Criticism as pure provocation

T.T. Heine, Loie Fuller [src]

Charles Rosen, appreciating Kermode in the NYRB, paraphrases him thus:

Properly practiced, in short, interpretation protects the works of the past from becoming disposable junk by astonishing the readers, making them take a second look. It keeps the past alive.

(Isn't it faintly Micawberian to paraphrase a quoted passage with "in short"?) I can't tell if Rosen is reading Kermode correctly but I like the idea of throwing absurd interpretations at people as a way of getting them to pay attention to the text, and -- in the process, maybe, of trying to respond to the critic's trolling -- to see what they had previously skimmed over. (But cf. Kant being "woken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume and -- in Russell's version -- inventing a soporific in the Critique so he could sleep again.) I was thinking about the "astonishment" business recently re the question of how people get interested in poetry; but perhaps a more reliable course of action is to have readers become obsessed, perhaps for bad reasons at first, with some particular writer or other, and hope that sheer familiarity brings solicitude with it.

The first piece of literary criticism I ever read, innumerably many years ago, was Kermode's long introduction to the Arden Tempest; I don't remember what was in it, but it left me very interested in Shakespeare. (I loved the lists of textual variants.) Other than that I know Kermode mostly through his essays and the delightful war reminiscences in "My Mad Captains." I've read his book on Shakespeare's Language  -- it is very good on Richard II and King John but boring on the later work; Kermode spends too much time expressing his astonishment to be much use. I also read the Yeats book (Romantic Image) at some point, but might as well not have; I don't remember a thing except the frontispiece (see above) and a remark about Auden emphasizing the right to use poetry discursively. For some reason I'm doing the Romantics right now, and I mean to go back to it once I'm done rereading Moby Dick.

Incidentally this Kermode sentence (from a quote near the end of the piece) feels powerfully like a Pope passage transprosed:

It is so long since most writers had the necessary education, or could afford the pleasures and find the women, that if they were made available we should hardly know what to do with them.

(It is mostly the balanced "A, or (B or C)" construction, and "afford the pleasures, and the women find" that does it.)

A plug, a blague, and a bleg

Colin Burrow's new LRB piece on Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets -- unfortunately gated -- is very good; it says many clever things and a lot of it is written in an enjoyable pastiche of Johnson's style. I particularly liked Burrow's remarks on Johnson's "not unpriggish" moral psychology [attn. ADL]:

Johnson believed that the intellect without sociable interchange or occasional enforced periods of reflection will rust into melancholy. Experience has a general tendency to become a chaotic and unregulated sequence of ideas, and ideas received in the past tend to fade unless regularly refreshed. Each person is subject to these general laws of the mind, and each person also has a disposition to decline into his particular set of vices. Each of us, however, has a sluggish but voluntary power to arouse ourselves from both our collective and our individual weakness.

And the application to Pope and Swift:

Pope was ‘fretful, and easily displeased, and allowed himself to be capriciously resentful’. That phrase ‘allowed himself’ is absolute Johnson: Pope’s failure to correct his own inclination to be fretful turns his natural disposition into a moral failing. In a similar way Swift, towards whom Johnson is generally hostile, condemned himself to eventual madness by his refusal to participate in society: ‘His asperity continually increasing, condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.’ The sentence is so damning because it makes no reference to Swift’s own agency. He failed to prevent himself from becoming an isolated curmudgeon because he allowed his passions to drive his behaviour into a loop of decline, and that way madness lay: ‘His ideas, therefore, being neither renovated by discourse, nor increased by reading, wore gradually away, and left his mind vacant to the vexations of the hour, till at last his anger was heightened into madness.’ 

On Johnson's criticisms of the metaphysical poets, Burrow has this to say:

He believed that a heterogeneity of elements – the method of metaphysical poetry according to Johnson – was intrinsically prone to cause corruption and impermanence in poems as it was thought to do in physical bodies. Hence modes which bring together contrasting registers – notably burlesque and mock epic – are not of permanent value: ‘Burlesque consists in a disproportion between the style and the sentiments … It, therefore, like all bodies compounded of heterogeneous parts, contains in it a principle of corruption.’ 

I am not so sure about this. After all, Johnson explicitly praises heterogeneity of a kind in the Preface to Shakespeare:

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. [...] let it be considered likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.

A play isn't a poem but this cannot be the relevant distinction. I think the principle of corruption is a red herring; Johnson's objection to the metaphysical poets is that their metaphors do not approach "the appearance of life" and are frigidly artificial, the metaphor is one of desiccation rather than rot. And Johnson's praise of the mock-epic Rape of the Lock is, as far as I remember, unreserved. As Johnson remarks about the Metaphysicals, "if their conceits were far-fetched, they are often worth the carriage"; it is better to understand his objections to Cowley and Donne were as being of a piece with his objections to "academic" poetry more generally, for being (in Burrow's phrase) "mean, donnish and unnatural."

---

While looking up the Rape in the life of Pope I came upon this delightful paragraph that I had unaccountably never noticed before:

[340] The purpose of the Poet is, as he tells us, to laugh at "the little unguarded follies of the female sex." It is therefore without justice that Dennis charges The Rape of the Lock with the want of a moral, and for that reason sets it below The Lutrin, which exposes the pride and discord of the clergy. Perhaps neither Pope nor Boileau has made the world much better than he found it; but if they had both succeeded, it were easy to tell who would have deserved most from publick gratitude. The freaks, and humours, and spleen, and vanity of women, as they embroil families in discord and fill houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries. It has been well observed that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

And I think that one aspect of Johnson's lives that Burrow doesn't stress enough is that they are full of good technical criticism. The now-well-known observation that Pope's poems have too many adjacent couplets with similar rhymes, for instance, or this remark about Dryden's use of rhyme:

The rhymes of Dryden are commonly just, and he valued himself for his readiness in finding them; but he is sometimes open to objection.
It is the common practice of our poets to end the second line with a weak or grave syllable:

Together o'er the Alps methinks we fly,
  Fill'd with ideas of fair Italy.

Dryden sometimes puts the weak rhyme in the first:

Laugh all the powers that favour tyranny,
  And all the standing army of the sky.

It is absolutely true that there is a difference between the two patterns, but I have never seen anybody else point this out.

---

I'd like to conclude this overlong post with a bleg. My friend Calista is looking for passages in novels, poems, etc. that involve grease-smeared or food-encrusted books. The purpose, as I understand it, is to endow her frequent book-besmirchings with literary associations. I can barely think of anything; examples would be welcome.

"Anticipatory or reflective aberrations"

Ray Davis on the fugue as literary metaphor:

Written language, like a violin but more so, is not a polyphonic instrument, and therefore it can only imply complex harmonies and simultaneous lines through anticipatory or reflective aberrations which the mind weaves across paragraphs and pages, as when weaving the implied melodies of Bach's works for solo strings. The term "fugue" appeals by emphasizing the mental effort without which intended polyphony remains apparent disorder. 

It's a nice idea and I am drawn to the word "aberrations" in this context, because it reminds me of Frost holding a pane of ice against "the world of hoary grass." But I wonder if it isn't an overly modernist term for what's meant here. One thinks of Keats's odes as having complex harmonies but it's not clear that "aberrations" are involved; Keats is definitely not doing the police in different voices. Maybe the premise is fundamentally wrong. The relationship between written language and time is not straightforward; verse moves differently depending on whether you read it silently or aloud; there are poems, like the Nightingale ode, that have a propulsive force to them, and others, like the Grecian Urn and Melancholy odes, for which "motion" is not the right word at all. Few of the modernists in English were at all painterly -- there's David Jones, and one should read Wyndham Lewis but hasn't -- but I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to come up with earlier examples in which the "movement" is slow enough that there are a lot of parts, say the entire content of a Spenserian stanza in the Faerie Queene, moving together, in which case polyphony is a relatively natural effect.

One should distinguish between descriptive passages, like the temple of Mars in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, in which the description is "temporal" and you're hurried from one sight to another as at the Met, and those like Keats's Autumn ode, where it seems more natural to keep the whole picture in your mind at once.

Melancholy noise; swiving; middlebrows

Jenny Diski writes about Google n-grams:

Melancholy is virtually non-existent before 1570, but begins to rise and then falls until it drops off completely around 1625, about the time of the death of Dowland. It builds again to a great surge in 1650 (when, it says in Wikipedia, ‘the Age of Discovery ends’: reason enough), falls and then picks up, growing nicely and rising with the Romantics in 1800, and then declines gently before starting to increase again after 2000. Sting recorded a very terrible version of Dowland’s songs in 2006. [Ed. !!]  Fuck is quite absent from books until about 1590 when it jolts up the chart for about eight years and then plummets, before returning in the 1630s...

To see what's really going on one should run the search without smoothing:

So it's mostly just a signal-to-noise artifact that's due to small corpora. (Here's the post-1750 part expanded.) It is not credible that "fuck" was absent until the 1590s; late medievals and especially Scots -- Dunbar, Lyndsay, etc. -- were fond of the word, which for some reason was preferred in the north to "swive."

By the way, the gem-studded OED entry for "fuck" has this beautiful inadvertent alexandrine by Florio, defining "fottere" in World of Words:

to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.

(Note to self/others: use in parody of Tennyson's "Ulysses.")

Another n-gram I wanted to post, although I don't have the time to discuss it in detail, is the "brow" words:

As you can see they're all recent, not just middlebrow. All of them are coeval -- middlebrow perhaps exactly contemporary -- with T.S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" thesis. I suspect that the dissociation of brows had something to do with this. In particular there's a Church of Latter-Day Middlebrows that the modernists came up with, beginning with Dryden (I remember J.D. McClatchy actually calling Dryden a middlebrow) and running through Addison, Richardson, Johnson (but not Pope or Swift, who were playful and mad respectively), and Walter Scott, to the high Victorian period when the distinction between middlebrows and highbrows becomes imperceptible. This lines up nicely with Eliot's history of English poetry, in which all poetry after Milton and Dryden (until Eliot, of course) was either ethereal and goofy or businesslike and drab.

Update Jenny Davidson asks in comments about the "standard" history of highbrow, which is presumably a phrenology thing although I can't locate any reliable early sources of an explicitly phrenological character. Assuming that this is so, it's interesting that even highbrow dates from the later days of phrenology. Perhaps this is because the terms had no real, non-jocular application before the era of Bloomsbury and Eliot.

Deep Thoughts from W.H. Auden

Four quotes from W.H. Auden:

The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine.

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to their graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

Two Men One Stovepipe Hat

Despite the obvious theological differences I often find myself in sympathy with Marilynne Robinson, who's just been interviewed for the Paris Review series. As usual there are a couple of sharp insights:

The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don’t behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people. The Bible reiterates this endlessly.

Which is the best defense of the O.T. I've heard against the charge that it's deficient in human feeling.

We archaize Abraham Lincoln—he’s somehow premodern—at the same time that we use Marx to epitomize modernity. Yet the two of them were engaged in the same conversation. The slave economy and the industrial economy were interlocked. Marx is considered modern because he describes an ongoing phenomenon, industrialism, which once again is starting to resemble slavery—child labor and so on. You take a course as a sophomore in college called Modern Western Civilization and you get Marx and Nietzsche, but you don’t get Lincoln. The fact that they were all wearing frock coats and stovepipe hats doesn’t register.

Then there's her annoying take on Dawkins:

The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don’t talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.

The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

There's an important truth somewhere in the neighborhood of this remark; it really is the case, for instance, that the New Social Sciences are uninterested in predicting and discovering interesting new phenomena, and this makes them intellectually drab. But Dawkins et al would reply that they'd be writing about cutting-edge research except that someone has to push back against the idiots in Kansas, and this involves writing about old, well-understood science. And there's something tiresome about the literary world's what-the-bleepish fondness for quantum mechanics.

Heaney's Oysters

Jenna Krajeski at the NY'er Book Bench has compiled a list of poems about food, with some assistance from Major Poets. There's some good stuff there but to my mind this poem is better than anything on their list.

Oysters
Seamus Heaney

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean --
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Bad Sex (4)

Bookslut notes that the new Penguin classics edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover has a striking cover picture:

Bad Sex, a Three-Volume Post

1. The British mag Literary Review does a "Bad Sex" award, "with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels." Some of the shortlisted passages are amusing, though there isn't much that compares to the 2005 winner:

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

2. Rod Liddle rambles about the former floridity and recent flaccidity of John Updike in the Times [of London].

3. [Update. See my review.] I've been reading Anne Enright's new collection of stories, Yesterday's Weather, which is very good, incomparably better than her novel, The Gathering. (Review to follow when I finish the book.) It is relevant to this post because of her story "The Bad Sex Weekend," which has this characteristic and beautifully poised sentence:

The sex, when it happened, an aimless battering around the nub of him, which was sadly distant and, she supposed, numb with drink.

Empson on Educating the Proles

"Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem … And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society would prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."
-- William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral

("The poem" is Gray's Elegy.)

Gladwell is a Blinking Idiot

It's difficult to appreciate how half-baked and awful Malcolm Gladwell is until he writes about something that's up your alley. (I think Dice made this point once.) His new piece on artistic genius is one of the most irritating things I've read in a long time. There are two immensely misleading statements in the piece -- 1. contrary to widespread belief, late bloomers exist in literature; 2. literary (and generally artistic) prodigies are a different kind of writer from late bloomers, being more intuitive, quicker, and less painstaking. He says:

“Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

I don't know who these idiots are, or where they came from. (I think Howard Gardner said similarly dumb shit in Gladwell's previous article about scientific creativity.) But their claims are utterly risible and anyone who knows anything about lyric poetry, or literature, knows this. This point is important because he uses the counterintuitiveness of his result to launch the (very silly) claim that he and his favorite researchers have discovered a new type of late-flowering artistic genius.

In fact, very few poets produce their best work at first, and by far the most common type in English poetry is the "prodigy" that turns into a "late bloomer." Yeats was a talented minor poet who randomly turned at 50 into a very major poet. A lot of Eliot's best stuff is in Four Quartets, which he wrote when he was over 50. There are a couple of cases of "late blooming," like Stevens, but these are mostly cases of people who took a little longer to find their voice -- or, more plausibly, started later. But all major poets take a few years to find their voice -- even freaks like William Blake and prodigies like Auden, whose juvenilia (200 pp. written age 15-19) Gladwell would have done well to read. The normal course is for poets to start off good, then get better, then get senile and die. There isn't anything remotely mysterious about this.

I haven't got the energy to debunk the rest of the piece but I wish someone would. In particular, I hate how the examples are cherrypicked. Here's a contrast to set against his two writers: Shakespeare was a late bloomer who wrote all of his greatest plays after 35 -- most after 40 -- while Ben Jonson was a prodigy who wrote his last great play (with one possible exception) when he was 35. As to the amounts of research they put into their efforts, and as to their relative sloppiness, I refer you to the historical record.

In which I randomly win a book

Mitch Sisskind offered a prize for an explication of this poem:

Earth took of earth
Earth with woe.
Earth other earth
To the earth drew.
Earth laid earth
In earthen trough.
Then had earth of earth
Earth enough.

I offered two, and (astonishingly) won a book. Below, my second take on the poem:

Actually, here's an alternative take. The first four lines are, as before, about procreation. However, the "earthen trough" is a vagina rather than an urn; 5-6 describe coitus; what the poem is saying is that after their childbearing years, the couple had prodigious amounts of sex (hence "earth enough").

To which Deborah Overmeyer aptly responded:

"Come to my dry den and we'll moisten the cave of nakedness for thee, O sultan."-- Mac Flecknoe

"The Leathery Extremist Phyllis Schlafly"

James Wood devotes some fine writing to the analysis of Palinism. The transcripts really are horrifyingly weird, btw, even for the otherwise uncomplaining Joycean.

At times, even Hannity looked taken aback; his eyes, slightly too close to each other, like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above. Or perhaps he just couldn’t follow.

...

“I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.”

Osama bin Wordsworth

Turns out Osama bin Laden writes poetry.

"(Bin Laden) frequently uses mountains as metaphors," Miller told the newspaper. "As borders, they separate Arabs from each other but mountains can also help them from the temptations of the secular world."

Auden's remarks on Wordsworth, in the Letter to Lord Byron, seem relevant:

I’m also glad to find I’ve your authority
For finding Wordsworth a most bleak old bore,
Though I’m afraid we’re in a sad minority
For every year his followers get more,
Their number must lave doubled since the war.
They come in train-loads to the Lakes, and swarms
Of pupil-teachers study him in Storm’s...

The mountain-snob is a Wordsworthian fruit;
He tears his clothes and doesn’t shave his chin,
He wears a very pretty little boot,
He chooses the least comfortable inn;
A mountain railway is a deadly sin;
His strength, of course, is as the strength of ten men,
He calls all those who live in cities wen-men,

I’m not a spoil—sport, I would never wish
To interfere with anybody’s pleasures;
By all means climb, or hunt, or even fish,
All human hearts lave ugly little treasures;
But think it time to take repressive measures
When someone says, adopting the “I know" line,
The Good Life is confined above the snow-line.

First Sentences, Cont.

Thus begins Hrafnkel's Saga:

It was in the days of King Harald Tangle-hair, son of Halfdan the Black, son of Gudrod the Hunter-king, son of Halfdan Hearth-stingy, son of Eystein Fart, son of Olaf the Wood-cutter, king of the Swedes, that a man called Hallfred brought his ship to Iceland, putting in at Breiddale east of the Fljotsdale district.

The genealogies are sometimes the best parts of a saga.

Green on Warhol on Jagger

Mick Jagger

from Warhol's Portraits

He is in my opinion past his prime

already in this print, and he and Keith

are fast becoming tacky little skanks

and sherry-slurping, chicken-headed whores.

They shake their butts and sweat in leather pants,

like ancient drag queens high on Angel dust.

-- George Green

Here's the portrait (link):

On Buying Books

When should a starving grad student with access to a large library buy a book? There's an ethical issue here as well as the prudential one -- university libraries let you borrow arbitrarily many books, and you can usually keep them for a long time. In principle your renewals run out at some point, but you can always hand in the book and borrow it again in a day, or have someone else borrow it for you. Nevertheless it seems wrong to hog the library's copy of, say, a novel that you could buy for $10-15 on Amazon, just because you sometimes unpredictably feel like rereading it. And there are also the books you -- at least if you're me -- haven't read and like to have lying around in case you're ever in a mood to read them. I remember running out of renewals on Halldor Laxness's large novel Independent People (strongly recommended, btw) before I read it, and finishing it about five minutes before Frost library closed. If I owned my copy I might never have read it; on the other hand I had no business keeping the library's copy for eight months.

Apart from textbooks, which one always ends up buying regardless of price, the following seem like well-motivated purchases:

• Books to travel with. Three library hardcovers are a lot heavier than three paperbacks. Besides, you can't slough library books.
• Books with passages I return to. Poetry, of course; but also the more aphoristic types of nonfiction. Montaigne or Johnson, say. Some literary criticism -- W.H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral. Some picaresque novels, like Tom Jones or Don Quixote, that are readable in sections. Not Dostoevsky or especially Tolstoy; if I were to reread War and Peace, I would probably have to reread the whole thing. It follows that I don't need a copy, since I can borrow it whenever I want to reread it.
• Of course, one's very favorite books are always rereadable in parts.
• Remaindered books. The bargain/remaindered books at most bookshops are, of course, there for a reason -- there are very few masterpieces, but a lot of the lesser works of good writers.
• Books perpetually checked out of the library. Camus, for instance, or Arendt or anyone else of that sort. I tend to avoid these except when I can get them cheap. Which isn't always possible.

Of course, I often make stupid purchases, like buying books I probably won't reread because they're on sale.

Given that one wants a book, there's a decision to be made about whether one should hang on until one finds it at a bookshop or use Amazon. I like to support what Mary Beard calls "Real Bookshops," i.e. independent bookshops with better collections than Borders/B&N. I don't mind the big-box stores, but they tend not to have what you're looking for, and, more importantly, not to have anything you didn't know you were looking for. I don't think these bookshops serve a useful purpose, except as pretentious cafes; I would rather support Amazon, which tends to have better prices and more books in the long tail, where most of my reading list is. I especially like shops with medium-sized, idiosyncratic collections; there's something to be said for the acres-of-random-stuff model, but one tends to zone out and miss things one isn't specifically looking for.

Apart from the social responsibility high, I guess there's the rationing effect of saying something like, that's a book I want to own, but I'll wait until I find it at a bookshop.

[These reflections were triggered by seeing the name Alcock somewhere in a news story, and remembering this observation in Littlewood's Miscellany p. 128:

At a Scholarship Examination, Dykes pointed out to me that the list had the consecutives Alchin and Alcock.]

In Which DFW Kills Himself

Link.

I wonder if this makes it less or more probable that I'll read him. Less, because the formerly unlikely prospect of his writing an inviting novel is now quite impossible. More, because his shorter pieces will be all over the internet.

Amherst faculty were ambivalent about DFW [who, of course, was an Amherst alum and near-classmate of Dan Brown] pre-suicide. I remember Norton Starr ranting about the garbled math in Infinite Jest. Andy Parker reputedly said that I reminded him of DFW. Bear in mind that the one time I took a class with Parker -- "Big Books," my first semester at Amherst -- he called me into his office and lectured me on how my behavior in class "could do with some improvement."

The third-party candidate we've been waiting for...

Godot!

(via Alex Massie)

The fist is more romantic than the sword

Jenny Factor once did a reading at Amherst, which I remember best for the purported "canzone about fisting," which sounded bizarre and unsatisfactory. I came across the text today; the poem, it turns out, is less bizarre and more unsatisfactory -- quite awful, in fact -- than I remembered. The canzone is a sort of sestina on steroids; there are five endwords, and each stanza has a featured endword, which is repeated over and over and over. I am not aware of any canzones that are actually worth reading.

While on the topic -- not of canzones -- I would like to introduce you to Professor Manfred Pfister, Lowell's German translator and a distinguished scholar of Romance languages: