15 minute sprint

Hi all! I've tried, off and on over the last few months, to do a better job writing a little bit every day, so I can gain the practice of turning vague ideas into sentences and so my fingers will learn how to hit the letters, even when I'm not fully formed in what I have to say. I've been really bad, in writing my papers, about staring at the screen or wandering off because I couldn't write the perfect sentence, finally putting something down after an extended period of time, and then having eventually to go back and erase my hard-won compromise once I figured out what the paper was actually about.

Doing this is a sort of finger exercise for learning how to write unselfconsciously.

Today I want to think a little bit about Surrey and Chaucer. In my post for Jeff's class, I argued (1) that Surrey often explicitly constructs a third-party observer in his poems that occupies the stance of both the poet and the reader, using phrases like "I se" and "I know" to introduce his observations, (2) that Surrey seems to embed his poems in a narrative framework more frequently than Wyatt does, (3) that Surrey is prone to connecting clauses with indications of their place in sequence and causal chain, like "but"/"for," "when"/"then," "from"/"to," etc, and (4) that Surrey is also prone to using unsubordinated lists, which I interpret as perceptions of the sort of observer/narrator we see in (1).

All this amounts to a different relation to the persona than we see in Wyatt. In my early thought about this, I wanted to read Wyatt as rhetorical and Surrey as fundamentally narrative, but as I went back through the poems, I found that's not quite true. Surrey frequently has poems that issue forth as a presumed record of speech in an implied situation just like Wyatt's. The difference, it seems to me now, is that where Wyatt's persona is one of an artificial remove--undoubtedly in itself strategic--Surrey includes that posture as part of the artifice. Surrey, to some extent, until we get to the late poems, is more at home with the artifice of court, while Wyatt gains much of his force from arguing for a misfit. Some of this, I'm sure, is a difference of rank: Surrey's status as an earl means both that he's more familiar with the world of the court and that he's more free to operate within it.

Some of this, too, is more related to a larger general problem with Surrey. His poetry is very much about conventions and artifice, but not as things to be resisted but as things to be lived through. This makes it difficult for me, brought up on New Historicism, to read politically, because I cannot look for fissures; I'm stuck looking for complicity.

I just realized that I haven't talked much about Chaucer. Chaucer is clearly important for Surrey--particularly The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Cresseid, and The Knight's Tale. I don't really have a good sense of why, besides perhaps his interest in the moods of epic. Surrey isn't really a lyric poet, exactly, for this reason. Perhaps: where the later Elizabethans are interested in the fictitiousness of epic and romance--its availability as a site for imaginative resolution of the problems of court-- Surrey is interested at times in epic/Chaucerian ability to situate the lyric speaker in a political world that is nevertheless only background for his actions. This whole paragraph is a muddle--I don't really know how to get at what I'm trying to say. Heck. I don't know what I'm trying to say. But that's what makes this a useful exercise...

Writing, again

Today Susan Stuart told all the first-years in the class. "You've probably noticed that your writing has gotten weird." A number of us--me, at least--starting nodding. And she said, "That's because you're learning."

Surely there's a more sinister explanation

A Conundrum

Nobody knows
What the blobfish does with its comical nose.

(Hat tip to Light Reading.)

Renaissance Advice

I'm working my way towards an interesting reading of Cymbeline, finally, I think.

I need to think more about what it means to give advice in the Renaissance. In the drama, advising king is always troped as dangerous but it isn't, really. The irony of Polonius's advice is pretty much par for the course--it's funny that he of all people insists on "giv[ing] thy thoughts no tongue."

Incidentally, don't rely on the version below--I copied it from a website that had called it "Plotinus's Advice In Hamlet." Now that I'd like to read.

There ... my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
T'hose friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg’d comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

male bodies

Horace, at To Delight and Instruct:

2) My point here is to note the contradiction between the use of embodied (and masculinist) metaphors while actual bodies are being hidden, which sometimes seems a rhetorical strategy to sublimate masculinist discourse while maintaining its hegemony. So I think that reinforcing this "about the mind and not about the body" divide is actually disguising some real issues in the discourse of gender in academia.

He's writing in response to a critic of this post on academic masculinity. It's a question that frustrates me to no end. And one that I've yet to find a productive way of thinking about: I 'm much better at considering myself a feminist than I am at considering my own male privilege and its limitations.

Right now, though, I'm just sitting here thinking about that last bit: "a rhetorical strategy to sublimate masculinist discourse while maintaining its hegemony." How do embodied metaphors affect the person thinking with them? Does it matter how dead the metaphor is?

Oh William Empson

John Gross, on William Empson. (Via Light Reading)

Empson once began a seminar on Henry James by taking off his shoes and socks, throwing the socks on the fire, producing a new pair, putting them on, and reassuring the class, "James would have approved."

Teaforks sent me to Naomi Wolf's old article "The Porn Myth."

It's a good piece. I'm always interested in contemporary conceptual pieces that relate social changes to intellectual changes--it's so much a part of my work to try to imagine how all of this stuff relates--and it's a good piece.

The part that gets me, though, is this.

Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness.

I'm not sure that's the porn, so much as being a person.

Well, It's About Time

I was just poking around here, for old times sake, when I realized I misspelled /Volpone/ in my Last Blog Post Ever.

Don't go check, I fixed it of course. So, I had to sign in to fix it, and now I'm here.

Two months into graduate school, and so far, no breakdowns or breakthroughs. I'm sorta racing against both.

In the meantime, I just need to keep writing.

1. I did nothing remotely patriotic for the 4th, besides posting on HvA about the Haitian immigrants held in camps in Guantanamo Bay during the early 1990's. Somehow, I feel like I can ethically be patriotic, despite this country's history and current government, if I translocate my pride and respect to progressive institutions and a constructed dissident and activist "tradition."

Fair enough, I guess. But I can tell there are some emotions beneath there that I don't particularly want to interrogate. (Then again, at one point I was convinced that it was my moral duty to sign up to go to Iraq. I'm easily confused.)

2. Since, I guess, it's self-analysis and deconstruction day, I may as well mention that I really want to go see this art exhibition, of inside-out teddy bears (via BoingBoing, I think). They're fascinating, if slightly disturbing.

From the press release:

In this body of work Rogowski presents a delicate and sensational series of teddy bear portraits. The bears appear different than ordinary stuffed animals. They have been turned inside out, re-stuffed and sewn back together, transforming them, creating entirely new creatures. The result of this enabled metamorphosis is a new kind of bear, sometimes grotesque or pathetic but often rather endearing. These new emblems no longer sustain the perfect image of childhood, but break apart this image into a complex picture of youth and development.

3. Blogging may not be making me a better writer, but I am beginning to recognize more and more of my little tics. Like "more and more," for instance.

Another new development: I really like Ben Jonson. I want to write about Volpone, now.