Shots Fired! Literary Canon and Digital Reading

Recently, a student asked for my help in understanding what canon is, in preparation for an exam. I asked her to define her idea of canon first, so that we could have a starting point from which to extend her grasp of the concept. She answered simply: “Canon is something that changes when reading changes.”

I was impressed with the elegance of her definition, and the clarity with which this simple statement can cut through a lot of the theoretical webs the humanities disciplines have a habit of spinning out for themselves in the name of reflexivity – which is not to toss the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, but an acknowledgment that theory can have alienating effects sometimes, from that which we use it to analyze. What the humanities do, at their core, is represent reading in all of its iterations, including the practical, the social-cultural, the economic, and of course the theoretical. Reading nowadays is an integral part of almost everyone’s lives in our cultural milieu, and it is increasing in importance by the day due to increasingly digitized forms of communication – think about how much more often we text each other rather than call on the phone than we did even ten years ago. Reading is how we communicate; it is the thing that allows us to understand our bank statements, look at the time, a new recipe, or a timetable.

Last week, I could not read anything for three hours because my ophthalmologist had dilated my pupils to do an exam. It was disturbing. I cannot remember the last time I went that long without reading something – I couldn’t check my email, answer text messages I knew I was getting, or read the book I had brought with me. I was completely cut off from my responsibilities, my friends, and my digital life, which leads me to the claim that today, because of digitization, and more so now than at any point in history, reading is life. Not just for scholars, academics, or the cultural elite – it has become this way for nearly everyone. I personally do not know a single person, including my 86 year old grandmother, who does not have an email address and a smartphone. So if the humanities represent reading, and reading is our lives, then the humanities represent life.

For my readers who are not in the humanities, this is not an innovative or original claim by any means, but a discussion about the broader implications of this claim lies beyond the scope of this post. What this post does instead is consider the following questions:

(I) If digital humanities’ computing techniques are interested in representing ways of re-imagining reading, through topic modelling, distant reading techniques, Matthew Jockers’s Syuzhet package, et cetera, then how does this re-imagination affect the humanities as a discipline?

And (II) If canon is something that changes when reading changes, what are the effects of digital reading practices on the literary canon?

I. Re-Imagining the Digital Humanities

In answer to the first question, the main effect I see this having on the humanities is that the digital humanities as method has given birth to itself, sui generis, to the digital humanities as a discipline. Matthew Kirschenbaum traces this shift with an expert hand here. The effect this shift has on the humanities as an umbrella field is complex, because the digital humanities means something different in every humanities discipline. However, because English is, as Kirschenbaum points out in his article, an exclusively text based discipline (as opposed to something like Art History, which is both image and text based by nature) it has tended to be an early adopter of digital humanities methods.

The most interesting thing about the evolution of digital humanities, to me, is that it began as a methodology, and is now a discipline. If methods of literary analysis can be said to work like different pairs of glasses that we can pop on and off to see the object/text we are looking at through blue or green or yellow lenses, then it is a little bit like if early adopters of DH put on a pair of these glasses that have since grown outwards to become the object they regard, the eyes that perceive, and the brain that makes sense of all of it.

The process of understanding digital methods’ mediation of reading and reading practice is therefore now so much more complicated than it used to be. If, as Kittler affirms, mediality happens in a matrix, then the mediation of digitized literature draws our attention not only to the re-formed text but also to how that process reflects back on the textual object. But the more digital methods open up a text, the more its ontology is destabilized, and the less fixed an object the text becomes, both in terms of Eisensteinian “fixity” and the phenomenological. It is curious that something that seems so empirical is having phenomenological problems. Something that began as a method has grown into a discipline and a movement, so of course there is a component of instability that comes from traveling from methodology to ideology. At this time, the digital humanities are in a transitional moment where uncovering how their own ideological formations inaugurate new ontologies for textuality and actualize new ways of understanding narrative teleologies.

Part of what is so destabilizing about this period of transition is that these ontologies arise out of digital rupture, which is to say the ways in which the digital as a form creates a rift in the old understanding of the relationship between print culture, textuality, and narrativity. We find ourselves returning to questions of structure, of imposing configurational modes of seeing – in the sense that we see modernity in figures (the rhizome, the network, the diagram, the chart, the database), not the details or content, but the configuration, which must be connected to the material social, the economic and, naturally, the technological realities.

In more practical terms, we can deploy this reasoning into a line of inquiry that wonders what the difference might be between visualizing, editing, re-compiling, or otherwise remediating a text as, for example, a database, versus a network or a cloud or a protocol or a diagram. What are the digital humanities’ literary interventions really doing if not eliminating content and replacing it with an image, a configurational mode of reading? This is how digital culture is rupturing textual ontologies and, in drawing attention to modalities of thinking and bringing them into being, and transmuting them into digital phenomenology.

II. The Canon

The realities that arise from connecting the material social, the economic and the technological realities of digital reading and its configurational phenomenology mean that we can interpret them as lines of inquiry the humanities in general and the digital humanities in particular are taking more and more seriously, especially in relation to their social role and their economic positions within an increasingly neoliberal context for the university. It is important to consider the conditions under which habits of seeing and thinking are pressured to be transformed, partly through the impulse for innovation and partly as a response to techno-capitalist pressures. I am not making an argument for or against neoliberalization of the university here, merely asserting that this is the reality for most universities today, and that it can be understood as a stimulus that the humanities, DH, and the canon are responding to. I am arguing, rather, that because digital reading is an increasingly pervasive part of everyone’s lives, one effect of the digital revolution is the democratization of literature. I am further arguing that this has led to democratizing perspectives on literature through digitality, and that means that the digital humanities are more democratized, and also more neoliberalized.

So now, as I am wont to do, I will end this post with a provocation about the future of canonicity: If the argument is that the democratization of DH is tied up with its neoliberarlization, what effects will this have on DH’s impact on canonicity? Is it possible that canon can become simultaneously more democratized and more neoliberalized, or do the two mutually exclude each other?

Isabella Does Not Exist

In Bruce R. Smith’s chapter “As It Likes You” in his book Phenomenal Shakespeare, Lacan’s ideas about how identity is constructed through language are featured. He observes that the “gap between imago and language in Lacan’s scheme opens up… a space for phenomenology, for knowing-through-the-body that has a fraught, perhaps tragic relationship to knowing-through-language” (25). Yet how can we discuss this “knowing-through-the-body” without looking at how the body, particularly the gendered body, fits into the Lacanian scheme? Smith rightly identifies that there is a space for phenomenology along those shared borders, particularly within Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and its troubling (and yes, perhaps tragic) figure of Isabella.

Lacan once infamously claimed that “la femme n’existe pas” (“woman does not exist,” or perhaps more precisely, “the woman does not exist”) (Seminar XXI, March 1973). Lacan’s central idea on gender, then, is that “there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman” (Fink 115). As there is no Lacanian signifier for Woman, it may also be useful to read Isabella in similar terms because she cannot precisely be said to exist unless she can be read through a referent: as Lacan postulates Woman, Shakespeare can perhaps be seen to postulate Isabella. Considering this component of Lacanian thought lends nuance to the subjective nature of “knowing-through-the-body” and can yield fruitful discourse about phenomenology. To push it to the extreme, it may even be possible to apply object-oriented ontology to the concept of Isabella; she is so powerfully yoked to patriarchal structures, she seems to exist in relation to the men around her almost exclusively. The same can be read into the other female characters in the play: (1) Mistress Overdone’s brothel; (2) Juliet’s pregnancy; and (3) Mariana’s sexual fungibility.

Smith observes that in “Lacan’s scheme of psychic development, perception through and of one’s own body comes before speech” (25), but an ambiguity lies therein. Perception through one’s own body is clear enough, but whose perception of that body really matters? It might be Isabella’s own, but it could just as easily be the Duke’s, or Angelo’s, or her brother’s, or even the nuns’. Furthermore, if this perception is meant to come before speech, Isabella’s silence in the closing scene takes on a new meaning.

If we are to adhere to the Lacanian framework and if we continue to consider that Isabella can be read as Isabella under erasure, then it stands to reason that her silence is the beginning of her identity’s partial dissolution. At the play’s beginning, she is loquacious and persuasive, sure that she can convince Angelo to free Claudio. As affairs progress, she gradually quietens and ceases to trust that she will be believed at all. As Smith points out, “Lacanian psychoanalytical theory maintains that there is nothing natural about personal identity, that it is scripted by language, and that language is in turn scripted by culture. We speak a different cultural language; therefore we know a different cultural reality” (23). Using Isabella’s experiences, it is possible to work backwards through Lacan’s theory. Her cultural reality is stripped from her through a series of shocking experiences that culminate in the revelation that the brother she thought dead is in fact alive. She also learns that the friar she believed to be an ally and trusted confidant is actually the Duke, a man who had the power to put a stop to her suffering at any time, yet wants to marry her now (and they lived uneasily ever after, like Walter and Griselda). After all of that, her silence is only natural. She does not have the language for the new cultural reality that has overtaken her old one, and if personal identity is scripted by language, then in a Lacanian sense, her identity as she knew it has effectively been erased.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.

Remediating Cultural Mem(e)ory in the New Media Universe

I.

This blog post grows out of an exercise on temporality that my Digital Humanities class undertook a few weeks ago. For the exercise, I chose to consider a webpage called Classical Art Memes, with emphasis on the way it combines high art, low/vulgar interventions, and the meme culture of remix and remediation. I also chose to examine notions of cultural memory, print culture v. the new media universe with specific regard to the notion of fixity as defined by Elizabeth Eisenstein, and the evolving nature of language.

In the fields of book history and print culture, Elizabeth Eisenstein is known as one of the greatest historians of the book within the field. Her writing about the print revolution has as one of its central claims that one of the effects print and printing had was something she termed “fixity,” by which she means the way in which knowledge grew increasingly “fixed” or pinned down as they were printed in increasingly standard forms, and standard versions of books were reproduced and disseminated from library to library across the world. Eisenstein claims that we only really have a western tradition of knowledge because it is based on the print revolution which created stable, fixed forms of knowledge, and perhaps we can extrapolate that to include cultural memory as well, if we include things like the literary canon.

However, we now  find ourselves in a new media universe in which fixity seems a distant dream. There are attempts made to “fix” the web and pin it down as it is, through something like the internet web archive, but even then, this is not the fixity we want, because it lacks the authority and the reliability of the Official Archive, or Repository, Library, Holding, etc. The web is in a state of constant flux, almost like a living thing or a tidal ocean, and the web archive can only give us records, like snapshots, of ways that it has been – what is missing, then, is the stability of future expectations. While chapter 6 of Bleak House will be, in essence, the same in twenty or forty or two hundred years, and you could go to a library in the future and read it because it is “fixed,” we have no way of anticipating the web that way. This was clear even in McLuhan’s day; the new media age is instant and simultaneous – the light switch is on, and this is how the global village exists. Everything that is happening happens at the same time. It is no longer sequential, in the plodding, one-foot-in-front-of-the-next way of print. Without this fixity, though, we are now scrambling both conceptually and grammatically to find new ways to think about what the experience of historicity and of time might be in the new media age.

I posit that the meme is to the new media universe what the book is to print culture. (Loosely.) It is both medium and message, it represents cultural memory better than any other media format I can think of, and it functions as simultaneous iteration and emulation of both history and memory. Alan Liu has said that at this very moment, we find ourselves on the

“seam of a tremendous destabilization of notions of historicity and of temporality, and just like we are with the notion of reading where we are inventing all these words, distant, close, surface, etc, to try to stabilize once more what we mean by reading, the experience of historicity and temporality are so unstable that we are reaching for new concepts and words.”

We see this reflected in so many different aspects of our lives and our culture, and even our language, with the explosion of post-digital retronyms like “analog clock” when pre-digital clocks were just called “clocks,” or “film camera” has to specify that its functionality materially differs from the digital. It’s as though we are retro-fitting a vocabulary onto media archaeology.

I do not argue that memes offer similar stability or that they are equivalent to books in terms of generating fixity in print culture. Instead I suggest that they can be read metonymically for the larger, more generative, and more flexible fixity that finds purchase in the new media universe.

II.

The exercise:

Classical art is a good place to begin contemplating an exercise on temporality. The very term “classical art” refers, in its purest and most correct sense (that is to say, correct to art historians), to the art of ancient Greece and Rome.

If we can consider time and age as a form as aesthetic remediation, then classical art is endowed with one of the most enduring legacies of cultural currency. That said, the website Classical Art Memes does not limit itself to art from the classical period and world – the Waterhouse portrait of Ophelia used as the example here is quintessentially Pre-Raphaelite, and therefore about 19 centuries too late to qualify as properly classical. This implies something about how the content creators are thinking about the “high” art (read: Western European art historical tradition, usually oil paintings) that they use as a vehicle for their memes; the veneer of elegant, polished, high art is used to lend contrast to the silly colloquial text content that make up the rest of the meme. Because the content creators (mis)use “classical art” as a synonym for high art, they signal to us that we are meant to understand all high art as a meme-like backdrop for a given kind of meme. In the same way anytime we see Sean Bean in his LOTR Boromir costume, and know to expect a “One does not simply” meme, all “high” art becomes a meme for itself, visually, within the larger frame of the meme it makes up.

Let us consider, for a moment, the anatomy of the meme media format. It consists of an image as a backdrop, and text over it, and the interplay between these two create a new kind of message. They are almost always meant to be funny, and are a pastiche of art, text, single-frame cartoon, illustration, and pithy quote. In terms of language – always an important thing to consider when thinking about temporality and media evolution – they have also developed a grammar and a syntax all of their own. For instance, there have been analyses done by linguists on the Doge memes, proving that there are correct and incorrect ways to write them.

In the Doge meme’s linguistic universe, “such meme” is correct, but “such mediality” would not be since it would technically be possible to use it correctly in a sentence in English. In the same way, “much cute,” is more correct than “much cuteness,” and then there’s the fact that the word “wow” can go anywhere and supersedes the otherwise fairly rigorously set internal logic of the Doge meme syntax. The utter irrationality of that fact makes it, interestingly enough, quite like real languages – every language I can think of has some sort of inexplicable rule that must be respected: English certainly, French certainly, Italian has nouns that change gender when they are plural, and no one knows why other than to say it’s a holdover from Latin, ditto Spanish. Mandarin has no verb tenses, which always hurt my brain, and Arabic’s written and spoken languages and their respective, distinct rules are so distant from each other that to speak the written version out loud would be like me speaking to you in Chaucer’s English.

Much in the same way language evolves in unpredictable and sometimes nonsensical ways, memes are evolving to have a grammar and a syntax all their own. If we can consider memes this way, then we can also begin to consider meme-indexing websites like Know Your Meme  (aka the Internet Meme Database) as proto-dictionaries and style guides. There is a logic by which the memes are sorted, namely into categories like: confirmed, researching, popular, submissions, and deadpool, and which can be cross-tagged with the following: events, memes, people, sites, and subcultures. There is no criteria listed on the website to explain how a meme moves from “submission” to “popular” and then “confirmed” (if that is even indeed the order in which things progress) and, at the time of writing, the website more closely resembles LOLcats than OWL Purdue, but ultimately what matters here is that there is even an attempt to create an Internet Meme Database.

This is suggestive of two points that dovetail with Eisenstein’s concept of fixity: 1. That fixity in the new media/internet universe is significantly more difficult to achieve than it is (or was) in print culture; and 2. That despite this increased complexity, the human impulse towards fixity persists, and this is why there are “correct” and “incorrect” internal logics and grammars operating within meme types like the Doge memes, and the classic “One does not simply” memes. For example, below I’m including a “wrong” meme in which I’ve “broken” the rules of both memes’ internal logics:

Much as in the case of grammatical errors, we recognize them and we know that they are erroneous, but it can be hard sometimes to pinpoint exactly why. Part of what gives  memes cultural power, then, might be less about their internal logics and more to do with their easily internalized logics. This internalization is the new media universe’s answer to Eisenstein’s fixity. Rather than depending on the texts’ multitudinous existence to assure their fixity, as in print culture, then, we can perhaps begin to understand memes’ fixity through pop culture’s easy, even eager internalization of their form and content, their medium and their message. And so begins the formulation of a grammar, or  at least a structured way of thinking about memes and their cultural function.

In the case of the Classical Art Memes, their language’s internal logic coheres around rude or lewd statements, often full of innuendo (or sometimes more explicit content), and they are rife with the abbreviations that web language has given rise to, like “OMFG”  as well as uniquely lower-case lettering (see the above Ophelia frame). In this way, the Classical Art Memes format appropriates the elevated tone that the fine arts and high art sets, a tone that it acquires by virtue of being old art as much as by being good art, and radically transforms it.

These memes make a mockery of the art through their intermediality, and in that way also make fun of the entire concept of high/fine/elevated art. Their refusal to adhere to art historical terms, that is to say to only use examples of classical art from the Greco-Roman world, then, is not evidence of ignorance on the subject of classical art, but rather a way of understanding that high/fine art demands to be paid a certain kind of attention, and a way of answering, to put it the best way I can to make this point:

Through this denial or high culture’s own insistence to command a certain modicum of respect, these memes demonstrate a shift in modes of cultural memory. And if we understand cultural memory as a mutable parcel of memory, history, and time that is constantly in a process of being transmitted, perhaps even virally, as we say, then that is effectively also the definition of a meme. This speaks to the original definition of the word “meme,” which of course shares a common root in Greek with the words “memory,” “mimesis,” and “mnemonic.” Memes, in the original sense, can be defined as repeated ideas that are culturally transmitted, often through repetitions and imitations. In this way, they act as an almost living memory that gets passed around a culture, and there is none of the care about authenticity that “fixity” demands, making them flexible fixities operating at a different order of magnitude. At a time when cultural memory, as it has been institutionalized in its iterations as the humanities and, more specifically, the literary canon, I will end this post with a provocation: Could it be that in the future the humanities will be not a mode of cultural memory, but of cultural memes?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This post is a lightening round of notes on STC designed to function as a little aide-memoire on some of the important terms associated with him.

Coleridge (1772-1834) is the Romantic poet-philosopher most concerned with defining imagination, its consequences, and its ability to reform the mind.

STC’s definitions of the imagination reform prior notions of imagination; we can therefore read “Kubla Khan” as both a description and enactment of imagination, and see his idea of reform through imagination at work.

Imagination/Fancy (689)

Phantazein: to present to the mind

Primary imagination: faculty of creative perception

Secondary imagination: with addition of will, faculty of conscious creation

It is vital, even as all objects (as objects) are fixed and dead.

 

 

CanPo Roundup!

Hi gang,

I’m back with a few notes on some Canadian Poetry (or CanPo if you must abbreviate everything, and I live in Southern California, so I do).

My comprehensive exams are rapidly approaching and I’m soon going to be done the Canadian literature section of the twentieth century anglophone list.

Today I’m writing about the poetry section of that list, which requires knowledge of the works of Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Michael Ondaatje, P.K. Page, Margaret Avison, Al Purdy, and Margaret Atwood (whose novel Surfacing is also on the list, write-up posted here).

Armed with my trusty Geddes, a cup of coffee, and some truly exquisite baklava straight from Beirut, we are good to go.

Earle Birney (1904-1995)

Birney writes satire and criticism about the economic and political atrocities of the American empire. The organizing principle of his poetry (and Al Purdy’s too, sometimes) is to contemplate something, like a “height of land (say Tintern Abbey) and is moved to discover some personal and universal significance in his experience” (Geddes 50). We can see this at work in “Vancouver Lights” and “A Walk in Kyoto” among others.

Geddes writes that “Birney’s energies were continually engaged in coming to terms with his need for a social identity and with his separateness as an artist. Despite his involvement in the war and the universities, he always was an outsider, beset by internal and external forces that kept him from feeling fulfilled. He resented society’s indifference to the artist and feels intensely that the artist has a cure for society’s ills” (50). This is a theme that comes up often in a lot of the works from the twentieth century anglophone list, and is a leitmotif I think might be good to mention and use in the exam.

To be continued!

 

Pomodoro

So lately I’ve been getting a bunch of questions about my time-management and work-life balance, so I thought today I’d just quickly share what I do and how I do it. Basically, this blog is the tip of the iceberg of the reading and writing I do, with many drafts about many other readings waiting in the wings to be polished up and posted, and significantly more that is never destined for the blog at all. It’s not easy to determine how many hours a day I need to spend reading for my qualifying exams (I do at least two daily, but it’s not unusual to do as much as twelve or fourteen), writing up the notes on those readings, writing my own research, reading for my own research, reading for classes, writing those notes, and researching and reading and writing for those classes too. It takes some juggling.

Part of what’s challenging about this lifestyle in which you are constantly overwhelmed by the work you need to do, very little of which you can easily finish in a normal eight-hour workday, is that we have huge blocks of unstructured time. This quarter, I go into campus two days a week, on Tuesdays for classes I’m taking and teaching, and then Thursday for the lecture for the course I’m assisting to teach. For some reason, some people I talk to seem to think this equals a four day weekend. I have to laugh, because if PhDs took four day weekends, it would take us fifteen years to get our degrees, and nobody wants that. What it really means is that I have five days of unstructured work time, four of which are consecutive. There are no days on which I do not read for a minimum of two hours, and very few days where I do not write a daily quota of two pomodoros (more on that in a sec) or 1000 words minimum. Normally I will read for two hours straight every morning before doing anything else. It’s honestly a pretty easy part of the job to get up at 6, make some coffee, and climb back into bed with a novel till 8 or 9 am, and it’s nice to feel like you’ve accomplished a daily task so early in the day.

It’s the writing that’s a little harder to figure out how to time-manage. Writing does not resemble a job like brick-laying, which is going to more or less require the same level of effort/time to lay. This means you can estimate how many bricks can be laid in a given hour by a given person. If the average is 1000 a day, then the guy who did 800 had a bad day, and the guy who did 1200 is doing great.  There is a measured and measurable expectation of productivity which makes assessment possible. Writing is not like this. Writing is a mercurial task. Sometimes you get the odd unicorn day where it just pours out of you comfortably and easily. Most of the time it’s hard work, and you remember that old Hemingway quote: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” at least once as you sit there. And then there are the bad days, when you stare at the cursor malevolently blinking at you, and nothing comes. Those are the worst.

In terms of work-life balance, mental wellness, and the cultivation of a professional persona, those bad days are hard on morale. An unproductive day is a bad day, for the writer and the academic, as we measure (and ARE measured) largely by our output. So even if you had the best idea you’ve ever had in your life that day, unless you can put it on the page, it’s a bad day. When you do an eight hour day that yields nothing, and your materials are your brain and your words and your creativity, it can feel like you’re worth nothing. Our work is highly individual, and that lends a different, more personal quality to the nature of the labour we perform than, say, the labour of a person who sells DVDs at the HMV megastore. This is in no way an assessment or judgment of how hard these types of work are, if they can be compared at all. Rather, my impression here is that while all labour is soul sucking, writing is soul sucking in a more personal way, as it is fulfilling in a more personal way too, than, say,  ringing up movies all day at a cash register was for me.

It also means that the strategies in place to deal with the bad days need to be different person-to-person. There are as many strategies out there as there are people who use them. I’ve tried a lot of different ones, but the one I use the most is called the Pomodoro technique, or a version of it I’ve customized to my own work style.

The way it works is that you use a kitchen timer to help create focused windows of productive time. I put my phone and iPad onto airplane mode. I turn the wifi off on my laptop or I activate the SelfControl app if I need to be writing code. I keep a notebook and a pen in front of me, and my word document open in front of me, and I write. That’s it. You can write “I hate this why god why did I think this was a good idea please can’t I go back in time and just be an investment banker who hates her life in a NORMAL way because at least then I could afford avocados whenever I wanted them” over and over again for the entire allotted time. But you have to keep going. The one rule is Get it on the page. Paper or word processor. Doesn’t matter. But you have to keep writing until the timer goes off. No reading, no stopping, no distractions. If I get an idea or remember something, I’ll jot it down in the margins (Renew library books/ Check this reference/ find quote!) but that’s it. It’s HIIT for your writing.

Tons of people have a version of this, but this one is mine. A friend of mine is an occupational therapist who focuses on neuropsychology, and her dissertation focus was on the biomechanics of productivity. She told me about an article she had read that showed that productivity in the human brain usually taps out after 50 minutes, so I tried that out and now I like to do 50 minute Pomodoro intervals. I take ten minute breaks in between, and do a maximum of three before stopping for at least an hour. Doing 4 just burns me out and then, as my friend Bryan says, “you can’t chop with a blunt axe.” So today’s workday looks like this:

I read for 3 Pomodoros (50 on, 10 off, 50 on, 10 off, 50 on), had breakfast, and practiced the flute for an hour. Then I did my writing Pomodoros: 2 Pomodoros (50 on, 10 off, 50 on. Then I wrote this blog post (another 1000 words but I don’t count these to my academic writing quota). Now that I’ve hit my minimum quotas for the day I’m going to the gym, and then I’ll assess what kind of work I feel like continuing with in the evening. I think I feel like practicing Italian, and doing a few hours of work on a research project I work for. I don’t use the Pomodoro intervals in the evenings because their only purpose is to keep me on track for my daily quotas. Then I’ll read in bed until I fall asleep (Heart of Darkness tonight) and wake up and do it all over again. And that’s my life! I think it’s pretty great.

 

Macarons and Defenestration: The Adventures of Christopher Circumflex

This is the story of Mr. Christopher Circumflex, a swashbuckling piece of text who boldly went on many fascinating adventures. For breakfast every morning, he would eat commas and apostrophes (he loved Italic food) and was often praised for his appetite, though he tried not to let the adulation go to his head. 

His hobbies included

• water-skiing
• macramé
• and tight-rope walking

although sometimes, after he had eaten too big a breakfast, the tightrope line would break

.

.

.

and he would fall through the air and land hard on his asterisk. He took these falls with good grace, however, and, would brush his hands off on his breeches, laughing as if it were all in good fun.

He’d read about much worse falls altogether. Indeed, his friend Sir Tilde had told him just the other day, over tea, of a particularly dreadful fall out of a window  and into a WAR, if such a thing can be believed (everyone knows windows are for looking in as one browses, not being pushed out of, and besides, Sir Tilde was prone to hyperbole.) But he insisted it was true, and even pulled up a photograph of the window in question, mumbling half-apologetically about it all happening eons ago, and who can know what really happened:

 

In the afternoons Christopher would go and play the links with his friends, Sir Tilde, Fräulein Umlaut, and Monsieur Cédille, who had a terrible lisp, and would fly into a French rage at the thmallest pertheived thlight, and would only be placated by the liberal dispensation of pistachio macarons, which his friends kept about their person for just such a purpose.

As such, while cookies are the most commonly used form of baked good to smooth passages from link to link, in the case of these friends, their traversals ended more often than not with them brushing sticky green crumbs out of the lining of their tweed jacket pockets, and muttering under their breath about the French.

Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

Surfacing is Margaret Atwood’s second novel, published in 1972. These are my reading notes.

The narrator is a complex woman in search of her missing father, and as the novel unfolds, we are given snippets of her history. She lived on an island in rural Quebec. Her mother died of brain cancer. Her father has disappeared. Her brother drowned off the end of their dock before she was born. She got married and had a child, and then got divorced and abandoned her husband and child. Her parents never forgave her divorce, or her abandoning the baby. But the unnamed speaker is an unreliable narrator. Later on it’s revealed that she was never married to the man, but that he was her married art professor, and that she did get pregnant from their affair, and he took her to an abortion clinic to terminate the pregnancy. We cannot be sure she ever told her parents she got married or had a baby, or that their forgiveness or lack thereof ever had a chance to manifest itself. The only material evidence of any of this, really, is that she wears a gold wedding band, and the first time she mentions it she claims it makes things easier at motels, and with landladies. In a similar way, her “drowned” brother only nearly drowned, but was rescued and survived the incident with no consequence. He’s not actively present in the novel except in her memory, since he seems to live in a remote part of Asia and cannot be reached; she isn’t even sure if he got the news about their father’s disappearance. The only other detail we hear about him, and he is also unnamed in the novel, as are her father and mother, is that he used to capture small animals and would torture and experiment on them in a makeshift laboratory on the island. At one point, the narrator discovers them after he had neglected to take care of them for a while, and found half of them starved or frozen to death, and the other half she released back into nature, much to her brother’s fury when he found out.

In terms of the novel’s atmosphere, the story opens with the narrator going home to rural Quebec to look for her missing father. It’s a fascinating portrait of a Quebec that has, for the most part, vanished today. Atwood has an eye for details that are dated, that feel distinctly mid-century, and that are beginning to decay or go out of style – the fringed clothes, the winged cars, the advertisements they pass on the road. Atwood also emphasizes an element of Quebec culture, Catholicism, that lost its grip in the 60s during the Révolution Tranquille in which people moved away from the church:

“A clutch of children playing in the wet mud that substitutes for lawns; most of them dressed in clothes too big for them, which makes them seem stunted. “They must fuck a lot here,” Anna says, “I guess it’s the Church.” Then she says “Aren’t I awful.” David says “The true north strong and free” (16).

This serves to put forward the divide between the French of Quebec, who at the time of writing were in the throes of a nationalist movement, and the rest of North America. Anna (who the narrator claims is American but then later contradicts herself) remarks on what she perceives to be a soci0-cultural difference, and the comment makes her seem disrespectful, coldly superficial, and unsympathetic. In that moment, Anna is awful, but it’s not for the reason she thinks she is. To her, and perhaps by extension also the two (maybe) American men in the car with her and the unnamed narrator, Joe and David, Quebec is an uncanny sort of place, in the Freudian sense of the Unheimliche. Rather than being entirely foreign, like a country in Europe would be, and rather than being familiar, like the way Americans have the potential to feel at home in an Anglo-Canadian space, the cultural landscape of rural Quebec is uncomfortably familiar and yet utterly foreign, and it’s an unsettling ethos our four travelers find themselves in.

The unnamed narrator, who unwaveringly identifies as Canadian, and grew up an Anglo-Canadian in French Canada, is like her “American” counterparts, and cannot help but feel the same disturbing, uncanny tension between the familiar and the foreign. Her first stop on her quest to find her father is to visit a French Canadian couple who knew her parents:

“I wonder what they think I look like, they may find my jeans and sweatshirt and fringed over-the-shoulder bag strange, perhaps immoral, though such things may be more common in the village since tourists and the TV; besides, I can be forgiven because my family was, by reputation, peculiar as well as anglais. I lift my cup, they are watching me anxiously: it’s imperative that I mention the tea. “Très bon,” I manage to get out in the direction of Madame. “Délicieux.” Doubt seizes me, thé may be feminine.”

This is such a great passage because it brings home the alienation that anglophones can feel in situations like this. It’s not that you can’t speak the language; you can, and you do, but to make even the smallest mistake, or to have an accent that betrays you, is to announce your alienation, instantly and uncomfortably, to your auditors and to yourself. And it’s a particularly cruel alienation for someone who was born there and has lived there all her life, because it means that she not permitted to feel at home in her homeland. So what is this person, this belittled, beleaguered member of a linguistic/cultural minority, to make of” Quebec nationalism, when she is culturally un-homed by her otherness, her peculiarity, her anglais?

This is underlined in the second interaction the narrator has with French speakers in the novel. After taking tea with the couple, who are inclined to be friendly towards her, especially out of sympathy for the death of her mother and subsequent disappearance of her father, she stops to buy groceries, and tries to conduct the transaction in French.

“Avez-vous du viande hâché?” I ask her, blushing because of my accent. She grins and then the two men grin also, not at me but at each other. I see I’ve made a mistake, I should have pretended to be an American.

“Amburger, oh yes we have lots. How much?” she asks, adding the H carelessly to show she can if she feels like it. This is border country.

“A pound, no two pounds,” I say, blushing even more because I’ve been so easily discovered, they’re making fun of me and I have no way of letting them know I share in the joke. (30)

This scene is exceptional for its depiction of vicious, mundane cruelty enacted  with depressing regularity the world over. It is also something that Atwood’s writing has in common with Alice Munro’s: the ability to convey, in an almost offhand manner, the small ways in which the ugliness of human nature instantiates itself into daily life, quietly and insidiously. The tone of the writing is calm, accepting, easy even, and that is part of what makes both of these women’s writings so disquieting sometimes. Their representations of human interaction are not fraught with judgment, moralization, or even the suggestion that there’s a better way to be. The writing just flows forward with (maybe more so for Munro than for Atwood) a spare grace that creates chilling tensions at times. It’s brilliant.

Here is one of my favorite lines from the book that the narrator utters, and that exemplifies the genius Atwood has for cuttingly prescient statements (at time of writing, Trump is to be inaugurated at the end of the week): “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results” (34). The instance of evil that stood out to me in the novel was the part with the blue heron. The narrator and her friends are portaging a canoe across some land to get to an inner lake when they come across a blue heron that has been killed and strung up from a tree with blue nylon cord. She is profoundly shaken by this because there is no reason to kill a heron – they are not pests, they are not dangerous, and they are not good for meat. She knows immediately that this was done by Americans, stating that they kill for pleasure, and out of boredom, and that it’s the only thing a certain kind of man does for leisure, now that he’s back from the war and there’s nothing to do. Yet when they encounter the men on the lake, she is surprised to find out they are Canadian, from Sarnia and Toronto. The narrator doesn’t buy it though:

“But they’d killed the heron anyway. It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference […] If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do” (152).

This sheds new light on her prior assertion that her three traveling companions, Anna, David, and Joe, are American, when in fact they are all Canadian. It creates a narrative tension, broadening the divide between herself and these three. Only she and her family are unnamed in the novel, and it may have something to do with the fact that she cannot situate herself and her family geographically, culturally, societally, or in any other way. We know that the three traveling companions do not speak French, and that at least one of them is from Ontario for certain. I think it’s likely that they are all Anglo Canadians from English Canada. We know that Paul is a pure laine French Canadian from Quebec too. It seems that the most stable characters are the ones that are the most clearly or easily situated in the socio-political/geo-cultural map. The American man, Bill Malmstrom, (the only actual American in the novel, besides Evans, the guide) who comes up to make an offer on her father’s house, is easy to pin down – David even suspects him of being CIA, although I think this says more about David being a fanciful ass than it does about Malmstrom. The narrator’s family occupies a confusing liminality that makes them impossible to situate on that map, as recluses, as Anglo-Canadian minorities in French Canada, as a peculiar family, and as people who individually are impossible to locate. The mother is deceased, of course, and the brother is gone but not missing, and the father is impossible to find. Over the course of the novel, he occupies a Shroedinger-esque state of simultaneous alive/deadness. She thinks he must be dead, and then that he must be alive, and is on the island with them, watching them, waiting for them to leave, and evading attempts to discover him. It is an intensely creepy part of the narrative, almost Gothic in its quality of pervasive unease.

The end of the novel shares this near-Gothic quality as well. The narrator, falls into madness, but her psychosis has an undeniable internal logic. This is part of what is so disturbing about Surfacing; the insanity  feels quite sane more often than not. She decides she needs to get pregnant to replace the child she lost (she characterizes the child as “lost” like it was a miscarriage or something beyond her control… which in some ways maybe it was). She has sex with Joe, the boyfriend whose marriage proposal she has recently turned down, and who earlier that day had had sex with Anna (Anna’s life revolves around cheating more on David than David does on her. Their marriage is a stalemate of mutual hatred and cruelty which they sustain because to do otherwise would end the relationship, and they are a pair of co-dependent narcissists). Joe mistakes the narrator’s sexual advance as forgiveness for his transgression with Anna, but the narrator is beyond caring at that point. She believes she knows she is pregnant, and the next morning she destroys the film canisters of the movie the men were making, and runs away, hiding in the woods until they leave. Then she gets rid of her clothes, wearing only a blanket while she waits for her animal pelt to grow in because at this point she believes she is going to turn into an animal, and trashes the house, and builds herself a den outside like a woodland creature. She eats things from the garden, but is soon on the point of starvation. She walks the island, having moments of ice-clear lucidity (a fairly common symptom of fasting/starvation) and hallucinates that she can see her dead mother standing in the yard, feeding the jays from her hand. The novel closes with Joe coming back to find her, and he stands on the dock calling her name. She stays hidden, deciding whether or not to go back with him. It seems like she does choose to go with him, but it is not depicted with any kind of certainty. She calls her love for him “useless as a third eye or a possibility” (224) and she can see the kind of future they would have together, acknowledging the probability of failure. She also sees that he “isn’t an American… he is only half formed, and for that reason I can trust him” (224) and then she … what exactly? It’s not clear. She seems to decide to go to him, but still she does not move: “To trust is to let go. I tense forward, toward the demands and questions, though my feet do not move yet.” (224) and this is how the final scene ends, with Joe waiting, and with the narrator poised to come forward to him, yet not moving.

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Byron – She Walks in Beauty (1813)

This poem is pumpkin spice latte level in terms of being a basic bitch favorite. Put it up there with the Sonnets from the Portuguese and some Pablo Neruda and you’ve got  yourself a trifecta of about 99% of what’s on Pinterest poetry boards covered.

It is on the quals list, I expect, because it is famous and popular, and it is popular because it is beautiful, but popularity and beauty don’t really mean that it has a great deal of poetic merit in terms of conveying meaning, evoking feeling, or provoking thought, which is what the best poetry does/should do. That said, I always tell my students that poetry of any kind falls on a spectrum between literature and music, and this poem has inspired a lot of music and art, so while my taste and training run closer to the literature end, this poem falls away from that and lands more on the music/art end. It’s very short, so I’ll post it here:

        She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

In terms of form and genre, it’s an 18-line poem in 3 stanzas of six lines each, it’s a lyric poem, and it’s in iambic tetrameter (so, four iambs per line, iambs being two-syllable “feet” of unstressed-stressed syllables – see the scan of the first line below).

x       /         x   /         x   /         x       /
She walks in beauty, like the night

The story behind this poem is that Lord Byron met his cousin by marriage at a ball, and she was in mourning dress, wearing a black sparkly dress, and he wrote this the next day.

Wordsworth – The Thorn

This poem opens with a description of an old, gnarled thorn growing on a mountaintop, near a muddy pond and a small mound, about the size of a child’s grave. We are given to understand that it is well tended and very beautiful, with a gorgeous array of colors, green, red, white; moss and flowers growing on the child’s grave.

There is a woman there in a scarlet cloak (imagery evocative of a “scarlet woman,” so already bringing in the Fallen Woman trope) weeping and crying “misery!” and “woe is me.” She is always there beside the thorn, and always lamenting. The idea that the thorn is old and gnarled may give some indication that this grave has been there a long time too. The woman may not be a young mother recently bereaved, then, but an older woman lamenting an old loss. She lives in a hut near the spot, and the speaker states that the grave is such a beautiful spot that if one spots her in her hut, one should go straight to the spot and enjoy it while possible, because no one dares go near it while she’s there. I find this kind of insensitive; the spot is beautiful because it is the well-tended grave of a child she buried and still grieves almost night and day. Maybe it is because I think grief is and should be private, and this speaker is intrusive in his desire to go look at the grave’s beautiful colors, and rude in even just his awareness that she’s always there, since he hints she’s blocking the spot from his and perhaps other people’s enjoyment.

Then we get some of her history: He states “Full twenty years are past and gone” since she, Martha Ray, was to give her hand in marriage to one Stephen Hill, but he left her at the altar and married another girl, and she was left heartbroken. The speaker is sympathetic to her plight, saying “Poor Martha!” Six months later, she is always going up to the mountaintop and it is clear that she is pregnant. She is exceedingly sad, and some people in the village gossip that the unborn child is actually helping clear her depression and restore her to a more healthful state of mind: “And when at last her time drew near / Her looks were calm, her senses clear.” But the story stops there. No one knows what happened – she would often go up into the mountains, and nobody knows if the baby was stillborn, or if it was born alive and she killed it. The speaker mentions some people think she hanged the baby from a nearby tree, or drowned it in the muddy pond, but everyone agrees that the mossy mound is where she buried the baby.

“I’ve heard, the moss is spotted red

With drops of that poor infant’s blood;

But kill a new-born infant thus,

I do not think she could!

Then there’s a bit about how if you go to the pond and look into the water, the baby will look back out at you, and that there have been people who wanted to dig up the bones and bring her to justice, but when they tried, the land began to shake and it scared them off, so there’s an element of the supernatural at play here, or at least superstition. The speaker says “I cannot tell how this may be” and does not really comment on that further, just states that the thorn is always struggling up against the moss that seems bent on dragging it down to the earth, and the woman is always there wailing and crying “misery” and so she and the thorn, both aged, gnarled, past blooming, keep their sorry vigil over the child’s grave.