20190306.0430

It should come as no surprise that I have a personal library; I was for many years engaged in formal study of English languages and literatures, and I spent no small amount of time trying to be a professor in those same fields, and they call for books more than most. Even before that, I was an avid reader, given to spending money on books instead of on the kinds of things that others of my age, when I was of such an age, spent money on. And while I have made much use of the libraries where I have been, and I have at times pruned items out of my collection, I have tended to hoard the printed pages. There are several reasons, of course, and I may come back to them in another post, and it may even be that some of them still apply. But I think I may be about to go through and rid myself of some of the books and magazines and journals I have acquired over the years; I think they have outlived their usefulness to me, and the sentimental connections they embody and reinforce are not what I need them to be.
Clearly, not all of my books and suchlike fall under such rubrics. There are the fancy copies that my wife and I keep in the living room, decorations for it and advertisements to those who visit us that we read. (Yes, it's a bit snobby.) There are the copies of books I still use for what research I do, their pages stained by the oils of my hands as I've flipped through at high speed, looking for that one line to quote or that one passage to summarize. There are the copies I've been given as gifts, tattered from age and use by now and falling apart, but kept because they came from people I still value. And there are no few that I use in the recreational activities I still undertake--because I am a raging nerd, and the things I like to do involve reading even when they're not typically thought of as "reading."
But I also have boxes and boxes of academic journals, as well as many issues of them still in their wrappings. Some, such as CCC, College English, PMLA, and Profession, I no longer subscribe to; I am not a member anymore of the organizations that produce them, and I have no reason to be so. I will never be a real college professor; I will never be a full-time teacher. So there is no need for me to align myself with the MLA or the NCTE; they do not represent me, and they should not, so I should not give my time or the representation of my time that is the money I earn to them. And I probably ought not to continue to give space to works that I no longer use and am not likely to open again.
To be fair, such a thing feels like quitting. It feels like another admission of defeat, another acknowledgment that I have been wrong. It is not, at least not so much; when I undertook to get such things, I had honest hope that I might be one of the fortunate folks who picked up a professorial job. If I am wrong, it is in holding onto a hope that will never be; letting go of the things that informed that hope and that emerged from pursuing it is more a correction than an error. Such a correction is good to have, even if the reminder of error that it necessarily is is not the most comfortable thing to have provided.

20140721.0720

Along the way back from Texas to Sherwood Cottage yesterday, my wife and I talked about my journal-keeping. As I think I have noted, I have kept a journal for some years, switching from gathered legal pad pages to inexpensive bound volumes in spring 2005 and upgrading from them to nice leather-bound, gilt-edged volumes while I lived in the Best of the Boroughs. (Brooklyn treated me well; I feel obliged to sing its praises even living away from it.) I am nearing the end of another such volume, the twenty-fifth in just over nine years (I did not say I was good at keeping a journal), and as I want to continue to keep one, I have to see about procuring a successor volume. And that means I have to think about what type of volume I want for the next volume, either to maintain my current practice or to change it, and if to change it, how to do so.

Determining how best to proceed requires that I contemplate what I want to do with my journals. It is a task to which I am giving attention...in the journal. But similar questions obtain here; how ought I to proceed with the entries on this blogroll, and to what purpose do I make the posts that I make? In answering the latter and more fundamental first (because it is more important, and it is easier), I look back at the earliest entry in this webspace. In it, I write of the same kind of impetus that prompted my switch in journal-writing: the desire to offer my comments in a socially-privileged form. What I had been doing before, making status updates (now lost) on a vanity site (that still exists but that I do not maintain as I ought to do), seemed no longer to suffice for my purposes. Although it was not until late last year that I began to make daily or near-daily posts (and some of those, I admit, are made more to post daily than to post well), there seemed to be a difference in presentation that pushed me to do a better job of writing for this blog. If nothing else, it has equipped me to better carry out the work I do for the Tales after Tolkien Society here.

So has the work in public intellectualism--if I can call it that--begun early in this blogroll and continued intermittently throughout. Whether or not it has done any good for me to offer summaries and responses to the piece I have read in, say, CCC, College English, the New York Times, PMLA, and Profession, I do not know. They have helped me to better understand what I have read, certainly, and that has helped me to be better in the classroom, but I am not sure that they have been of benefit in fostering conversation about the kinds of things that need to be discussed better than they generally are. I have tried to encourage it as I can; it has been another of the standing projects of this blog that I do so. I have to wonder, however, at the effectiveness of it. Perhaps it is another thing at which I need to keep working. Perhaps I have my answer to the earlier point, as well; I ought to keep doing what I have been doing, hoping that it will make some kind of breakthrough and practicing for other writing venues whether it does or not.

20120430.2030

My reading of the March 2012 PMLA has not yet ended--I have been sticking around home more than usual these past few days, and, as I noted, I tend to do my journal reading on the train.  But I went to the dojo today (and did not do so well there as I like to), so I was on the train, and thus I read.

Among today's readings was the short piece by Joan DeJean, "A Long Eighteenth Century?  What Eighteenth Century?" which bemoans the increasing presentism of foreign language departments in the United States.*  DeJean does not claim any scientific rigor or statistical validity, simply noting that "Enough of a trend emerged" from those surveyed for the author "to feel that it was time to sound an alarm" (317).  The alarm derives from the increasing dearth of new hires--and of faculty positions generally--in period specializations in pre-modern non-English languages, although Italian manages to hold onto its "holy trinity--Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio" (317), and Spanish, because of other factors, has enough enrollment to keep its variety to some extent (318).  Even so, DeJean paints a depressing picture, one which forebodes ill for the study of language in the United States.

Aside from evoking my sympathy for the departments affected (I stand in solidarity with my fellow students of older languages and literatures) and my fear for my own discipline (although DeJean posits that medievalists in English could take up some of the slack created by the elimination of medievalist positions in other languages' departments, I am not certain that administrators would see that as a viable work--and even DeJean is not pleased with the proposition [320]), the article gives me some things to consider.  One of them is DeJean's comment that "We are all intellectually poorer because of this drift to presentism [outlined in the article]" (320).  It seems to imply that there is something wrong with considering the language and literature of the present and near past, and I cannot agree with that implication; there is a lot going on now, and some of it is even worth attending to.  But my arguments against such rhetoric are on record; I need not rehash them here, and there is more to address in DeJean's comment than the implication.

Namely, DeJean is correct.

There is the adage about what happens to those who do not know their history, and those who know that history are aware that the "good old days" are anything but good.  Aside from proverbial wisdom, however, there is the issue--which DeJean points out in some measure (320)--that what happens now is a result of what happened then, so that to understand now we must understand then.  Similarly, failing to comprehend the then shuts out a large chunk of the comprehension of now that we can have, and that is a detriment to us all.  Too, we have a number of tools now that were not available then, and the application of those tools can illuminate then, enhancing further our understanding of the underpinning of now.  And, if nothing else, there are some amazingly subtle, witty bits that happened then, and we miss out by not looking at them now.

I would say that, though, being a medievalist.

My discipline has little to do, however, with my interest in another thing DeJean writes, this in the end-note to the piece: "I name no names so that none of them can be held responsible for my remarks" (320n).  There is something wrong with the world when a professor who is by title well-respected, one at a major institution, has to worry about repercussions upon colleagues for a piece printed in a major research journal.  Academic research is supposed to be one of the few places, if not the only place, where people can speak freely and openly, where they can state opinions sincerely held and supported from evidence, even if those opinions are not necessarily popular or easy to hear.  For such a figure as DeJean, who by all rights ought to be among the people who get to speak freely, to feel compelled to conceal her sources so as to protect them, to note that her sources may well need protecting, bespeaks something that I cannot call anything but evil.

Is this the world in which we live, that those who work to help others find truth must have it hidden that they have done so?  And if it is, can we complain of its sad, sad state?

*I am aware because of my readings (specific citations from which I do not recall at the moment, since I am working away from the set of materials from which I would pull them) and from the simple fact of living in New York after having lived in central Texas and southwestern Louisiana of the problems inherent in the term "foreign language departments."  The languages taught by such departments have a large number of native speakers among the native-born United States citizenship, so that their status as "foreign" is fraught, and the United States does not actually have an official language (the de facto English is not de jure).  The University of Texas at San Antonio calls its version the "Department of Modern Languages and Literatures," which I think a better solution--but it has not caught on as much as I should like.

Work Cited
DeJean, Joan. "A Long Eighteenth Century? What Eighteenth Century?" PMLA 127.2 (March 2012): 317-20. Print.

20120427.2100

On 25 April 2012, I received my copy of the March 2012 issue of PMLA.  Journals have been taking their sweet time to get to me of late; I suppose I ought to check up on my memberships to be sure that they are current, but I think I am paid up for the year.

Anyway, I was not able to jump right onto reading it as I usually am; I have mentioned a few times, I think, that I try to keep abreast of major developments in the fields in which I work as a scholar, so I generally start reading journals as soon as I get them.  This one waited a day or two for me to get started with it, and, since I tend to do my journal-reading on the train, I am not yet done reading through the current issue.  But I have read a few of the articles, and a few things have already struck me.

One is a short passage near the beginning of Christopher Grobe's "The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959" which reads

Authors are not supposed to have smells because, by and large, they are not supposed to have bodies.  And, with the exception of a private frission or two over the tactile pleasures of fine paper, neither are we readers supposed to have, or else make much use of, bodies.

Much of that strange ritual the poetry reading [sic] seems choreographed to enforce this prohibition.  Why else, when called on to perform their authority at such readings, do our literary titans meekly clutch the podium at their abdomen, sport clothing that aspires to invisibility, and defer to the safer seductions of the printed page by visibly scanning, word by word, poems they know by heart, by breath, and by gut?  The author, on such occasions, is merely the onion-skin flap protecting the poem--the mercifully thin obstruction to poetic meaning and not its conduit. (215)

I know and have known a number of poets, some of them better than others, and I have occasionally (too often for a number of people, I know) pushed forward some semblance of verse, myself.  From my experience with the poetic community--which I will admit is limited--I find myself asking Grobe's questions alongside him.  The "poet voice," the propensity for performing poets (and other artists I have seen, but I'll not delve into that too much) to dress all in black, and the all-too-often evident phenomenon of people burying their faces in the pages they wrote rather than looking at the audience to which they are actually presenting the work have all raised my hackles and prompted me to ask Why?

I know there are some answers.  Some of them are even good ones.  One (and one with which I am familiar, doing a fair bit of writing myself, although more of it in analytical prose than in "artistic" endeavors) is that a writer writing a thing does not entail that the writer remembers the thing.  Even now, I am at work on a paper in large part so I can get the idea out of my head; I can hardly expect to keep it in when I push it out.  Hell, my dissertation, on which I spent years of work, is not as clear in my mind scant weeks after I defended it as I recall it being in the hours surrounding the defense.  So that part, the need to look over the material, I can well understand.  But the rest...I am not sure about the rest.

Especially the "poet voice."  That drives me nuts.  The false suppression of inflection and intonation in favor of a pseudo-dramatic, staggered, assumed breathiness grates.  If a poem is supposed to be a relation of feeling, why should it not sound as though the reader feels?  If it is an attempt to arrive at some truth, then why should it not ring of the elation of uncovering truth, or of the sorrow that an unpleasant truth cam prompt?  And if it is an expression of the poet's inner being, and it really does sound like the "poet voice" puts it, why should I want to know the person?  For I get to deal with enough deadness and false pomposity riding the subway each day, and before that, among the central Texas population among whom I grew up; I do not need it when I look to something outside of my "normal" life.

As I think on it, it occurs to me that the "poet voice" may be part of the reason that the general public (insofar as it exists) has trouble with poetry--something which has been an issue of concern for me.  Something about the falseness...it forces the poem into some place other than where people are willing to go to it, and it is forced; few people, if any, actually talk the way they read poems, and those people are usually shunned for being blasted annoying.

Do not use the "poet voice" and then complain that "people don't like poetry anymore."  Your use of the thing is part of the problem.

Work Cited
Grobe, Christopher. "The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959." PMLA 127.2 (March 2012). 215-30. Print.