember and grasp their syntactical relationship. The consequence with all four of these poets is that the reader untrained in their syntactic styles loses semantic control. Yet he knows, at least, that Hopkins, Browning, and Milton are saying something; but Swinburne further confuses him by offering a continuum of beautiful sound which seems to have no relationship to anything at all. The result is that for the first three, the unpracticed reader, though baffled, is at least aware that he is not understanding what is before him, but with Swinburne he rapidly comes to the conclusion that there is nothing to understand.
To learn to read Swinburne it is necessary, therefore, to resist with all one’s power both the seductiveness of the rhythm and the seductiveness of the phonic character. One must read him slowly, very slowly. The mind must always remain focused intensively on the task of comprehending the syntax, of grasping how the parallel syntactic sub-units fit into the larger sentence construction; and it must do this as they come along, in the order in which the poem offers them. It may be said that there is at every cultural level an upward limit to both the complexity and the length of the syntactic structure that may be comprehended. Obviously, the higher the cultural level, the greater the complexity and the length of the syntactical structure that can be grasped. But the fact is that today the general simplification and deterioration of the cultural milieu have meant that most people are not exposed even in prose to much opportunity for extending the range of their syntactic grasp. The power to extemporize extremely long and complex syntactic structures with an extensive use of parallelisms is rapidly disappearing, and has been for some time; and at the higher cultural levels the sentence fragment, which presents precisely the opposite difficulty from Swinburne’s, has long been a standard device in both verse and prose. The first task, then, of the reader of Swinburne is to train himself by extending very far indeed the upward limit of his range of syntactic comprehension. The problem is analogous to that presented by Bruckner’s symphonies, which seem too long for people who have trained themselves on shorter symphonies, but are not a moment too long for those who have developed their capacity to maintain their attention span during a symphonic movement that lasts half an hour.
But when the reader who wishes to come to terms with Swinburne has conquered this difficulty—and it takes both time and a great deal of rereading to do so—he is faced with still further problems.
- Morse Peckham, "Introduction" to
Poems and Ballads / Atalanta in Calydon
Although Peckham describes the issue well, I can't recommend his proposed remedy. For myself, so long as I stubbornly maintained my straight stride down the path of the pages with no retracing of steps, reading "very slowly" proved ineffective: I became just as lost but even more exasperated.
Instead, at the start of each new syntactic unit, I began glancing ahead, silently, at its end, to get some notion of the terrain before blundering into it.
Success!
Reward?
3. What was Swinburne's deal?
My life has been eventless and monotonous; like other boys of my class, I was five years at school at Eton, four years at college at Oxford; I never cared for any pursuit, sport, or study, as a youngster, except poetry, riding and swimming; and though as a boy my verses were bad enough, I believe I may say I was far from bad at the two latter. Also being bred by the sea I was a good cragsman,3 and am vain to this day of having scaled a well-known cliff on the South coast, ever before and ever since reputed to be inaccessible. Perhaps I may be forgiven for referring to such puerilities, having read (in cuttings from more than one American journal) bitterly contemptuous remarks on my physical debility and puny proportions.- Swinburne to E. C. Stedman, February 20, 1875
Swinburne understated the case. He didn't just swim: he swam outrageously, fearlessly, alarmingly into the coldest, deepest, most treacherous waters he could find. He didn't just ride: he galloped like a Dionysian centaur and had the broken bones to prove it.
And, because he was writing to an unknown American instead of an old crony, he also undercounted: he was notoriously just as "far from bad" at being whipped and getting drunk.
As Swinburne himself suggests, these high-risk behaviors are all ways by which a small tremulous slightly-built countertenor might assert his masculinity. But more to the point, I think, they're also all recognizable ways to (in present-day jargon) self-medicate a painfully manic case of ADHD by forcing focus upon the here and now.
As I expressed it at thirty years old, I really did want to get away from fiction and into something real. I'd spent ten years writing fantasy and I wanted to be in some kind of situation whereby if you made a mistake, what would happen to you would be real. That was the way I expressed it to myself: that if you fall off a rock climb above a certain height, something very real will happen to you. [...] The greatest thing about rock climbing is that if you suffer anxiety it gives you a reason. You know, your day really fires up when you're eighty feet above the ground and things are going wrong and you suddenly think, Wow, I've got a reason to be worried for today. It's a fantastic relief to have a reason to feel anxiety.- M. John Harrison in conversation with Mariana Enriquez
The applicable jargon of Swinburne's own time comes to us through an at-fourth-hand diagnosis of his uncontrollable twitching, trembling, and jerking:
It made me unhappy to see what trouble he had in managing his knife and fork. Watts-Dunton told me on another occasion that this infirmity of the hands had been lifelong — had begun before Eton days. The Swinburne family had been alarmed by it and had consulted a specialist, who said that it resulted from ‘an excess of electric vitality,’ and that any attempt to stop it would be harmful. So they had let it be.- And Even Now by Max Beerbohm
While essential tremor is no longer explained by "electric vitality," it remains untreatable, and marks the spazz as a social oddity from childhood on. Any initial awkwardness would have been intensified by Swinburne's other difficult-to-diagnose ailment, early-onset deafness. And that eventually overwhelming self-consciousness seems to have been what triggered Swinburne's near-suicidal binges (as well as his marathon monologues): when cozily secured with intimates or left to his own devices, Swinburne stayed sober; moved into urban sociality, he quickly got blotto.
No matter how we choose to clump these personal traits, their aggregate is familiar enough. Born into similar privilege a hundred years later, Swinburne would've raced cars or tested planes or OD'd. He needed to drown the unspeakable noise in his head, needed to drown the unparsable noise from outside it, even at the risk of drowning himself. What distinguishes Swinburne from fellow jitterbugs, and from the canonical poets who scorned him in the twentieth century, was his reliance on incarnate versifying — whether recited or improvised — as the most sustainable of his high-risk behaviors.
Outside the Modernist canon, I find some context even for that. Masters of freestyle will emit occasional sonorous ambiguities or nonsense; maximalists of flow never know when to take the horn out of their mouth. As Swinburne swam beyond his depth, climbed above his height, drank himself past consciousness, and was flogged within a quarter-inch of his life, so he needed to write too much if he was to write at all.
4. What wasn't?
Outside books I've hardly heard anything about Swinburne, and when I did it was dubious.
Anyone expecting a hero of gay pride will be disappointed, or awfully selective in their reading. Swinburne's only definitely established sexuality consisted of masochism, and although as a practical matter it didn't matter much who swished the birch, a preference for male beauty doesn't seem to have been one of the marks left by Eton: his published fantasies put women in charge, his privately expressed polite demurrals and homophobic slurs sound genuine enough, and his "actual admiration of Lesbianism" is hardly counterevidence. Poetically he positioned himself with Baudelaire, Gautier, Hugo, and the Rossettis rather than Symons, Whitman, Pater, or Wilde.
Nor, so far as accessible evidence takes me, did Swinburne quite follow the reactionary path laid down by Southey and Wordsworth. It's true that his first-written (but second-published) book caused a scandal and his third called for bloody revolutions, whereas later collections were far more soothing to his family and the rest of the British establishment. But his anti-colonialism had never extended to British colonies; he always idealized English military action, particularly at its most disastrous; he was always drawn to babies and children; he always idolized Shakespeare. The shift in his publications didn't reflect changes in his beliefs or preferred themes so much as which of those themes found expression at any one time.
Even those switches of filter or booster weren't the result of independent evolution. Despite his vehemence and bellicosity, Swinburne was eminently pliable.4 You could pick him up, plop him down in a different direction or location, and he'd accept it as readily as a good zombie or a good dog. When he was so drunk as to risk arrest, a cab would deposit him at Ford Madox Brown's, the servants would toss him into a bathtub and then into bed, and he'd receive all as his due. When Theodore Watts-Dunton transplanted him to the Pines for the rest of his life, he took the change for granted. Oh, we're sharing a house now? It's very nice here. Water, not whisky? Lovely. You won't mind if I scrape some toast in for flavor?
Thus, during the period in which Baudelaire and the Pre-Raphaelites were his peers, Swinburne scandalized; when Swinburne met Giuseppe Mazzini, he revolutionized; and at the Pines Watts-Dunton encouraged sedate respectability.
Watts-Dunton only stifled so much, though. Swinburne's sex-positive Tristram of Lyonesse may have represented a more fundamental assault on Victorian mores than any vampiric femme fatale, and, around the time his name was proposed for a post-Tennyson laureateship, he publicly called for the assassination of the Queen's cousin:
God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay:
Smite, and send him howling down his father's way!
Fall, O fire of heaven, and smite as fire from hell
Halls wherein men's torturers, crowned and cowering, dwell!- "Russia: An Ode"
And from first volume to last, Swinburne attacked the church — any church.
He fell into facile writing, and he accepted a facile compromise for life; but no facile solution for his universe. His unbelief did not desert him; no, not even in Putney.- "Swinburne versus his Biographers" by Ezra Pound
5. What's the big deal?
In 1918 Pound very judiciously wrote that "No one else has made such music in English, I mean has made his kind of music [...] At any rate we can, whatever our verbal fastidiousness, be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-mâché era, in a time swarming with Longfellows, Mabies, Gosses, Harrisons." However, many things can be unique without seeming worth the cost of extraction, and we're no longer threatened by Longfellow and Gosse, much less by whoever "Mabie" and that not-M.-John "Harrison" were.
Peckham promises we can learn "why for sixty years or so people of intelligence, learning, and exquisite taste thought Swinburne a great poet, and why a few people think so today," and is likely to meet similar objections.
Mark Scroggins proposes "the intensity with which Swinburne evokes erotic desire and the conjunction of pleasure and pain," and his poetry's "lush, hypnotic music, its ever-shifting deployment of a fairly restricted vocabulary, leading us through a series of emotional states, laying out in shimmering overlays a series of symbols that can induce in us a new relationship to the 'real' world of objects." (Or, as Yeats wrote and McGann later quoted, "hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols.")
I have no inclination to argue with any of that, but neither do I feel the same responses. I stubbornly remain as untransfigured by his symbols as by Blake's or Yeats's, and although young Swinburne's scandalous ditties are catchy and funny, their wicked ladies and sweet sweet dead-leper lovin' strike me as received fantasies; I'm not even sure he'd fully grasped the mechanics of the thing. (Do humans really need their lips bitten through to reach orgasm? Isn't that otters or something?) He'd worked the details out by Tristram, but it's harder to quote Tristram.
In 2004 Jerome McGann found a way to reformulate some of Swinburne's self-evident flaws as virtues:
a type of phenomenal awareness that is perhaps unique in English literature [...] a drama of poetic subjectivity diffusing into the language as such [...] as in life, its meanings spread and mutate and transform under our own pursuit. To read him is to be reminded that a full awareness of even the simplest human experience is unachievable. [...] The dissolution is scarcely to be observed, however, lest one imagine that it could be understood by being seen. It is understood, rather, by being undergone. To read these poems is necessarily to be swept away by tactile and auditional immediacies
Back in 1972, dropping into his own voice for the epilogue to his academic drama, McGann sounded less detached:
Swinburne has not merely given his thought and attention to all disastrous things, he has given them his heart. His world, moving though its ruinations, is a disaster redeemed only, but always, by an equally disastrous love. For Swinburne, the fidelity of such a love is witnessed most eloquently in art, where the presence of beauty is man’s best witness of the deep care in which he holds everything that is lost to him and to all men. [...] Such passages haunt one not merely for their exquisite beauty, but for the fact that they are about being haunted. At the center of both is a heart which forgets nothing, no matter how swiftly things pass or how long they are gone; and which forgets nothing not because he cannot but because he would not.
Share his sentiment or not, that added risk, the risk of sounding heartfelt, seems key. No one who thinks poetry should be written like Strunk-and-Whited-out prose, without repetition or ambiguity or grammatical irregularities — no one like Ford Madox Ford, who straightforwardly confessed to disliking all English verse written before Pound and Eliot — will ever feel, or have, a need to wrest pleasure out of this stuff, and "bully for them."
More generally he'll never be for the cool, laid back, or dignified. I heard a good writer call him a "clown car." That's fair. Swinburne was a weirdo, and although his poems stopped being scandals they're still embarrassments. After everything changed in 1910, he would never be taken up communally, was always only going to be an eccentric taste. If I (not "we") want to describe the attraction, I have to get personal.
Writing/speaking as a particularity, then, I've come to appreciate the corporeal experience of the reading itself, and two of Swinburne's most persistent and distinctive themes: his championship of mere mortality, and his passion for the sea. As John D. Rosenberg says, those two themes meld. Swinburne's love for the sea was carnal, spiritual, all-consuming; his devotion demanded full-body contact. Other poets pay tribute from shore or shipboard; none writes so approvingly of ocean-eroded cemeteries.
Although I won't follow Swinburne into literal deep waters, I can enter (not necessarily comfortably) his resentment of theistic abstraction, his inability to represent material particulars, and his reliance on the materiality of voice to gesture at their ecstatic (or agonizing, or embarrassing, or irritatingly repetitious) effects. Writing/speaking from a myopic body which meets the world nose first and mouth open, I warmly and wetly second Rosenberg's introductory remarks:
Swinburne is a poet not of natural objects but of natural energies — of winds and surging waters. His scale is macrocosmic, his focus [...] less upon things seen than forces felt. At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch.
What else seems germane? I don't play video games, and if I did, they'd incapacitate me quicker than rock climbing. I'm retired and can spare the time. I'm oral/aural and can feel the noize. I'm a socially awkward humanist and head-in-the-clouds materialist who can use a hymnal. As I pace within our vermin-blasted garden, mouthing off the verses, their current pulls me offshore; the weave of breath and stroke begins to snarl and splash; the rhythm gallops apace and faster, a bit too fast; I jerk at the reins; I even break a mild sweat. For a second or so I inhabit Swinburne's experience of verse, an immersive adventure sport in words.
Or maybe it's the plague; I haven't been tested in a while.
Next: J. Gordon Faylor!
1. Davis, "Scanners vs. Swinburne", Bellona Times Science Supplement, 13 October 2020. Subjects were selected based on self-attested tolerance for poetry. A concentrated dose of Swinburne was filtered of generically aversive content (paeans to infants and British imperialism; doggerel about flogging; particularly redundant stretches) and distributed. Only two subjects expressed willingness to consume the sample. Both reported initial mild discomfort followed by swift and complete elimination.
2. I pray that Henry James's spirit had attained sufficient detachment to enjoy Adams's tribute:
Mr. James when he had occasion to mention Mr. Swinburne would do so with positive sparks of indignation welling from his dark and luminous eyes, his face rigid with indignation.... I do not know what the poet of the Pines can have done to him; Mr. James would be almost speechless with indignation. I never heard him otherwise be immoderate. And with real fury he would imitate Swinburne’s jerky movements, jumping up and down on his chair, his hands extended downwards at his sides, like a soldier at attention, hitching himself sideways and back again on the chair seat and squeaking incomprehensibly in an injurious falsetto....No! I never knew what so excited the Old Man, though I have often reflected on the subject. [...] I cannot imagine that Mr. James ever cherished a secret passion for Adah Menken!
I have come to the conclusion that it was the natural antipathy that the indoor man of tea-parties must feel for the outrageous athlete, clean-boned, for ever on the seashore or longing to be there. Mr. James indeed exploded with an almost apoplectic fury when I once raised my voice and said that Mr. Swinburne was one of the strongest — the most amazingly strong — swimmers of his day. I remember recounting, to rub it in, my anxiety on the shores of the Isle of Wight when Mr. Swinburne had disappeared in the horizon on a rough day, amongst the destroyers and battleships and liners and tramps... disappeared and then reappeared hours after, walking with his light, swinging step over the sand dunes a mile behind my back.... Yes, he could swim... and be made a wonder of....
- Portraits from Life by Ford Madox Ford
3. "Cragsman" is clearly the proper word and should have become standard English usage, even if it's a bit too spot-on for M. John Harrison's magnificently abraded Climbers.
4 Swinburne's many tributes to prepubescents suggest a sense of fellowship with their own lability, their look of being perpetually overwhelmed, and perhaps their inability to maintain a civilized conversation.
FWIW, I wouldn't have self-reported my clinical outcome as "complete elimination"; Algy and I disagree on a lot, but anyone who defies the odds like that writing Greek tragedy in English can come to my party if he wants to. Thanks for giving me the chance to temper my earlier assessment of "another goddamn Pre-Raphaelite." -pk
Way to bum my low, dude. But I'm glad you got something out of it. After all, a lot of eminences found Keats embarrassing, too. Maybe Swinburne, even, since he mostly wrote about Blake and Shelley. An apparent (from this angle) oddity that I didn't look into much was Swinburne's championship of Walter Savage Landor, Matthew "NO SHAKESPEARE! NO KEATS!" Arnold, and young Thomas Hardy, none of whom seem (from this angle) like natural pairings.
If I live long enough (a modifier which might call for Blakean amendment) I do intend to launch a similar assault on Christina Rossetti. Everyone who can stand to read her (including Swinburne) claims her music is lovely.
Write a line? Ritalin!
A lady came in for some stimulant.
I asked her what kind she'd adore.
"Adderall, please," so I added 'er all.
Now I don't count there anymore.
Heh, actually I love Christina Rossetti! It's just the dudes (esp. painter dudes) in that circle. I mean, singsong.html#ifam -pk/metameat
As I suspected, Christina Rossetti does a better job with children, just as Kipling's a better jingoist and Shelley and Bryon better revolutionaries. On English nineteenth-century secular masochism, though, Swinburne's hard to beat.
Ford was crazy about Christina Rossetti, even if he disliked all other English verse from before his time. (But where did he say that?)
He labors to give that impression in the Swinburne chapter of Portraits from Life, which splits between youthful reminiscences of the man and bluff dismissals of the poetry, but I gather that Ford's discursive prose — like Swinburne's, and Pound's and Eliot's, and, hmm, an awful lot of writers' — could cheerfully exaggerate for effect. Earlier in the volume, he proposes a list of Desert Island Books in which Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson are the only poets.
Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2024 Ray Davis.