In the short legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae—we have the
classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it
if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says:
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by."
—Marianne Moore, "In the Days of Prismatic Color," 1924
Showing posts with label Marianne Moore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marianne Moore. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Friday, December 9, 2011
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Nests
I mentioned the other day that Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale was making me realize the connection between my research on Berssenbrugge and my research on Moore. I'm now realizing that comment probably made no sense to anybody but me, so here's a bit of an explanation.
My Berssenbrugge essay is about a book titled Nest (2003), which pushes hard on the idea of domestic spaces as nests and the analogy between human and animal dwellings. My essay recurs, quite naturally, to Gaston Bachelard's chapter on the nest in The Poetics of Space, which rather self-consciously conjures up sentimental images of cozy avian nuclear families (self-conscious because Bachelard has already admitted that anthropomorphizing birds is embarrassing and absurd).
My recent trawl through early twentieth-century books on girlhood, including Forbes-Robertson Hale, is making me realize how pervasive the image of the nest is in late discourses of domesticity circa 1900. Forbes-Robertson Hale's novel The Nest-Builder is a good example of that.
But it's not just that birds are used to describe the home; the home is also used to describe birds. What I hadn't realized earlier was the tightness of the connection. Ornithology circa 1900 (and this is where my Moore research comes in) was divided between an all-male profession located in universities and natural history museums and a thriving amateur bird-watching culture that was largely female. While there were many male amateur bird enthusiasts, the division between professional and popular ornithology was distinctly gendered in discourse as in membership.
It should not be supposed that the hobbyists were not serious, nor that their observations were inconsequential for the professional ornithologists. For one thing, the Audubon Society ladies were in many ways the public face of ornithology, since it was their writing and illustrations that dominated popular handbooks, texts for children, journalism, and the like, so the professional ornithologists had to reckon with them one way or another. One of the most amusing parts of researching my Marianne Moore chapter (and there were many amusing parts) was reading the spluttering reviews of popular bird books in The Auk, the organ of the American Ornithologists' Union, circa 1900. For another thing, the hobbyists were quite as serious as the professionals, and often observed specimens and behaviors in the wild before their professional counterparts did. Since the first observed specimen carried (and still carries) a good deal of importance in nomenclature, this meant that professional ornithologists, to their chagrin, sometimes had to cite the amateurs' findings in publications with hilarious titles--and by hilarious, I mean domestic.
Here are a few titles by the popular writer Olive Thorne Miller (pen name of Harriet Mann Miller): Little Brothers of the Air (1892); Four-Handed Folk (1896, on mammals rather than birds); The Bird Our Brother (1908); and of course, In Nesting Time (1888). Birds and other animals are consistently described in generally anthropomorphic and specifically familial terms. The book flap text for In Nesting Time is revealing:
Okay, so it comes as a surprise to nobody that amateur ornithology circa 1900 anthropomorphizes animals. I mean, we still anthropomorphize animals all the time. And it's also totally unsurprising that descriptions of animals are used to naturalize human social structures; that, too, still happens all the time. What's striking is the specificity with which birds and nests are used to figure human domestic life in particular, and vice-versa, through a branch of the sciences that was distinctly feminized. Birds are also, by the way, the first specimens that museums used for "life groups," the lifelike dioramas of specimens posed in simulacra of their habitats ("homes"?) that are now the norm. (This is owing to the ease of stuffing them in a lifelike way in the later nineteenth century; I found out way too much about taxidermy researching Marianne Moore.)
The language of nests, when applied to humans, is always about regulating family and femininity, naturalizing a configuration of affective, social, and spatial bonds. But it can never not be about animals at the same time. What Marianne Moore in one way and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in another way do is reinsert the animal as such into that discourse. For Moore, the animal introduces the alien into human life; for Berssenbrugge, that the animal is all too familiar--a pet, or even a "furry child," as Donna Haraway puts it--lays bare our embarrassing willingness to conscript animals for our emotional satisfaction. They place the animal at the scene of gender-making, but they also point toward the way that the animal, too, is made by (human) gender--that we do not know a nest that does not remind us of capital-H Home, that we are never not "dressing up our pets."
My Berssenbrugge essay is about a book titled Nest (2003), which pushes hard on the idea of domestic spaces as nests and the analogy between human and animal dwellings. My essay recurs, quite naturally, to Gaston Bachelard's chapter on the nest in The Poetics of Space, which rather self-consciously conjures up sentimental images of cozy avian nuclear families (self-conscious because Bachelard has already admitted that anthropomorphizing birds is embarrassing and absurd).
My recent trawl through early twentieth-century books on girlhood, including Forbes-Robertson Hale, is making me realize how pervasive the image of the nest is in late discourses of domesticity circa 1900. Forbes-Robertson Hale's novel The Nest-Builder is a good example of that.
But it's not just that birds are used to describe the home; the home is also used to describe birds. What I hadn't realized earlier was the tightness of the connection. Ornithology circa 1900 (and this is where my Moore research comes in) was divided between an all-male profession located in universities and natural history museums and a thriving amateur bird-watching culture that was largely female. While there were many male amateur bird enthusiasts, the division between professional and popular ornithology was distinctly gendered in discourse as in membership.
It should not be supposed that the hobbyists were not serious, nor that their observations were inconsequential for the professional ornithologists. For one thing, the Audubon Society ladies were in many ways the public face of ornithology, since it was their writing and illustrations that dominated popular handbooks, texts for children, journalism, and the like, so the professional ornithologists had to reckon with them one way or another. One of the most amusing parts of researching my Marianne Moore chapter (and there were many amusing parts) was reading the spluttering reviews of popular bird books in The Auk, the organ of the American Ornithologists' Union, circa 1900. For another thing, the hobbyists were quite as serious as the professionals, and often observed specimens and behaviors in the wild before their professional counterparts did. Since the first observed specimen carried (and still carries) a good deal of importance in nomenclature, this meant that professional ornithologists, to their chagrin, sometimes had to cite the amateurs' findings in publications with hilarious titles--and by hilarious, I mean domestic.
Here are a few titles by the popular writer Olive Thorne Miller (pen name of Harriet Mann Miller): Little Brothers of the Air (1892); Four-Handed Folk (1896, on mammals rather than birds); The Bird Our Brother (1908); and of course, In Nesting Time (1888). Birds and other animals are consistently described in generally anthropomorphic and specifically familial terms. The book flap text for In Nesting Time is revealing:
These fifteen papers have such tempting titles as "Baby Birds," "A Tricksy Spirit," "A Stormy Wooing," "Friendship in Feathers," etc.; and give such wonderful revelations of bird ways and bird character as no one but a close observer would ever even imagine that our feathered friends could develop, or hardly even possess. That Mrs. Miller has given much attention to these subjects is well known; and all readers of her articles in current magazines must likewise be aware of her pleasant mode of arriving at the information which she gives so charmingly, with such sympathy, and a vivacity suited to the nature of her little companions. It has long been her wont to domesticate wild birds for a time, that she might study their dispositions and idiosyncrasies--if a bird may be said to have such; and the things that happened, the deeds that were done, the petty spites, jealousies, loves, manoeuvrings, exhibitions of craft and almost of forethought on the part of goldfinch, mocking-bird, bluebird, thrush, and others, as set forth in these pages, are as entertaining as a book of adventures. It is a most loving record, and we are assured that the sketches are "scrupulously true in every particular."Birds here are not merely anthropomorphized; they are domesticated, made into home-dwelling creatures with "petty spites, jealousies, loves, manoeuvrings...." Moreover, this is a textual record, we are told, of literal processes of domestication, as Miller takes wild birds into her home for observation. The book flap text oscillates between enthusiasm for the domesticated quality of Miller's textual birds and Miller's "sympathy" with them, on the one hand, and skepticism that Miller's domestic language has anything to do with the reality of birds, on the other, so that the blurb ends on a strange deflection: a claim that the contents of the book are "true," distanced by quotation.
Okay, so it comes as a surprise to nobody that amateur ornithology circa 1900 anthropomorphizes animals. I mean, we still anthropomorphize animals all the time. And it's also totally unsurprising that descriptions of animals are used to naturalize human social structures; that, too, still happens all the time. What's striking is the specificity with which birds and nests are used to figure human domestic life in particular, and vice-versa, through a branch of the sciences that was distinctly feminized. Birds are also, by the way, the first specimens that museums used for "life groups," the lifelike dioramas of specimens posed in simulacra of their habitats ("homes"?) that are now the norm. (This is owing to the ease of stuffing them in a lifelike way in the later nineteenth century; I found out way too much about taxidermy researching Marianne Moore.)
 |
| Cuthbert Rookery diorama, American Museum of Natural History |
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Building
There comes a point in every academic's life, sooner or later, when various professional bitternesses set in, and one's private self rails against the injustices of the world. The world is in fact unjust, so it's a thing that has to be done, but it's not a way to work.
Someone recently said to me that literary critics are either builders or cutters: they extend others' ideas or cut others' ideas down. As far as I can tell, this is more a matter of framing than of substance; any building necessarily cuts against whatever else might have once occupied that space; any cutting implicitly rests on certain strongly held, if unavowed, beliefs. The framing can be powerful, though; I'm currently reading a book, for instance, that largely stages itself as cutting, and, halfway through, I'm still unclear on the book's actual argument.
In my writing I try as much as possible to be a builder. To my mind, building is more difficult, and therefore more rewarding, than cutting. Building is, as much as possible, an act of creation. But the commitment to building is also part of my research interests; despite their sometimes oppositional language ("I, too, dislike it"), the authors I study are interested in bringing something forth that was once concealed, or insubstantial, or inaccessible.
In the midst of various pressures, it is good to be able to bring something forth, and so in what (wrongly, of course) feels like my old age I find myself renewing my commitment to building. I find myself interested in the craft of critical writing, in the presence of the voice, in the modalities of affection, in what it means to praise. (This last, admittedly, in the context of needing to write a letter of recommendation for something unusually important.) That doesn't mean I've gone all hippie: I'm also interested in invective, in aporia, in travesty, in the poetics of mockery. But I'm interested in them as things that exist rather than as negations of something else.
In other words, I suppose, I'm feeling productive. Which is a good way to be in April, allegedly the cruellest month.
Moore, Marianne. "The Pangolin." A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936. Ed. Heather Cass White. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008. Print.
Someone recently said to me that literary critics are either builders or cutters: they extend others' ideas or cut others' ideas down. As far as I can tell, this is more a matter of framing than of substance; any building necessarily cuts against whatever else might have once occupied that space; any cutting implicitly rests on certain strongly held, if unavowed, beliefs. The framing can be powerful, though; I'm currently reading a book, for instance, that largely stages itself as cutting, and, halfway through, I'm still unclear on the book's actual argument.
In my writing I try as much as possible to be a builder. To my mind, building is more difficult, and therefore more rewarding, than cutting. Building is, as much as possible, an act of creation. But the commitment to building is also part of my research interests; despite their sometimes oppositional language ("I, too, dislike it"), the authors I study are interested in bringing something forth that was once concealed, or insubstantial, or inaccessible.
In the midst of various pressures, it is good to be able to bring something forth, and so in what (wrongly, of course) feels like my old age I find myself renewing my commitment to building. I find myself interested in the craft of critical writing, in the presence of the voice, in the modalities of affection, in what it means to praise. (This last, admittedly, in the context of needing to write a letter of recommendation for something unusually important.) That doesn't mean I've gone all hippie: I'm also interested in invective, in aporia, in travesty, in the poetics of mockery. But I'm interested in them as things that exist rather than as negations of something else.
In other words, I suppose, I'm feeling productive. Which is a good way to be in April, allegedly the cruellest month.
'Again the sun!
anew each
day; and new and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul.' (ll. 142-5)
Moore, Marianne. "The Pangolin." A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936. Ed. Heather Cass White. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008. Print.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
"Experimental"
I tend to be very reticent about my research on this blog, perhaps due to the universal academic fear that nobody is interested. But I think I'm going to try to change that; after all, research is what I devote most of my brain to, and it is probably the most satisfying part of my life. (I mean, besides persimmon season, naturally!)
I have a few different research projects going on at the moment, but the most important is of course my dissertation. If one were to pigeonhole it, it would be called an American modernism dissertation, but the project actually resists such pigeonholing quite a bit. For one thing, one of the chapters is on a nineteenth-century French author, Zola. For another thing, the conceptual rubric of the project resists, or rather suspends, modernism as an identifying category. There is an impulse that I call "experimental" that runs through naturalism, modernism, and the avant-garde.
It's that word, "experimental," that gets me the most questions, and indeed it's the problematic nature of the experimental that most interests me.
When we talk about experimental literature, we usually mean one of two things, each inadequate yet revealing. One is an overly broad definition: that any text that is formally interesting, unusual, or, in short, literary by any number of standards may be deemed "experimental." This definition is inadequate insofar as it is too broad, nearly meaningless. It is revealing, however, insofar as it is used as a term of approval, one that, like "interesting" (as Sianne Ngai has so brilliantly explained [Chicago Journals paywall]), can express approval while evading or suspending aesthetic judgment.
Another use of the term "experimental literature," usually used in an attempt to narrow the overly broad definition above, is extremely literal: the author is imagined to have conducted a scientific experiment somewhere in time and space, and whatever appears on the page is the result, the "data," as it were. A direct and usually tenuous analogy is thus made between writing and "the" scientific method. Friedrich Kittler has a great chapter on automatic writing and the avant-garde in connection with precisely this definition, so I do not wish to say that this definition cannot be productive. But I think that it, too, is inadequate because it fails to capture, or has to try too hard to capture, a lot of literature that I think we would deem experimental but which did not emerge from amateur psychology experiments.
Moreover it presumes that we know what a scientific experiment is. Out of a desire for rigor, the second definition of experimental literature supposes that there is a single scientific method, universal, transhistorical, and fully theorized. Such an assumption might be forgiven if, in our "desire for rigor" we were to adopt scientific conventions ("assume the cow is a cylinder"; "assume zero friction"), but for good humanities scholars such an assumption would be ludicrous. It's no good to give up rigor out of a desire for rigor.
In point of fact, the definition of "experiment" and its status as a part of science has been in flux for centuries. In the period of interest to me, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, experiment is prestigious. It is a way to bring to light hitherto unseen realities. To be "experimental" has connotations of action and heroism, in contrast with "observational," which connotes passivity and even possibly just not doing anything at all. To be experimental is to be as scientific as possible.
And the notion of the experimental is also being radically challenged by the institutionalization of the biological and social sciences.
It's taken for granted that the well established physical sciences are the pinnacle of scientificity to which all other sciences must aspire. That's exactly what Claude Bernard very explicitly does in his Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865), arguing that there's a natural, quasi-evolutionary sequence that begins with physics and chemistry and proceeds to the biological sciences, such that medicine, formerly an "art," is surely next in line to become experimental. Of course, Zola piggybacks on this idea, saying that after medicine comes the novel. (Obviously.)
This notion, that there is a unified scientific method and it is defined by the methods of the physical sciences, is still very much in force today. But there is a reason that the physical sciences use certain methods: they are well suited to the things that physical scientists study. Suppose you are studying epidemiology: there's a serious ethical challenge to infecting a bunch of people with a disease in order to study its etiology under different conditions.
Claude Bernard's solution is one that we still use today. It's still experimental, he argues, to observe the outbreak of an infectious disease first in one climate and then another, so long as you're doing it advisedly, with the hypothesis in mind that climate is a factor in the disease's etiology. That nature has infected the subjects on your behalf does not, he argues, make your work less experimental. On one hand, we can see his point; on the other, we can see how this constitutes a significant revision to the idea of experiment. It's no longer as much about what you do as about what you think. This is not Bernard's only revision to the idea of experiment, nor is Bernard the only one developing methods that are suitable for studying living and/or thinking, feeling creatures. New methods are proliferating all the time, and developing the clarity-in-obscurity of professionalism.
The upshot of all of this is that the concept of experiment is being made newly capacious, that the professional sciences are invested in their own clarity-in-obscurity, best exemplified by experiment, and that that clarity-in-obscurity is thought to get at the heart of reality.
It is this sense, the sense that to access reality warrants a clarity-in-obscurity, that animates the four texts that I discuss in my dissertation and constitutes what, for me, is a better account of "experimental literature." It is defined not by a single method or set of formal devices but by this fundamental understanding of a reality alien from us in particular ways that it was not previously alien. For Zola, there is the symptomatic depth model, which he himself constantly undercuts with a horrified awareness of the power of the superficial (in every sense) to control even the penetrating scientific gaze. For Stein, there is, increasingly, a move toward abstraction and a refusal of empirical reality as inevitably disappointing. For Moore, there is the encounter with the nonhuman animal or thing that always points, indexically, away. And for Williams, there is the photograph of the far-flung primitive, which is the only way to reveal Paterson.
It is in this clarity-in-obscurity, this sense of the real, that the sciences seek knowledge; there, too, is it sought by the authors I discuss. That literature of the period is seeking knowledge, not some kind of alternate fluffy "poetic knowledge" nor an inner, personal knowledge, but something metallic and solid and alien that we would all recognize as knowledge should give us some pause. It returns us to the word "experimental" as a term of approval, with its suspension of aesthetic judgment. Why is it the duty or the pleasure of literature to produce knowledge, and what does it mean when it is? Why is it good to "experiment," to "innovate" (a.k.a. make it new)?
How is it that we can understand art as a kind of research, and why is it that we so want to do so?
I have a few different research projects going on at the moment, but the most important is of course my dissertation. If one were to pigeonhole it, it would be called an American modernism dissertation, but the project actually resists such pigeonholing quite a bit. For one thing, one of the chapters is on a nineteenth-century French author, Zola. For another thing, the conceptual rubric of the project resists, or rather suspends, modernism as an identifying category. There is an impulse that I call "experimental" that runs through naturalism, modernism, and the avant-garde.
It's that word, "experimental," that gets me the most questions, and indeed it's the problematic nature of the experimental that most interests me.
When we talk about experimental literature, we usually mean one of two things, each inadequate yet revealing. One is an overly broad definition: that any text that is formally interesting, unusual, or, in short, literary by any number of standards may be deemed "experimental." This definition is inadequate insofar as it is too broad, nearly meaningless. It is revealing, however, insofar as it is used as a term of approval, one that, like "interesting" (as Sianne Ngai has so brilliantly explained [Chicago Journals paywall]), can express approval while evading or suspending aesthetic judgment.
Another use of the term "experimental literature," usually used in an attempt to narrow the overly broad definition above, is extremely literal: the author is imagined to have conducted a scientific experiment somewhere in time and space, and whatever appears on the page is the result, the "data," as it were. A direct and usually tenuous analogy is thus made between writing and "the" scientific method. Friedrich Kittler has a great chapter on automatic writing and the avant-garde in connection with precisely this definition, so I do not wish to say that this definition cannot be productive. But I think that it, too, is inadequate because it fails to capture, or has to try too hard to capture, a lot of literature that I think we would deem experimental but which did not emerge from amateur psychology experiments.
Moreover it presumes that we know what a scientific experiment is. Out of a desire for rigor, the second definition of experimental literature supposes that there is a single scientific method, universal, transhistorical, and fully theorized. Such an assumption might be forgiven if, in our "desire for rigor" we were to adopt scientific conventions ("assume the cow is a cylinder"; "assume zero friction"), but for good humanities scholars such an assumption would be ludicrous. It's no good to give up rigor out of a desire for rigor.
In point of fact, the definition of "experiment" and its status as a part of science has been in flux for centuries. In the period of interest to me, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, experiment is prestigious. It is a way to bring to light hitherto unseen realities. To be "experimental" has connotations of action and heroism, in contrast with "observational," which connotes passivity and even possibly just not doing anything at all. To be experimental is to be as scientific as possible.
And the notion of the experimental is also being radically challenged by the institutionalization of the biological and social sciences.
It's taken for granted that the well established physical sciences are the pinnacle of scientificity to which all other sciences must aspire. That's exactly what Claude Bernard very explicitly does in his Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865), arguing that there's a natural, quasi-evolutionary sequence that begins with physics and chemistry and proceeds to the biological sciences, such that medicine, formerly an "art," is surely next in line to become experimental. Of course, Zola piggybacks on this idea, saying that after medicine comes the novel. (Obviously.)
This notion, that there is a unified scientific method and it is defined by the methods of the physical sciences, is still very much in force today. But there is a reason that the physical sciences use certain methods: they are well suited to the things that physical scientists study. Suppose you are studying epidemiology: there's a serious ethical challenge to infecting a bunch of people with a disease in order to study its etiology under different conditions.
Claude Bernard's solution is one that we still use today. It's still experimental, he argues, to observe the outbreak of an infectious disease first in one climate and then another, so long as you're doing it advisedly, with the hypothesis in mind that climate is a factor in the disease's etiology. That nature has infected the subjects on your behalf does not, he argues, make your work less experimental. On one hand, we can see his point; on the other, we can see how this constitutes a significant revision to the idea of experiment. It's no longer as much about what you do as about what you think. This is not Bernard's only revision to the idea of experiment, nor is Bernard the only one developing methods that are suitable for studying living and/or thinking, feeling creatures. New methods are proliferating all the time, and developing the clarity-in-obscurity of professionalism.
The upshot of all of this is that the concept of experiment is being made newly capacious, that the professional sciences are invested in their own clarity-in-obscurity, best exemplified by experiment, and that that clarity-in-obscurity is thought to get at the heart of reality.
It is this sense, the sense that to access reality warrants a clarity-in-obscurity, that animates the four texts that I discuss in my dissertation and constitutes what, for me, is a better account of "experimental literature." It is defined not by a single method or set of formal devices but by this fundamental understanding of a reality alien from us in particular ways that it was not previously alien. For Zola, there is the symptomatic depth model, which he himself constantly undercuts with a horrified awareness of the power of the superficial (in every sense) to control even the penetrating scientific gaze. For Stein, there is, increasingly, a move toward abstraction and a refusal of empirical reality as inevitably disappointing. For Moore, there is the encounter with the nonhuman animal or thing that always points, indexically, away. And for Williams, there is the photograph of the far-flung primitive, which is the only way to reveal Paterson.
It is in this clarity-in-obscurity, this sense of the real, that the sciences seek knowledge; there, too, is it sought by the authors I discuss. That literature of the period is seeking knowledge, not some kind of alternate fluffy "poetic knowledge" nor an inner, personal knowledge, but something metallic and solid and alien that we would all recognize as knowledge should give us some pause. It returns us to the word "experimental" as a term of approval, with its suspension of aesthetic judgment. Why is it the duty or the pleasure of literature to produce knowledge, and what does it mean when it is? Why is it good to "experiment," to "innovate" (a.k.a. make it new)?
How is it that we can understand art as a kind of research, and why is it that we so want to do so?
Friday, November 13, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
MSA 11
Some quick notes from today.
I went to a very interesting seminar on science studies and modernism this morning. The seminar was run by Anne Raine and Craig Gordon. I met some smart people, learned some new things, and wrote down the titles of some interesting-sounding books.
The thing that most struck me on reading all the papers was the diversity of possible meanings of "science studies," as manifested in people's various approaches. Most of the papers discussed a specific science in relation to modernism, e.g. environmental studies or astrophysics. Mine was one of the few papers that tried to deal with scientificity as a category (though I'm not sure to what extent I succeeded). For me, the most interesting sciences with which to deal in the modernist period are the biological and social sciences, precisely because of the way that they challenge existing notions of scientificity and/or experimentalism.
Unfortunately for my jetlagged, uncaffeinated body, the seminar was at 8am, but on the up side, the Montréal metro was a breeze.
I went to three panels today. One called "Border Conditions: Poetry at the Edge of Modernist Discourse" was chaired by Oren Izenberg and featured papers on Duncan's oracular impulse; Oppen's notion of poetry as a kind of testing of the truth, and translation and Mallarmé's refusal of voice.
A panel called "Circling, Singing, Scoring" included papers on Oppen and Stevens, Moore, and letter frequency -- what the speaker, Roger Gilbert, called "scrabbliness" (scrabbliness, roughly, is what happens when words are dense with letters that win a lot of points in Scrabble). The last paper was both interesting and comical, and this spoke to something I've been thinking about in relation to Christian Bök lately: why the act of accumulation is comical. I was most interested in Heather Cass White's paper on Marianne Moore, though (of course). She drew on the evidence of drafts to reveal a "romantic" Moore. Though I have a few reservations about how this was framed, it was an interesting and convincing talk.
In the afternoon there was a roundtable on "The Future of Women's Literature in Modernist Studies," chaired by Suzette Henke and featuring many important feminist modernists. It was very smart and illuminating. I was interested to learn, in Clare Hanson's talk, of Angela McRobbie's Aftermath of Feminism, which examines the sense of loss at the heart of postfeminism -- first, the loss of the mother as love-object, and second, the loss of a feminist ideal of liberation upon being handed a "feminism" that has been completely co-opted by patriarchal capitalism (i.e. "empowerfulness"). I'd love to read this book.
I did go to Susan Stanford Friedman's plenary talk, "Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies," but it'll have to wait.
It's about 10:30 pm, and somebody in this B&B is playing very loud dance music. I really wish this were not the case.
I went to a very interesting seminar on science studies and modernism this morning. The seminar was run by Anne Raine and Craig Gordon. I met some smart people, learned some new things, and wrote down the titles of some interesting-sounding books.
The thing that most struck me on reading all the papers was the diversity of possible meanings of "science studies," as manifested in people's various approaches. Most of the papers discussed a specific science in relation to modernism, e.g. environmental studies or astrophysics. Mine was one of the few papers that tried to deal with scientificity as a category (though I'm not sure to what extent I succeeded). For me, the most interesting sciences with which to deal in the modernist period are the biological and social sciences, precisely because of the way that they challenge existing notions of scientificity and/or experimentalism.
Unfortunately for my jetlagged, uncaffeinated body, the seminar was at 8am, but on the up side, the Montréal metro was a breeze.
I went to three panels today. One called "Border Conditions: Poetry at the Edge of Modernist Discourse" was chaired by Oren Izenberg and featured papers on Duncan's oracular impulse; Oppen's notion of poetry as a kind of testing of the truth, and translation and Mallarmé's refusal of voice.
A panel called "Circling, Singing, Scoring" included papers on Oppen and Stevens, Moore, and letter frequency -- what the speaker, Roger Gilbert, called "scrabbliness" (scrabbliness, roughly, is what happens when words are dense with letters that win a lot of points in Scrabble). The last paper was both interesting and comical, and this spoke to something I've been thinking about in relation to Christian Bök lately: why the act of accumulation is comical. I was most interested in Heather Cass White's paper on Marianne Moore, though (of course). She drew on the evidence of drafts to reveal a "romantic" Moore. Though I have a few reservations about how this was framed, it was an interesting and convincing talk.
In the afternoon there was a roundtable on "The Future of Women's Literature in Modernist Studies," chaired by Suzette Henke and featuring many important feminist modernists. It was very smart and illuminating. I was interested to learn, in Clare Hanson's talk, of Angela McRobbie's Aftermath of Feminism, which examines the sense of loss at the heart of postfeminism -- first, the loss of the mother as love-object, and second, the loss of a feminist ideal of liberation upon being handed a "feminism" that has been completely co-opted by patriarchal capitalism (i.e. "empowerfulness"). I'd love to read this book.
I did go to Susan Stanford Friedman's plenary talk, "Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies," but it'll have to wait.
It's about 10:30 pm, and somebody in this B&B is playing very loud dance music. I really wish this were not the case.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
"Syllabics"
I would like to say that if I hear this one more time I will scream:
Syllabics.
A poet uses meter.
Wow, amazing. I am amazed. Let's reduce that poet's entire poetics to the fact that she uses quantitative meter. Yep, that is what her poetry is all about. Syllables: you can count them! Oh, and did you know she was a spinster?
To borrow an idiom or two, this particular baloney really gets the Cecire goat.
And yet, I know I must not scream when I hear it, because I will keep hearing it for as long as I work on Marianne Moore, which I hope will be a long time.
It is obvious that Moore did not always write in syllabics. It would not even be accurate to say that most of her poems use syllabics. Looking at multiple versions of her poems reveals a tendency to draft in syllabics and revise into free verse. People who think that syllabics are the defining quality of Moore's verse are wrong.
* * *
Unrelatedly: Sociological Images has a great post on pants.
"Oh, Marianne Moore's precision. So you're talking about her syllabics, right?"
Syllabics.
A poet uses meter.
Wow, amazing. I am amazed. Let's reduce that poet's entire poetics to the fact that she uses quantitative meter. Yep, that is what her poetry is all about. Syllables: you can count them! Oh, and did you know she was a spinster?
To borrow an idiom or two, this particular baloney really gets the Cecire goat.
And yet, I know I must not scream when I hear it, because I will keep hearing it for as long as I work on Marianne Moore, which I hope will be a long time.
It is obvious that Moore did not always write in syllabics. It would not even be accurate to say that most of her poems use syllabics. Looking at multiple versions of her poems reveals a tendency to draft in syllabics and revise into free verse. People who think that syllabics are the defining quality of Moore's verse are wrong.
* * *
Unrelatedly: Sociological Images has a great post on pants.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Its leaps should be set/ to the flageolet
* * *
I am so very late on this; nonetheless:
Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.
Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.
JUST ONE BOOK
1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.
UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php
USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php
2. Share this note on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.
With my best wishes to everyone
Chris Hamilton-Emery
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com
Via Archambeau.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Marianne Moore on Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
RML 1250/1, qtd. in Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995. 268n46. Print.
There was a young lady named Liz
Who made writing poems her biz
But when she met Bob
She gave up the job
It took all her time to read his
RML 1250/1, qtd. in Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995. 268n46. Print.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Summertime
I posted grades last night, so summer has officially begun. I have a research fellowship for this summer, which as you may imagine has me over the moon. I have big plans, people.
Of course, no semester ends but I ponder what went well and what didn't. In retrospect, I think my recent course, "Poetry and Science," may have asked students to digest too many ideas. In the review session, a student asked me how a chapter from Daston and Galison's Objectivity related to the rest of the course. I was a bit taken aback; the connections seemed clear to me, this was a student who tended to be on top of things, and in any case, isn't every word that Lorraine Daston writes applicable to everyone's daily life in myriad ways? It was a reminder that not everyone lives in grad-student-land, and that a bit more intellectual hand-holding (to use a dreadful metaphor) might not have gone amiss.
I also think I should have spent more time on writing practices--by which I mean writing affects. I'm never sure how much of this to do. It's essential to observe to college freshmen that we tend to take writing personally and treat it as part of ourselves, and that in order to improve or receive criticism productively, it's necessary to distinguish between self and writing. I do this every semester. I also often talk a bit about the affects of reading (what in an analytical essay produces pleasure for a reader, and why?). I usually talk about why "inspiration" is really code for "I want a mythical creature to write it for me," i.e. fantasy.
But I don't do any of these things in a sustained way. Should the affects of reading and writing be a distinguishable thread in my composition courses? Should I promulgate rules a bit more? "Have a professional attitude toward writing," I might counsel. "No drama."
I recoil in horror at teaching that smacks of moralism. I always hated it when writing teachers required one to outline, for instance. (I still think this is a bad practice, in fact; it supposes that students will be writing something so simple that they can envision its structure without doing any writing.) I am not sure that I want to instill any techniques of the self.
Yet it seems productive to try and think systematically and rigorously about the affects of reading and writing. I wonder if there is a way to do this in a classroom context that isn't implicitly prescriptive.
(Meanwhile, the Chronicle reports that a Trinity College professor is teaching an entire course on diagramming sentences to great effect. I love it. Maybe I should do that.)
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Reflecting on the Drucker article mentioned below reminded me of one more instance of a tool working well for some fields and not for others.
If you search the string "marianne moore" in Google Scholar, what you get is this:
That one book citation is the only reference to the poet Marianne Moore on the page. It is not the best.
If you search the string "marianne moore" in Google Scholar, what you get is this:
That one book citation is the only reference to the poet Marianne Moore on the page. It is not the best.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
A brief addendum, in case anyone was wondering whether mocking a grad student's diss in the NYT could really be problematic.
In the last two days this (not especially popular) blog has received hits from the following search strings:
medieval theologian Duns Scotu [sic] citations
duns scotus use of citation
Duns Scotus citations thesis
duns scotus colombia [sic] footnotes
duns scotus citations (five times)
how duns scotus used citations
how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations
dissertation medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations
duns scotus citations dissertation (twice)
duns scotus citations taylor "new york times"
duns scotus citation citations
duns scotus citations thesis
duns scotus used citations
duns scotus citation columbia
dissertation duns scotus citations
columbia dissertation Duns Scotus citation ph.d.
So now I'm really curious. How did Duns Scotus use citations? I seriously kind of want to read this dissertation. I hope somebody publishes a monograph on this topic in the near future. Listen up, Oxford UP: there is public interest.
Incidentally, I am currently writing something on how Marianne Moore cites Duns Scotus. No lie.
In the last two days this (not especially popular) blog has received hits from the following search strings:
medieval theologian Duns Scotu [sic] citations
duns scotus use of citation
Duns Scotus citations thesis
duns scotus colombia [sic] footnotes
duns scotus citations (five times)
how duns scotus used citations
how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations
dissertation medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations
duns scotus citations dissertation (twice)
duns scotus citations taylor "new york times"
duns scotus citation citations
duns scotus citations thesis
duns scotus used citations
duns scotus citation columbia
dissertation duns scotus citations
columbia dissertation Duns Scotus citation ph.d.
So now I'm really curious. How did Duns Scotus use citations? I seriously kind of want to read this dissertation. I hope somebody publishes a monograph on this topic in the near future. Listen up, Oxford UP: there is public interest.
Incidentally, I am currently writing something on how Marianne Moore cites Duns Scotus. No lie.
Friday, April 3, 2009
With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface.
--William Carlos Williams, "Marianne Moore," in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971): 318.
Williams praises the woman poet, even calls her scientific: but he still manages to do it in a way that emphasizes how good she is at cleaning. Oh, modernism.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Trashy current fiction
Marianne Moore wrote in 1925:
The Dial 79 (September 1925) 264-66, reprinted in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking, 1986) 152.
In 1854, in a report made by the librarian of The Astor Library, New York City -- we read: "The young fry of today employ all the hours they are not in school, reading trashy current fiction such as Scott, Cooper, Dickens, Punch, and The Illustrated News."
The Dial 79 (September 1925) 264-66, reprinted in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking, 1986) 152.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
On encountering your fifth grade class trip in the Moore archive
I don't know whether it is still the case that fifth-graders in Newport News routinely visit the Mariners' Museum. I admit that when I was a fifth-grader I was bored to tears by most of the exhibits, coming as I did from a family that was emphatically not the boat-owning type. I was interested in the exhibits of figureheads and in the rooms full of miniatures -- the handcrafts -- but found the large room full of watercrafts merely dull.
I'm reading a fascinating book on early twentieth century museums, Catherine Paul's Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (U of Michigan P, 2002). Theoretically, it's not overwhelming, but it's full of great archival finds, including an account of an unpublished review that Marianne Moore wrote about a 1937 exhibit on surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, titled "Concerning the Marvelous."
In an early draft of this essay, according to Paul, Moore compares the exhibit to the Mariners' Museum, using what my fifth-grade self considered essentially a big building full of boring crap to explain the curatorial rage for order.
"The objects that Moore finds together in the Mariner's Museum talk to each other, creating an impression of sea-faring life: collected shells combine with tattooers' apparatus; painted Portuguese boats, mastheads, whale skeletons, and walking sticks show what sailors brought with them on voyages as well as what they found. From these objects visitors are expected to piece together the big picture to which each object -- marvelous in its own right -- contributes; both the exhibitor's processes of selection and display and the visitor's interpretive ability shape that big picture." (146).
I must say that it's pretty much 100% certain that in fifth grade, I would have liked to see surrealism at the MoMA much better than the collection of small watercraft at the obligatory local maritime museum. But then, it's probably the podunk nature of that particular museum that suits it to Moore's purpose.
I'm reading a fascinating book on early twentieth century museums, Catherine Paul's Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (U of Michigan P, 2002). Theoretically, it's not overwhelming, but it's full of great archival finds, including an account of an unpublished review that Marianne Moore wrote about a 1937 exhibit on surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, titled "Concerning the Marvelous."
In an early draft of this essay, according to Paul, Moore compares the exhibit to the Mariners' Museum, using what my fifth-grade self considered essentially a big building full of boring crap to explain the curatorial rage for order.
"The objects that Moore finds together in the Mariner's Museum talk to each other, creating an impression of sea-faring life: collected shells combine with tattooers' apparatus; painted Portuguese boats, mastheads, whale skeletons, and walking sticks show what sailors brought with them on voyages as well as what they found. From these objects visitors are expected to piece together the big picture to which each object -- marvelous in its own right -- contributes; both the exhibitor's processes of selection and display and the visitor's interpretive ability shape that big picture." (146).
I must say that it's pretty much 100% certain that in fifth grade, I would have liked to see surrealism at the MoMA much better than the collection of small watercraft at the obligatory local maritime museum. But then, it's probably the podunk nature of that particular museum that suits it to Moore's purpose.
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