Image and Aesthetic - A Commonplace Book

Just to clarify: this blog was a limited-time exercise for ENGL469, one of my fourth-year classes at the University of Otago. The paper code then (2006) stood for a general Topic in Modernism, but it seems to change around quite a lot. This year it's a little more specific, focusing on annotating Beckett's work.

Unreliable narrator

It's actually one of my favourite devices for an author to use - I think I read too many books as a child that assumed kind of complicit trust, or suspension of disbelief, for the reader.

So, trusting HH is difficult: he talks about his photographic memory:
"I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry
in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) ... then, I copied it out with obvious abbrevia-
tions in my smallest, most satanic hand...."

And Charlotte's letter to HH - this is not her kind of language:
"You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate
and lonely woman and you are the love of my life. . . . Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny
while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces
(illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon très, très cher, what a world of love I
have built up for you during this miraculous June!"

As we discussed in class, Charlotte is unfairly treated by HH in his prose; he's remembering her a little differently (i.e. more bovine) than she perhaps appeared to him - in contrast with her daughter.

F.W. Dupree says of Charlotte: she is "whatever it is that spoils the party and dampens the honeymoon all across America." - not too different to HH's opinions...

Wilde - the shudder

Wilde: "It is the shudder that counts", after a performance of Salome. Salome was actually quite a strange play for Wilde, not really in keeping with the rest of his work - his characters usually didn't display emotion so openly.

This is interesting, but too much of a tangent...

Keats: Art and Beauty

Source?

General outlook, and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

From that poem, we take that the knowledge of beauty and truth combined (or equivalent) is enough to create Art in the urn, which can still 'speak' to people who observe it, which can remind us that, as observers, we can't in the same way... Or indeed, we do not have the status of 'objects of art', so to speak - we do not exist in the 'infinite' time that the urn, or Art, does.

But it's those two lines of Keats' poem - "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty" - that are key here. Nabokov's Humbert Humbert recognises beauty, but doesn't really coexist with the realm of truth, which is the paradox.

On a side note, here's a manuscript (a transcription in Geroge Keats' handwriting - the original manuscript/ first draft was lost):

Week 24/25: Nabokov

Nabokov in 1949 (Cornell publicity photo):

Links:

CNN's Beyond Lolita,
Vestige.org's coverage,
Cornell's 50th anniversary website, and
Questia's search results.

Class notes:

Humbert's language as the 'bait' that hooks you in..
The construction of the novel - double theme throughout

All the stops are pulled out -> the language [HH as a monster with an (exquisite) aesthetic sense]
- "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"

Mario Praz -"The Romantic Agony" - Romanticism and Decadence

Aesthetics without a moral force underpinning it (Aesthetics without Beauty) cf Keats - art and beauty, cf Wilde and the shudder

- Aesthetic shaping of the material ->orchestration of detail not unlike the Joycean epiphany.

[The idea that Art and Beauty have nothing in common]

Nabokov admired Joyce - Ulysses - no "social intent" (and nothing bored N. more than social intent)

N. used the Thesis/Antithesis//Synthesis - a fan of the triadic structure.

[Blending enchantment with revulsion]

cf 'A Girl in the Head' -> Boris as a failed HH, in some ways - thinks he's cultured, but... (also cannot act, limited to keeping the girl in his head...)

[end - HH's genuine love, empathy for Lolita. -> unexpected, involuntary - more genuine.

Jekyll/Hyde = Quilty/HH...

Photo (Lolita, Olympia Press, 1955):

One more Borges link

I just read this, which is pretty great - it's basically a revisionist look at Borges' work, in the context of phenomena emerging after his desk being his greatest influences.

Week 22/23: Borges

Since we discussed the stories in a fair amount of detail in class, I'd rather look at Borgesian ideas in a slightly different context on this site:

I wrote on Borges prefiguring the hypertext for Rochelle's class, specifically on "The Garden of Forking Paths", where Borges describes "an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times.” I don't want to cover that ground again, but I think as long as I stay away from Borges-as-literary-Cubist I should be fine.

Here's the picture that Barry found and sent to the class - I think we looked at it last year when we read "The Library of Babel":

Note that the site it's from (http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/) is a variant on the Discordian ('joke-worship' of Eris, goddess of chaos) idea, and includes extracts from the Discordian Bible-equivalent, the Principia Discordia. Reliable? Not really, but these people really appreciate a good story, especially one that Makes You Think.

In "The Total Library", Borges followed the infinite-monkey idea back to Aristotle's Metaphysics, where A explains Leucippus' views: basically that the world came about through random combinations of atoms... A adds to L's ideas, but mentions that atoms are effectively the same, and that the only differences are in the placing and order.

He follows the argument through people like Pascal and Swift - in 1939, when the essay was published, it was phrased that "a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum." Borges, with his tendency to reduce things, notes that "strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice."

Then, he continues:

"Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanes of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves — shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies — ever reward them with a tolerable page."

Fantastic.

Also, on infinite hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth.

Week 20/21: Lowry and genetic criticism tangents

Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
And died playing the ukelele.
(from 'Epitaph')

Links:

An in-depth look at the novel here, some trivia questions here,, and another, more serious study here. And, of course, Chris Ackerley's site here.

From a biography:

Lowry lived in London and then in Paris until 1935. He travelled to Spain with Aiken and met there the American writer Jan Gabrial. They married in 1934 and moved in 1935 to the United States. He spent some time in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. After writing the novel LUNAR CAUSTIC, publishded posthumously in 1958, he went to Mexico, which became the settings of Under the Volcano. In Cuernavaca and the nearby volcanoes he found the perfect landscape for his novel. The snowy peak of Popocatepetl was for him a symbol of aspiration, and the deep woods in the surroundings formed the opposite, lower depths.

In Oaxaca Lowry was thrown into a jail-he was considered a Spanish spy. Once he forgot the first draft of his manuscript in a bar. By the time Lowry left Mexico, his first marriage was in ruins. Later, in her book Inside the Volcano (2000), Jan Gabrial wrote that "He would drink anything. I had thrown out the rubbing alcohol I'd used to massage his back, but he gulped the contents of a bottle he thought contained hair tonic but which Josefina had refilled with cooking oil..." His second wife, the novelist Margerie Bonner, Lowry met in Los Angeles. He moved in 1939 to Dollarton, British Columbia, where he built for himself and for his wife a squatters shack to live. The hut burned down in 1944, but Margerie Bonner managed to save his manuscript from the fire.

After a short visit to Mexico in 1945, the Lowrys returned to Canada, where they stayed until 1954, then moving to England. During his last years Lowry planned a modern, "drunken Divine Comedy," a sequence of seven novels built around Under the Volcano, titled The Voyage That Never Ends. He had already written the "Purgatory" part, "Paradise" had been destroyed in the fire. Simultaneously Lowry worked on a number of manuscripts, unable to bring his plans to completion. Under the Volcano was for a short time on a best-seller list in the United States, but according to the author, the book sold in Canada only two copies. In France is was a critical success and hailed immediately as a classic.

"Neurosis, of one kind and another, is stamped on almost every word he writes, both neurosis and a kind of fierce health. Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth and it is this that adds to his isolation and so to his sense of guilt." (from Hear Us O Lord heaven thy dwelling place, 1962)
By 1940 Lowry had written an early, unpublishable edition of Under the Volcano. He had sent it to his agent Harold Matson, but after twelve publishers had rejected the manuscript Matson returned it. The next five years he spent rewriting and deepening the magical and mythical elements, especially after meeting a Cabbalist, Charles Stansfield-Jones, spiritual son of Alesteir Crowley. The novel went through innumerable revisions, many with Margerie Lowry's help, and was eventually published by Jonathan Cape ten years after the author started to work on it.

Apparently, Lowry wrote countless revisions of Under the Volcano (hereafter Volcano) - I'd love to get a copy of [Asals, Frederick. The Making of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998.] - the author has assembled a kind of ur-text of the novel, based on notebooks and previous versions of the book.

Textual evolution is fascinating stuff - it's like recreating the thought processes that led to the construction of the text - as annotation mediates between the author and reader, study of textual evolution could potentially get closer to the author's true intentions for the text. Leaving aside the intentions of the text for a moment, textual history, using the "avante-texte" (correspondences, notes, sketches, drafts, manuscripts and proofs), can give an intelligent reader a greater glimpse into what was actually going on...
But isn't that what English study is all about? Well, scholars use letters and manuscripts and proofs et al frequently, but separately. I think that's what is key - genetic criticism seems to aim at framing a text in a precise context, but a context where the 'final' text isn't the main point - it's the revisions and the writing process itself...

For Lowry, though, I think what it does it remove the myth of him as a drunk who managed to pull together the pieces of a messy book into a readable work, and actually acknowledge his writing skills and obvious passion for both the book and the act of writing.

Week 18: Pound's Pisan Cantos - cursory notes

[cf notes on earlier Cantos]

Images - sensory - the smells - mint under the tent/ sausages etc...
These act as fragments of sense in what otherwise seems to me a rather nonsensical series of poems...

[Remember, Mussolini has just been hanged - this is the end of a dream, when he is somewhat despised for his politics and his actions during a time he was doing what he thought was right, or fitting. (Maybe "meet" is the right term here.)]

cf Canto 2 -> Metamorphosis.
Rhyme -> situational/ historical/ social/ linguistic ...
_

Dynamic context of the images, a series with light put through them - like the cinematograph.

Images of eyes/ viewing: Athena with owl's eyes, Aphrodite with almond eyes. This all links in to the insect world (the wasp, the ant)
_

Libretto from Canto 81: "thy vanity" "what thy lovest well"
- a lyrical impulse behind all this. (resurgance of the self)
- the tradition uplifting, a heritage to be salvaged.

cf Elizabethan songwriters - madrigals

"eidos" - totality of experience, awareness of knowing.

"to have with decency' - Wilfrid Blunt - a "fine old age" - embodiment of the tradition

last 2 lines: slightly prosaic - to stop the music?

___

Canto 82: views, birds on a wire
- the immediacy and actuality of death "at 3om for an instant"
- a theme is struck - going back to past experience, but given the chance, he'd do it again.
- death of Agamemnon/ cf death of Shelley - drowned, weighed down with a copy of Keats' poetry in his pocket...

September 8 - Molly Bloom's birthday - day of the Virgin Mary... 3pm - when Jesus died...

cf Whitman, drowning, rhythm of the sea...

Gaia terra - sinking into the mother earth

Cthonic - of the earth (cf H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu 'mythos')

Pieta - last entry

Just as an example - here's Michelangelo's Pieta (sculpted 1498-99, now situated in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome):

One interpretation of the work suggests that Michelangelo's treatment of the subject was influenced by his passion for Dante's Divina Commedia. Apparently he was so well-acquainted with the work that when he went to Bologna he paid for hospitality by reciting verses from it.

Pieta - two more references

I found this today, and thought it was quite applicable to what I was thinking about, the constant recurrences of Aeneas and Dante in this course: "Becoming Aeneas, Becoming Paul: Hell & Dante’s Education in Love", by Peter J. Leithart. It's a pretty great article.

The most relevant parts are as quoted below;

from chapter "Love & Piety":

...

Nor has Dante really understood the nature of pieta, another key term in this episode, which ranges in meaning from “pity” to “piety.” When Dante calls out to Francesca and Paolo, it is with a compassionate cry (Inferno 5.87), and Francesca welcomes the pieta that the pilgrim expresses for her wretchedness (Inferno 5.93). When Dante has heard her story, he weeps with “tristo e pio,” sadness and pity (Inferno 5.117).

Pieta, too, is a major theme of the poem. Beatrice’s love for Dante expresses itself in pity for his desperate condition in the dark wood. When she finally meets him at the top of Mount Purgatory, she rebukes him with bitter, sharp pity (“pietade acerba,” Purgatorio 30.81). The pieta of Beatrice ensures that the pilgrim will make his way to salvation, but this is precisely what the pieta of Francesca does not do. Instead of rousing him to continue the pilgrimage, Dante ends the canto in a swoon.

An association with Aeneas is also in the background. In Canto 2, Dante hesitates to enter Hell, telling Virgil, “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul” (Inferno 2.32). The reference to Aeneas is an allusion to that hero’s journey to the underworld in the Aeneid, Book 6, and the Pauline reference is to his ascension to the third Heaven (2 Cor. 12:2). Dante believes he is unqualified to make the journey to Hell and Heaven, being neither Aeneas nor Paul.

Though the word pieta does not appear here, Dante is well aware that Aeneas’s great heroic virtue is his piety (Latin, pietas), manifested in his willingness to shoulder responsibilities, act out of loyalty to his family and city, and submit to the will of the gods. Piety in this sense is echoing in the context, especially since Francesca is a member of “Dido’s flock.” The pieta that Francesca rouses, however, is not loyalty to family and duty and submission to God, but the opposite. Her story of un-pietas arouses Dante’s pieta.

...

Readers of the Comedy have always been attracted to Francesca. Dante meant us to be. But he also meant for us to learn that this attraction is a symptom of our blindness. If we find her attractive, it is because we are still wandering in the dark wood, having lost the path of truth. If we pity her, it is because we have not learned the meaning of true pieta. If we think that her love was genuine love, we have not learned the true nature of charity, a lesson that only Hell can teach. With Dante, each reader has to confess, “I am not Aeneas; I am not Paul.”
...

Also interesting is the Princeton Dante Project, which uses the Hollander translation, but has a lot more resources as well. Well worth browsing through.

Pieta - more notes

In "Dante and the Lobster", we see Belacqua agonising over the seemingly impossible translation of Dante’s “great phrase” “qui vive la pieta quando è ben morta” (Inferno xx:28); whether to translate it as "pity" or "piety"...

From the original: In the Inferno, Virgil reprimands Dante, the pilgrim, for his compassion for the damned: "Here pity/piety lives when it is dead".

The Latin root for both pity and piety is pietas; the Italian word pieta refers to either pity or piety (or, as in Dante, to both). In 'The Divine Comedy', Christian piety and pity can mean the same thing.
For Virgil, writing from a Roman (and pagan) perspective, pieta meant "the subordination of personal compassion to a political duty that served a national destiny decreed by the gods." (Phyllis Carey, "Stephen Dedalus, Belacqua Shuah, and Dante's Pietà")
For Dante, writing from both Roman and Christian persectives, pieta would seem to infer both morality and devotion. "Morality opposes evil; piety aids the good." (Karl Vossler, 'Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times')

In the Inferno, where moral evil is explicit, piety is seen as a moral stance. Conversely, in the Paradiso, with opposition to evil being no longer necessary, the moral will is indistinguishable from piety (Vossler). In Dante, human piety evinces varying degrees of participation in the holiness of God.

Different translators offer slightly different versions:

Robert and Jean Hollander (2000 - verse): "Here piety lives when pity is quite dead."
John Sinclair (1961 - blank verse): "Here pity lives when it is quite dead"
Wallace Fowlie: "Here piety (to God) lives when pity (to man) is dead."

It would be great to line up all of the different versions next to each other, line by line, and just compare them, perhaps in the order in which they were translated - the original, the Longfellow, all the way through to the Hollander. There's a 1997 attempt at doing it here, but it only compares three translations with the original, and only two cantos of the whole thing.

I'm going to try to get hold of Robert Pinsky's 1994 verse translation - the US Poet Laureate, he's been criticised for sounding too much like he just, all of a sudden, got really good at using magnetic poetry, but from the extracts I've read, it seems like a very approachable version of the text. It seems like every text in this course has something to do with Dante, or The Descent, I guess they're very resonant myths and ideas through the ages...

Week 17: Beckett: "Malacoda"/ "Dante and the Lobster" - brief notes

Malacoda: Dante through the 8th circle of Hell, a bad coda to a good life (funeral of Beckett's father, and all the bad things happening)

[The phrase for 'Ulysses' - stay, stay]

"Dante and the Lobster" - "have sense ... they must be."

["It is not."] cf ["No."] - definitive answers to what's happening.

An exercise in absurdity.

Italian: pieta (piety or pity? how to translate this?) - or both. (cf statue of Mary mourning for Jesus) - a more complex emotion, perhaps?

Also: a funny Beckett link.

Quick note

Woolf's sensation that androgyny is the ideal state of the artist - cf her narration - it has an androgynous sense about it, I think. It goes between men and women without discrimination, almost without noticing their gender.
But a distinction should be made between the artist and the narrator, I suppose. A slim difference, but it must be important.

More Dalloway: Hermione Lee

The name was familiar, so I read around some of Lee's writing about Woolf:

I read some of the Vintage edition of 'Virginia Woolf' by Lee, and what stood out was the way that Woolf was represented not as a passive victim (as seems to be all too common) but someone who worked hard to accomplish what she did. It was very readable, actually, and Lee makes good use of Woolf's letters and other writing to construct a pretty solid picture of the person behind the writing.

I think what stood out most was the beginning of the book - not with "VW was born on this day," but "My God, how does one wirte a Biography?"

Week 16: Mrs Dalloway

So... first impressions:

Well, clearly it's the best example of the stream-of-conciousness narrative that I've seen, moving back and forth in time, and in and out of different characters' heads to construct a single (complete) image. Woolf seems to have a broader scope than Joyce did; not to say that one is better than the other, but I do appreciate Woolf's ducking and weaving around her characters.

The trouble I have is that picking up on one thing from the novel is like pulling threads - it's so well constructed, to put it clearly, that I feel uneasy picking on one thing and leaving the others. I mean - feminism, sexuality, madness, sexual/economic repression, colonialism, commercialism, medicine, politics - it's all there. Where to begin?

Well, to start with, as we did in class, I'll look at the video we saw. To be honest, I think too much of the class discussion we had was focussed on the treatments that the characters of the film/ video/ book received, and not enough on the book itself. Not that my comments were any different - I loved the book, with the fluid dipping in and out of different characters, and all I could think about was how jarring it felt to have the characters actually speaking out loud what I had always envisaged being purely in their heads - not even spoken sotte voce, but speaking clearly. But I digress, as I usually do.

Another digression: Vanessa Redgrave has become the quintessential Mrs Dalloway to me now. I think there was just something in her carriage that dovetailed perfectly with the character in the book, something wistful and forgetful and sad, but still endearing.

Case in point:

Update

Actually, it was in the same letter; I didn't recognise it because it wasn't in the Greek alphabet.

"Para thina poluphloisboio thalasses: the turn of the wave and the scutter of receding pebbles." It literally means "beside the loud-murmuring sea".

Here it is in Greek:

So Pound is quite right to say that his variation is totally different, and a different movement of the water. Don't know about the "inferior" bit, though.

Comparatively, what have others made of the same phrase?
Chapman's translation: "the sea-beat shore"
Dryden (in the unfinished Ilias): "along the hoarse-resounding shore"
Pope: "along the Shore"

Actually, Pope seems remarkably constrained, although he is big on capitalising Important Things.

NB - I didn't actually have to chase these translations down completely; they're from this review, from Signals, a (seemingly) short-lived poetry magazine.

On Andreas Divus and George Chapman.

Divus' Latin translations of Homer were also used by George Chapman in his English translations of the Iliad and Odyssey - so, did Chapman influence Pound? Or did he want to do a better job?

From Pound's letters, to W.H.D. Rouse, 30/12/9134:

Pound talks about people "whose interest I have aroused in the Odyssey and been unable to slake, as they are all too sensitive to read the tushery provided by "adorned" translations, though hey might stick a couple of pages of Pope and a dozen or so of Chapman."

So Pound thinks less of Pope's translations than he did of Chapman's, I gather.
In the same letter, he also discusses the difficulties of translation: "Can you augment it? Can you keep the drive of the narration and yet put back some of what you have skipped? What happens if you fgo through it again, making as straight a tale for adults?"
This is all pretty fascinating stuff. I love reading selected letters from writers, it gives such an insight. You also come across really well-known quotes from people, quotes you've read in lit crit, but never realised they could have been an off-the-cuff comment about a book from the same sentence as a joke, or something that was directed at a certain person. That's where wide reading on writers comes in so handy, you build up a picture of the writer's thought processes and general character (at least when writing to friends and acquaintances) - all this helps when you reread their works.

Update: I found another letter to W.H.D. Rouse from 1935 (6 June) that talks about Chapman: "the first essential is the narrative movement, forward, not blocking the road as Chapman does. Everything that stops the reader must go, be cut out. And then everything that holds the mind, long after the reading, i.e., as much as is humanly possible, must bee clamped back on the moving prose. It is enough to break six men's backs, and if you hadn't been there in a sailing boat, I shd. lie down and surrender..."

The letter also mentions Pound's reluctance to work with the Greek; as he says, he was "too god damn iggnurunt of Greek", and "when I do sink into the Greek, what I dig up is too concentrative; I don't see how to get the unity of the whole."

So Divus had the unity? Pound thought (in the same letter, again) that "neither Dante nor Homer had the kind of boring "unity" of surface that we take to be characteristic of Pope, Racine. Corneille.... A translation of the Odyssey seems to me so enormous an undertaking, and the requirements include all the possible masteries of English."

Great stuff. P. nevertheless did a pretty great job of translating part of the Odyssey for Canto 1... - He says "years' work to get that. Best I have been able to do is cross cut in "Mauberley", led up to:

"... imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-urge..."

which is totally different. and a different movement of the water, and inferior."

Inferior? So which part of the Odyssey was he working with, there? And how the heck do I find it?

Notes on the Cantos, pt 4

Canto 2:

Equivalent poetic moment of metamorphosis [ cf Yeats at the top of the tower] - working up to an epiphany.

Start -> source (epic in modern-day).

Prophecy in the name of Helen/ Elenor - destroyer of ships/ cities.

Tyro - cd peacfeul sea/ Poseidon's rape of Tyro, after assuming the form of Enipeus.

Story behind the poem: The sailors abduct a young boy (actually Bacchus - Dionysus in godly disguise) to sell him as a slave. The ship is transformed to an extension of the god, the sailors to fish...
Going into reverie/ meditative mode...
Acoertes is released - warns Pentheus (who gets killed for interfering).

Notes on the Cantos, pt 3

Back to the Cantos:

1st Canto - written in Anglo-Saxon mode.

[Pound had a pagan, mystical sense in him... cf the spirit of the nymph in olives - wind and destruction. Evidence of the Gods moving through human existence.]

Pound's metaphor for the Gods = light. (replaces religion/ theology in much of his writing.)

2.) Burst through from the quotidian into the mystical (transcendence again) - metamorphosis. Luminosity - a testament to something else. [Daphne/ Laurel] -> cf Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Also, in Canto 2, the myth comes through again.

//Polyphony//

[1930s - his politics took a "right" turn, and made his way into his poems]
cf Yeats - the disconnect between politics/ morality// quality poetry? How do you reconcile this?

Canto 3 - pity/ usury (good and bad)

So, read the Cantos as Pound suggested you read Homer - Periplus/Periplum - the Odyssey was written as it would be revealed to a passing sailor.

Canto 1: First 8/9 lines: hints at the alliterative tradition of poems like Gawain & the Green Knight, Seafarer etc...
This, though, has a slight artificiality - must have 3 alliteratives in each line.

Read this with the Odyssey, Book 11 - the descent.

Analogy to chase down - looking through soapy water using a glass - to see to the bottom, see more. Barry talked about this, but I'm sure I've read it before as well, just not in connection to Pound, unless it was last year in English 319.

1535 - Andreas Divus - Pound's Latin translation of the Odyssey, the one he worked from. Interesting that he would have worked from this, rather than from the Greek... I want to find an English translation of Divus' Latin, to compare to Pound's Canto 1.

[digonos] - key in the Cantos = rebirth/ reincarnation/ retelling.
Mistranslating n error [digenes] = exalted/ worthy
Pound takes advantage of a mistranslation, a linguistic error.

End the first Canto with and evocation of the muses - willful obscurity -> make the reader chase it down. (Generated from the sources he was using.)

cf The Waste Land (TWL) - rubble with an intimation of a tradition in ruins/ setting of tone.
- a provocative ending, a difficult one. Invoking the tradition of a poem without closure.

Notes on the Cantos, pt 2

From a 1927 letter from Pound to his father about "the whole thing":

1.) Point/ Counterpoint of th subject in fugue (cf Bach - the "divine sewing machine")
- themes/motifs in variation - a complete set (in every possible key)
- the Cantos do echo from one to the other

Themes:
- a living man goes down into the world of the dead (Odysseus as prototype, but Homer was responding to an even older mythos - more ancient than poetry itself)
- the repeat in history - Pound as an ideas man: Rhyme is not just metrical, but echoes exist across the ages - repeats on themes/images - a rhyme. Therefore Pound jumps a lot in his Cantos. I can't help but feel that he jumps a little too much, though... Maybe I don't like reading poetry with a dictionary and an encyclopedia next to me all the time, but that's what I have to do with the Cantos.
After I've read a couple of Cantos like that, though, they are enjoyable to read "normally".
[Pound is jumping A -> B -> C -> F]

Rhyme has closure (harmony) - but the disharmony in 1/2 rhyme (cacophony) is a kind of closure, in a way. It makes a point, anyway...
Rhyme in history -> P moves from society to society, handles allusion between cultures - Chinese, classical myths, the whole lot. There are so many allusions to chase down, almost too many (where do you begin - or end?). So again, it seems like he is so much more well-read than other people. Apparently, though, he had a limited range of available texts.. I'd love to have lists of the libraries of some of the writers I study, partly out of interest, and partly as a starting-point for new research.

Notes on the Cantos, pt 1

The Cantos: Pound attempting to update Dantes (100 Cantos) - to stand as the major figure of his age. He wanted to write the "epic of his age". He's possibly the only one to be able to conceive of such a thing (and one of the few to be able to do it).

Pisan Cantos: "scents and images come to him on the air" - like Italian sausages, apparently. Little touches that can haunt the imagination.

All this despite the fact that he seems to think it was a "botched" job.

Arrogance/ contrition//over-reached -> he wanted to do more than was possible...

Basil Bunting: "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! (130)

[Hugh Kenner: The Pound Era] - read for later

Pound started the project in 1904, but he wasn't "serious" about it until post WW1 - in the 1920s, he actually withdrew from his other projects (of which there were many). So he was rude about people who weren't sufficiently Modernist (of course), but he actually helped other.

See the Cantos as the logical outcome of Imagism - esp. the effect of juxtapositional montage: cf Whitman - it's a catalogue, a slideshow, not a movie. Pound generates an effect of movement - dynamic quality of cinema. (think: lights through a set of static images.)

So, the ideas of Vorticism are to be kept in mind when reading the Cantos, an "elephantine" poem that occupied the rest of Pound's life.

A note on translations, and an idea...

After the previous post:

That's not to say that I don't think it would be great fun to compare, say, three or four verse (and prose, assuming it was sparing) translations of the Descent segment, to see where different authors diverged.

And speaking of which, 'divergence' & 'descent' can mean different things, depending on what you're studying:

What might be an interesting thought (only because I studied too much comparative phylogeny in Genetics): to compare actual texts in a kind of evolutionary tree, with the "is descended from" lines instead mean "was influenced by"...
- For the first implmentation, you'd have to rely on actual evidence - to know that author X owned and had read book Y, etc...
[Admittedly, it doesn't require close reading, just knowledge about author's resources and source texts. I could be quite useful as a visual tool, a kind of "six degrees of separation" for authors.

I suppose you could do this with word choice in translations as well, but that would require a lot more assumptions about what individuals (long dead) were thinking, or what the words meant to them... Too many assumptions should be avoided.

I think that if I did this, I'd use the "Descent" segment of the Odyssey, just so I could use a snappy title using both the words 'divergence' and 'descent'. I'm sure there must be a culture somewhere in the world that thinks puns are the highest form of wit. Perhaps I've just written for too many Capping Shows, though.

Week 15: Pound's Cantos

Pound's most ambititious and ambiguous achievement; a close reading of Canots I & II as an introduction to the architechtonics of the greater whole. Necessary awareness: the descent into the underworld from Homer's Odyssey and the story of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

After reading the first two cantos without knowing much about the descent / Daphne & Apollo, I was pretty much lost and, to be honest, a little worried about understanding enough about what Pound was trying to get across to be able to comment on them at all. However, after some background reading, more things became clear, particularly the way Pound worked very closely with his translated text, and, I suppose, was working towards another verse translation of the descent.

Notes on the Descent (Book 11):

I was reading the Alexander Pope translation, which is very versified, almost to the point of losing the power of the text; I think it needs something more than a Victorian scrub-up to appeal to me. This is perhaps why I turned to Modernism, why William Carlos William's plans to strip the "dull patina" of language holds so much appeal: it's when writers "show", and don't "tell" that their writing becomes more real and insistent, rather than jarring on the nerves.

"Who is this Pope that I hear so much about?" said George II; "I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose? I hear a great deal, too, of Shakespeare, but I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow."

From Alexander Pope's translation (summary): "Ulysses continues his narration. How he arrived at the land of the Cimmerians, and what ceremonies he performed to invoke the dead. The manner of his descent, and the apparition of the shades: his conversation with Elpenor, and with Tiresias, who informs him in a prophetic manner of his fortunes to come. He meets his mother Anticles, from whom he learns the state of his family. He sees the shades of the ancient heroines, afterwards of the heroes, and converses in particular with Agamemnon and Achilles. Ajax keeps at a sullen distance, and disdains to answer him. He then beholds Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, Hercules; till he is deterred from further curiosity by the apparition of horrid spectres, and the cries of the wicked in torments."

The summary is probably about as much of Pope's translation as I can stand. Comparing the two verse translations in a small segment:

Pope:
“There in a lonely land, and gloomy cells,
The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells;
The sun ne’er views the uncomfortable seats,
When radiant he advances, or retreats:
Unhappy race! whom endless night invades,
Clouds the dull air, and wraps them round in shades."

Pound:
"Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever with glitters of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there."

I don't have much to say about this, other than the fact that in getting away from the verse form to which Pope so rigidly adheres, Pound has freed the intent of the text itself. I also dislike exclamation points in poetry, for a reason that I haven't quite worked out yet... I think that maybe it comes across too much as an insistent syllable or word, something that's fine in a text like a hymn, a text in reverence of something Absolute, but otherwise? It's enough to make me look for a different translation.

Primium Mobile

The idea of the primium Mobile caught my mind in class, so I thought I'd chase it up...

From Sourcery Forge, a wiki-based and community-maintained encyclopedia of esoteric knowledge, and something of a play on Source Forge:
"Philosphic term. Latin for "First Mover".
Everything the happens appears to be caused by something, which was caused by something, which was caused by something.
But, unless the universe has existed forever, there must have been something which acted without first being acted. Possibly god. This is refered to in some discussions on philosophy as the Primium Mobile."

Apparently it's also represented by the Aces in a Tarot deck, meaning 'white', 'soul' and 'good', presumably among other things.

So, it's the act of creation, I suppose, but there's something mystical in there as well - cf Yeats' mystical leanings in his earlier days?

From a French site. Showing, I assume, a subtle kind of sexuality associated with the virgins who could tame unicorns. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it is all that subtle, but it's certainly romanticised.

More on "Meditations"

Written in the summer/autumn of 1922 while Yeats was staying at his Tower in Co. Galway during the Irish Civil War. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had recently been signed... cue bloody civil war... The outcome of the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty split the Irish into Free State and Republican parties.

Yeats was a private supporter of the Free State party, which saw the outcome of the Treaty as a means for establishing the Ireland that the revolutionaries dreamed of... The Republicans saw the Treaty as a betrayal of the fundamental basis for the revolution. While neither party was unjustified, the bloodshed that resulted was seen by Yeats as senseless violence, as he outlines in "Meditations".

But, it wasn't published until 1928.

C&P'd: "Meditations" is a series of poems dedicated to the consideration of the violence Yeats observed in Ireland as a whole. In the first poem "Ancestral Houses", Yeats describes the difference between the Ireland of the past and his contemporary Ireland. While the past had greatness that stemmed from the violence of rebellion, that greatness had a purpose. Later Irish violence, the violence of the Civil War, had no greatness; rather, it was full of "slippered Contemplation" which no longer had a cause to motivate its violence, but simply a "servile shape, at others' beck and call."

The idea of violence for the sake of violence - vilified by Yeats in "I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness." Templar knight Jacques Molay used as a metaphor for the situation in Ireland - the vengeance sought by those who saw Molay as a martyr was more devastating than simple revenge. Martyrdom created a compulsion for revenge that would be taken out on anyone seen as an "other" figure. Such was the case, as Yeats saw it, in Ireland. The martyrs of 1916 created something that even they would not have been able to control. Fundamentalism of this nature is so volatile that Irishmen were fighting Irishmen, and civil war would only devastate the original cause.

Week 14: Yeats' "Meditations in Time of Civil War"

A profound contemplation of his place in time and history.

Responses:
Reading through it and "The Tower" - I'm not sure what to think. I was just reading comments by Joyce about meeting Yeats, and deciding that Y was too old for Joyce to have a positive effect on him (and this is when Joyce was 19 and Yeats in his 30s, I think). So "Meditations", written when Yeats was in his 60s, came as a huge surprise to me. Very powerful, and somewhat shocking. But again with the ambiguity of ideas, the tension between action and thought...
Ideas about enduring (similarities with the idea of Y's tower as both a symbol of Irish imagination and a monument [perhaps to the same]).

I. Ancestral Houses:
- aristocratic, images of gracefullness (but a symbol of British presence, an earlier age).
- fountain imagery.
- fulfilment/ fullness of being.
- Homer, the father of poets.
- Pope Julius II and Michaelangelo, the urge to commemorate own life, own ego.
- degeneration of power, influence, fortune, impulse.

II. My House:
- Platonic creation = world of forms
- the Platonic hero at the top of a tower, rooted in the earth, but toiling towards the transcendent. (Tower as hero).
- Rhyme scheme - very tightly formed, finely crafted. ABCABCDEED. Intricate.

III. My Table:
- sword - beauty/deadly. Tradition...
- mutability of the moon, Platonic realm of enduring form. cf "Easter 1916"'s "stone" - enduring, not transitory.
- tradition of ancestral houses, sword as an emblem of that tradition.
- tension between mutability and permanence.
- "business" = 'busyness'. Quotidian. Everyday life.
- a celebration of the best that imagination can do.

IV. My Descendants:
- imagination as flower
- arrogance and humility - Y. knew his children didn't have his gift of the imagination.
- degeneration again - "natural declension of the soul"
- Tower images again = resonant. Y. as architect of the poetic paragraph.
- Ptolemaic emblem of the owl circling.
- "a girl's love" - Georgie Yeats
[The real tower is the poem, fashioned by the imagination.]

V. The Road at My Door:
- Republicans/ Free State
- light of the sun, not the moon. This is reality?
- moor-hen as a natural part of life, as Yeats is caught up in the vocation of being a poet.

VI. The Stare's Nest by my Window:
- "the empty house of the stare"

VII. I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
- Y. at his best (or worst...).
- trying to get himself into a mood of reverie, to get an overwhelming epiphany. Of course, it fails. This is the key thing - the bathos.
- Gustave Moreau's unicorns
- "brazen hawks" - the mind seizes on the emblem.
- violence, but emblems out of his own mind, emblems with a permanence.
- Y must withdraw, leave the top of the tower, and pine, unable to transcend.
- partial revelation - frustration - he cannot achieve what he wants. brought back down to earth. He tries for the emotional, rhetorical epiphany, but it just doesn't work.

After the class (with class notes):
- The dilemma between contemplative and active lives [Scholar/Soldier]
- The image of old age as oppressive and scary as a tin can tied to a dog's tail, that the dog running away from the noise will run until it dies...
- Vocab = Wordsworth-esque (a conscious evocation of W e.g. the "humbler worm" - W in a bad moment)
- Likens himself to W, the gift of imagination decaying into senility, the years that bring the philosophical mind. A dread of ending up like W, but his imagination seemed to blossom when he was in his 60s: "Easter 1916" and the transition
- [Out of the quarrel with ourselves ... poetry"]
- "bit the muse go pack" - consolation of philosophy, "deal in abstract things" in his 60s, feeling his age.
- battlements - looking over his life and works

"The making of the soul" - preparation of life for death...

Ireland falling apart re: the union. Find out more about this.

Reconciling the gap between the mundane and the transcendental world.

Week 13: Pound, 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberly'

Considered in terms of the "tragic poets" of the 1890s and the impact of WWI. Essential reading: annotated edition of the poem, follow up some of the more important allusions.

Responses:

cf Ulysses -> SD and LB -> 2 sides of Joyce (also Under the Volcano)

2 halves: EP - The poet he wouuld like to be, HSM: the poet he despises (but secretly associates with himself)
evokes Yeats' "tragic generation" / "twilight generation"

Mauberley - dwindles away - the weakness of the '90s poets (aesthetic impulses destined to be aborted)

Pound and Eliot -> "destroyed" the Georgians - accentuation of irony, removing the dead weight, a revelation in English poetry.

WW! -> ruination of culture / civilisation [b/g of modernism = carnage of WW1]

- return home - not a place for heroes...

I: Pound doing the imposssible (or trying)

Odyssey as myth and structure

"elegance of Circe's hair" - trying not to be pulled in

Hyacinths and symbolism

[TWL as a recovery from a mental breakdown = restoration *and* dramatic process - the recognition of desoltaion, attempt to do something about it...]

Hyacinths are the equivalent of Whitman's lilacs (recalling Lincoln): so in other mythologies, what do hyacinths represent?

In Greek mythology, the hyacinth was offered to Apollo (god the light and the sun, but also music, poetry and fine arts, and, key for TWL, prophecy and the cure - sanity and reason). Apollo is also associated with the laurel, (Daphne's transformation).
The hyacinth is also connected with sports and games, for some reason... It's odd, actually.
Different colours of hyacinths apparently represent different things: blue = constancy, purple = contrition, yellow = jealousy...

From mythencyclopedia.com: "The Greek myth of Hyacinthus and Apollo tells of the origin of the hyacinth, a member of the lily family. Hyacinthus, a beautiful young man of Sparta*, was loved by the sun god Apollo. One day the two were amusing themselves throwing a discus when the discus struck Hyacinthus and killed him. Some accounts say that Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, directed the discus out of jealousy because he also loved Hyacinthus. While Apollo was deep in grief, mourning the loss of his companion, a splendid new flower rose out of the bloodstained earth where the young man had died. Apollo named it the hyacinth and ordered that a three-day festival, the Hyacinthia, be held in Sparta every year to honor his friend."

So, jealousy, sports and games, contrition - it's all there. I'm not sure if Hyacinthus was cured, or anyone prophecised about it happening, though.

According to Wikipedia (it has its uses...), the Hyacinthia is spread over two days, so:
'The first day was given over to mourning for the death of the hero: sacrifices were offered to the dead, banquests were stark and without pomp or decoration, the sacrificial breads were very plain.
The second day was one of celebration for his rebirth. The young people played the cithara and the aulos, and sang of the glory of Apollo. Others participated in horse races. Numerous choirs competed in town, singing country songs and dancing. Amycla was also the location of parades of carts decorated by the girls and women of Sparta. Numerous sacrifices were offered, exclusively goats, with the occasion of the κοπίς, kopis, banquets where the citizens invited their friends and relatives."

This is a pretty cool line of study - it covers the whole idea of death and resurrection. Also, goats.

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land III

[Memory and Desire] are key.

1. Sibyll - what do you want?
2. I want to die.

Quotations from Satyricon
Petronius - arbiter of elegance to Nero - told to commit suicide, did so at a high point of a party...

Eliot wanted "the horror, the horror" from Heart of Darkness - the ultimate futility of existence..

April cf the opening of The Canterbury Tales, and rebirth / resurrection / crucifixion

E's pilgrimage = recovery from a nervous breakdown..

Accepts the motion of the mystical experience.

[Whitman - homoerotic communion with nature, the transcendent impulse // Lilacs in Whitman's poem - representative of Lincoln. cf hyacinths...]
[Beckett acknowledges the experience but denies the significance...]

Borges: certain kinds of images reccur... the deeply personal...
//
Munich - Wagner -> Wagenrian echoing
Mad king Ludwig drowning in Lake Starnberg
cf Parsifal / Tristan & Isolde

The idea of rootlessness - unreal city - bertrand Russell -> London as unreal, a hallucination. (cf Conrad's Heart of Darkness)

Memory buried - will it reawaken?
- past sensations of desire and love, quickened by memory.

"Dog"//"God" - nails, travesty of resurrection, cf Joyce - Dog's body...
"hypocrite lecteur" - Baudelaire - hypocritical reader - my likeness, my brother!
- "you will find these experiences in common with me, don't presume to judge..."

Therefore - a process has been set underway - read on...

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land II

Part 2: A Game of Chess

Second half - dramatically more accessible, immediacy.

First part - he pulls out all the stops, luxury (opulence and sexual licentiousness)

Antony & Cleopatra // Romeo and Juliet...
Irony and cynicism - [middle-aged love] - more than the heroic ethos could ever entail...

Beauty, but with potential catastrophe awaiting... An intimation of beauty, but with an underlying threat.

A poem written for many voices.

2nd half of part 2 - Eliot speaking in his own voice (or the closest to it...)

Nothing ... cf Heart of Darkness

"I remember the pearls that were his eyes" - the love that used to be - again, it's that Proustian moment, where the past is restored in its full immediacy...

= pattern of sexually ambiguous language and imagery - e.g. Tiresias
- male-orientted moment of psychological intensity
- death of someone who was fondly remembered / cf present relationship that's miserable

// Pub scene: scathing (echoing)

cf poet Villon
end -> "good night sweet ladies" - Ophelia in Hamlet - the drowning of the soldier.

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land I

The Waste Land (hereafter TWL) - similar scope to Paradise Lost - secondary and tertiary associations...

cf Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring - dissonance/disharmony -> antagonising people
TWL - counter-rhythm / couterharmony

Epic and imagistic at the same time

Title page -> Mallory's La Morte D'Arthur -> the search for a sign...
Eliot talked about the "mythic method" - structure for something devoid of narrative -> cf Ulysses...
The Fisher King - wounded (usually, according to myth, in his genitals - his land became waste (fertility links, with Christian elements - redeem/restore the land)

Coherence of the poem // Fragmented
Modernism // Post-modernism
Modm - Allows for a dramatic reading, but from reading the manuscripts we can see that Pound cut out a lot of the original - he made it... But he cut out a lot of the crap - turning it inot a imagistic dramatic masterpiece.
Post-Modm - Celebrates fragmentation (but after Pound cut out the parts - it was a lot less fragmented before Pound deleted parts of it).

geronition: quote from Measure for Measure

The field: "The Potter's Field" - Judas bought with his 30 pieces of silver... Overgrown, grass/weeds/rocks ... and a goat. Moral overgrowth?

goats/sheep:
Goats - those who have passed over
Sheep - still alive? (not been passed over)

The modernist aesthetic -? Joycean detail ("demented particulars" - Beckett)

Infans -> unable to speak/hear
The Word within a word unable to speak a word

Christ the tiger -> cf Blake - "tyger burning bright" -> the eternal energy of the kosmos.

[TWL: econciles personal and impersonal: Part 2 more personal (3-part structure) - Eliot's dramatic sense of his 1st marriage...]

*Proust - involuntary memory - much more intense* (this comes up again and again in the course...)
I: Involuntary memory in a hyacinth garden (I'll come back to this later)
II: Dramatic present

Week 9: Eliot's quatrain poetry: "Sweeney"

"I consider my Sweeney poems as serious as anything I have ever written, in fact much more serious and more mature than the early poems but I do not know anyone who agrees with me on this point except William Butler Yeats and Vivienne who have both said much the same thing about them" (Eliot, Letters 608).

Here's a great article on Eliot's early poems.

On my first reading of the "Sweeney" poems, and after reading "Prufrock", I was struck by the disparity between them - Sweeney, on one hand, is an animal-man, a brute, but Prufrock is the repressed intellectual. I'm unsure whether Eliot meant to play one against the other - it's likely, I suppose, but it's a great opposition.
Sweeney lacks self-reflection, but Prufrock lacks anything much beyond self-reflection... It would make a great dissertation topic, I'm sure, but I'm somewhat unwilling to start with something that seems so.. broad.

...
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

As we discussed in class - the liquid siftings of the nightingales are clear enough, but I want to chase down Agamemnon, and get a better idea of who he was, why Eliot used him, etc...

So, armed with facts from pantheon.org:

Agamemnon was the son of Atreus and the brother of Menelaus. He was the king of either Mycenae (in Homer) or of Argos (in some later accounts), and was the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War. He married Clytemnestra and had several children by her, including Orestes, Electra, and Iphigenia.

When the Greeks sailed for Troy, their fleet was trapped by unfavorable winds at Aulis. The seer Calchas revealed that their misfortune was due to Agamemnon, who had boasted that he equalled Artemis in hunting; the winds would only change if Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia was sacrificed. Agamemnon reluctantly agreed to the sacrifice, but Artemis herself whisked Iphigenia away from the altar and substituted a deer in her place.
During the seige of Troy, Agamemnon offended the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, when he took the girl Briseis from him. Achilles' anger with Agamemnon furnished the mainspring of the plot in the Iliad. After the sack of Troy, Agamemnon acquired Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, as his concubine, and took her home with him to Greece.

Well, that's fine, but it was his homecoming that was featured in Greek tragedy....

Upon arriving, Agamemnon found that Aegisthus, who had killed his father Atreus, had become the lover of Clytemnestra, and the two together murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra shortly after their arrival. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra then ruled Agamemnon's kingdom, but were eventually killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes (or by Orestes and Electra in some accounts).

So the importance of Agamemnon in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" would begin with the sacrifice of the child (Iphigenia), and look toward the murder of Agamemnon by Aegisthus.. And the dishonoured shroud - presumably the marriage shroud of Agamemnon and Clymenestra, dishonoured by her betrayal of Agamemnon with Aegisthus.

Update: Pindar, the ancient Greek lyrical poet, wrote that Agamemnon was slain by his wife Clytemnestra while he was bathing, and that she threw a cloth or net over his head to prevent him from either noticing her or resisting. So it's less of a marriage-dishonoured-by-adultery shroud, and more a murder-of-a-spouse kind of dishonour, the stains, somewhat predictably being his blood.
Which, of course, makes the indignity of the nightingales emptying their bowels on his death-shroud all the more apparent.

Week 8: Yeats - Meditations

Iconic, enduring images -> marble, bronze, / cf. change and nature - man's effects on the world

"The Tower" - enduring images
- Dilemma between the contem[plative and the active lives [Scholar / Solider]
- Old age - tied to a dog's tail (tin can - dog runs until death - a joke)
- vocabulary - WW-esque - a concious evocation of Whitman - "a humbler worm" - Whitman in a bad moment...
- "bid the muse go pack" - consolation of philosophy, "deal in abstarct things"

In his 60s, feeling his ages.

Battlements - looking over his life, works

"Making of the soul" - Preparation of life for death.

[Yeats as aristocrat of the imagination]

Ulysses - Man in the Macintosh

He's the 13th mourner at Dignam's funeral, and is mentioned a few more times through the day.
Nabokov thought that it was Joyce inserting himself in his own book, but there are two other possibilities that seem worth mentioning: Mrs Sinico's widower (from "A Painful Case") or James Clarence Mangan. Interesting. I prefer Nabokov's opinion, but there's a distinct possibility (given the source) that it was tongue-in-cheek, or N. was just playing devil's advocate, or provoking someone else who put forth a really odd idea...

The Captain Sinico hypothesis I find rather odd, to be honest - there doesn't seem to be anything in the story itself that would suggest it - not that there's much in Ulysses that gives away who the man is... Perhaps it's the lingering image of a man alone that suggests it.

The Mangan hypothesis is perhaps more convincing, but no more so than the idea of Macintosh being Joyce himself, if not for my suspicion that J wouldn't tarnish the book by putting himself in there, no matter that he'd put everything around him into the book.
Mangan: a poet, translator and essayist, well connected with the Young Ireland movement... Something of a tragic figure, he apparently was "a lonely and difficult man who suffered from mood swings, depression and irrational fears, and became a heavy drinker. His appearance was eccentric, and later in life he was often seen wearing a long cloak, green spectacles and a blond wig." So the long cloak thing was well enough known, and he died fifty or sixty years before Joyce wrote the book, so the timing's right... It'd be interesting to trawl through Joyce's letters and diaries, to see if he mentioned Mangan, and in which circumstances.

Joyce - Ulysses

So - Joyce had apparently been planning the novel for eight years before he started writing it in 1914. With Leopold Bloom as his everyman (equiv. to Ulysses), and Bloom's wife Molly the equivalent to Penelope.

The important thing to me is that while all of these parallels with The Odyssey exist and were no doubt carefully placed in the book, the only obvious thing is the title - Joyce is showing, and not telling. It does, however, set up the whole novel as a play on what has gone before.

Stephen Dedalus is the focus of the first few chapters of the book, appropriate considering his similarities to Telemachus.

Hades chapter:

cf chapter 13 (sentimentalism in excess) - this shows reality (harsh, gritty, etc) in excess. Bloom's meditation on the decomposition of the human body are pretty unsentimental

Here's a great site with schemata of the whole book - basically the important correspondences between Ulysses and The Odyssey.

From that site:

Dodder, Grand and Royal canals, Liffey: The four rivers - Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Pyriphlegethon
Cunningham: Sisyphus
Father Coffey: Cerberus
Caretaker: Hades
Daniel O'Connell: Hercules
Dignam: Elpenor
Parnell: Agamemnon
Mentor: Ajax

The mode of writing: Narration & Dialogues -> theme of incubism

Salient points / themes: the cemetary, the sacred heart, the past, the unknown man, the unconscious, heart trouble, relics, heartbreak.

The caretaker as a lasting symbol...

Also keeping in mind Joyce's fanaticism about details, here's someone who may just have too much time on his hands, determining where in the carriage everyone was sitting, assuming that the four-seater carriage seats two looking forward, two looking back - which seems a safe assumption.

This was a great source:
[Bell, Robert H. "Preparatory to Anything Else:" Introduction to Joyce's "Hades." Journal of Modern Literature XXIV, 3/4 (Summer 2001), pp. 363-499, Indiana University Press, 2002]

Week 7: Joyce's 'The Dead' => Ulysses: "Hades"

The aesthetics of the Joycean epiphany.

"Imaginative Destiny" - feel the mythic

So in Joyce - you get some sense of the everyday, but feel the Homeric parallels as a powerful force. You can appreciate it in more than just the dramatic sense.

Naturalism // Modernism // Symbolism

Luminosity - something transcendent (but still of the ordinary) - not allegory but it clearly points at something else...

"The Dead" - orchestration of consciousness (cf Woolf's Dalloway)
"The Boardinghouse" - cf Puccini's 'La Boheme' - candle and cold hands
-> imaginative participation in both.

The sense of a pattern (but one which is implicit, not contrived)

Flaubert's "mot juste" - the right word
- faithful to its surrounds, also initiates feeling, transcends without being obtrusive

'Portrait' -> imagination as a burning coal - cf "The Windhover"
(image from Shelley)

Joyce "The Classical Temper" - also the title of a great book about Ulysses

Reject Romanticism, reach a classical stasis

//Less didactic: reach an awareness of aesthetic wonder.

[heightened sense of appreciation of wonder]

Week 5: Joyce - The Dead

Apparently the title comes from a poem from Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies, written between 1807 and 1834.

Oh, ye Dead! oh, ye Dead! whom we know by the light you give
From your cold gleaming eyes, though you move like men who live.
Why leave you thus your graves,
In far off fields and waves,
Where the worm and the sea-bird only know your bed,
To haunt this spot where all
Those eyes that wept your fall,
And the hearts that wail'd you, like your own, lie dead?
It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan;
And the fair and the brave whom we lov'd on earth are gone,
But still thus even in death
So sweet the living breath
Of the fields and the flow'rs in our youth we wander9d o9er
That ere, condemn'd, we go
To freeze mid Hecla's snow,
We would taste it awhile, and think we live once more!

There's a basic annotation here. Nothing more than the basics, but I found something similar the first time I studied the story, a few years ago.

As the last story in 'Dubliners' (1914), "The Dead" was apparently written after the collection was complete, in order to uplift the work, which was seen as depressing and sombre. I also noticed that it's significantly longer than the others in the collection, and seems more mature - Joyce is perhaps reaching further with his final story, and trying to do more than just contemplate a single aspect of the "moral history of Ireland". The aspects he was examining were childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life, according to a letter he wrote.

I won't spend too long on the story, considering we covered it quite well in class (and in my first year of English), but it's probably worth picking up in the idea of Gretta (parallels with Nora Barnacle, Joyce's partner), who is from the west of Ireland, the old country. Also, Micheal Furrey is based on Micheal Bodkin (one of Nora's past lovers), who died similarly.
The idea of the old country is a resounding note in the story, I think - just a concept of something more powerful and more meaningful than the quotidian life most people are living. I think the legends and language would have been what attracted both Joyce and Yeats to the idea of the past, although Joyce was probably slightly more self-aware of his obsession, not letting it take him over.

I also found something really interesting here - a reconstruction of the story, but with musical and vocal cues throughout. It's fascinating, considering how the story flicks between conversations, dances and songs.

From that link, on epiphanies: "In his Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen Daedalus describe an epiphany in the following manner, "By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself," and a bit later Stephen concludes, "This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact; finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps up to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany" (Werner, 48). While this description seems to outline three steps in the epiphanic moment, Joyce also emphasizes the sudden and momentary nature of the epiphany--the way the integral and composite nature of the object or emotion is perceived simultaneously. Just as musical counterpoint involves the simultaneous presentation of multiple melodic statements, the literary epiphany involves the simultaneous presentation of multiple hermeneutic perspectives. Furthermore, the recognition that the literary epiphany is both a composite structure and, at the same time, one integral thing is analogous to the way counterpoint is both a combination of autonomous melodic lines and an integrated, or interdependent, whole."

NB: "Werner" refers to [Werner, Craig H. Dubliners: A Student's Companion to the Stories. Boston: Twayne, 1988.]

Cubism + Futurism = Vorticism (give or take a few definitions)

Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way that it tried to capture movement in an image - in a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas.

Pound and Picabia

The Rebel Art Centre - lasted only a few months... its basic artistic ideas evolved into Vorticism (term coined by Pound). Term suggests a spiraling force which should draw the viewer into the work, creating a different kind of dynamism and strong focal point.

Vorticists' journal BLAST - published work by Pound and Eliot, as well as others, including Wyndham Lewis, whose art was on the cover of the first issue.

Vorticism was for Pound the first major experience in revolutionary propagandizing and the first cause that placed him beyond the pale of orthodoxy. Pound saw Vorticism as setting "the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization." In this way the arts were welded in a mystical union with politics in the manner already envisaged by Yeats.

Knot and Vortex

"Of patterned energies; and first, Buckminster Fuller on knots. He grasps and tenses an invisible rope, on which we are to understand a common overhand knot, two 360° rotations in intersecting planes, each passed through the other.

"Pull, and whatever your effort each lobe of the knot makes it impossible that the other shall disappear. It is a self-interfering pattern. Slacken, and its structure hangs open for anlysis, but suffers no topological impairment. Slide the knot along the rope: you are sliding the rope through the not. Slide through it, if you have them spliced in sequence, hemp rope, cotton rope, nylon rope. The knot is indifferent to these transactions. the knot is neither hemp nor cotton nor nylon: is not the rope. The knot is a patterned integrity. The rope renders it visible. No member of Fuller's audience has ever objected (he remarks) that throughout this exposition he has been holding no rope at all, so accessible to the mind is a patterned integrity, visible or no, once the senses have taught us the contours.

"Imagine, next, the metabolic flow that passes through a man and is not the man: some hundreds of tons of solids, liquids and gasses serving to render a single man corporeal during the seventy years he persists, a patterned integrity, a knot through which pass the swift strands of simultaneous ecological cycles, recycling transformations of solar energy. At any given moment the knotted materials weigh perhaps 160 pounds. (And 'Things,' wrote Ernest Fenollosa about 1904, are 'cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots.')

"So far Buckminster Fuller (1967). Now Ezra Pound (1914) on the poetic image: '. . . a radiant node or cluster; . . . what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' A patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words. 'In decency one can only call it a vortex. . . . Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.' For the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water."

(Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 1971, pp. 145-46)

Week 4: Imagism

The poetic revolution provoked by Eliot and Pound, as exemplified in the theory and practice of imagism. Req'd reading: poems on handout.

The Imagists

Manifesto - (Poetry I, 1913)

cf again: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia and Logopoeia

the "duree": Bergson's word for the individual moment of minimal consciousness
the "objective correlative": TS Eliot's term for the image (his essay on Hamlet)
- fully adequate for the emotion that is invoked.

Pound's article on vorticism, 1914. "Vortex"

A picture as somewhere between a thing and a thought. As the split (the gap) between the SD/SR and [REF]? Poetic communication: why? So images can be apprehended as intended.

Cf my idea from a while ago - mapping the sine curves accurately from one person to another...

Tenor/Vehicle/Ground
Tenor: the thing
Ground: the basis of comparison
A good metaphor: the tenor in relation to the vehicle, in the context of the ground.

Pound on Provence

From 'The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941', ed D.D. Page:

9 July 1922 (To Felix E. Schelling)

"My assault on Provence: 1st: using it as subject matter, trying to do as R.B. [presumably Robert Bridges] had with Renaissance Italy. 2, Diagrammatic translations (those of Arnaut, now printed in 'Instigations'); all part of study of cerse-form (as trans. of Cavalcanti). Note that the English "poet" en masse had simply said: "these forms are impossible in English, they are too complicated, we haven't the rhymes." That was bunkum, usual laziness of English, and hatred of craft.... I have proved that the Porvencal rhyme schemes are not impossible in English. They are probably inadvisiable. The troubadour was not worried by our sense of style, our "literary values," he could shovel words ini any order he liked.... The troubadour, fortunately perhaps, was not worried about English order; he got certain musical effects because he cd. concentrate on music without bothering about literary values. He had a kind of freedom which we no longer have."

What's interesting to me about all this is that Pound seems rather convinced that he had failed at what he set out to do: "I have failed almost without exception; I can't count six people whom I have succeeded in interesting in XIIth Century Provence. Perhaps the best thing I have done is with the music."

The music? What did he do? Certainly it makes sense for the lyrical verse to be appreciated with music, but I didn't realise that Pound had gone so far, having held a picture of him in my mind as a man of letters only.

1920 saw the publication in London of 'Five Troubadour Songs: With the Original Provençal Words and English Words Adapted from Chaucer, Arranged by Agnes Bedford' (London, Boosey & Co., 1920), with Chaucer's words (translated by Pound) set to music. It would be worth trying to track down a copy, if it's at all possible.
Update, a few hours later: haven't managed to find a copy, unfortunately. It's the sort of thing that would no doubt make the basis of a wonderful poetry/ middle english/ music combined project, looking at word choice in translation and choice of music...

Pound and Troubadours...

Pound apparently considered sex to be a sacrament and an esoteric tradition which had been preserved in the West by the Troubadours. He considered the only true religion to be "the revelation made in the arts." Rejecting Christianity, he described it as "a bastard faith designed for the purpose of making good Roman citizens slaves, and which is thoroughly different from that preached in Palestine. In this sense Christ is thoroughly dead." Pound found the Churches objectionable for having gained subsidies which should have gone to artists, philosophers and scientists.

Pound was inspired by the "love cult" of the Troubadours, which had been suppressed by the Church, and the Classical mystery religions. He considered the teachings of Confucius, which taught a civic religion that assigned everyone a social duty, from emperor to peasant, to be a means of achieving a balanced State. He later saw in Fascist Italy the attainment of such a State.

Like Yeats, Pound's concepts of esotericism and culture brought him up against liberal and democratic doctrines. Pound saw in Fascism the fulfillment of Social Credit monetary policy which would break the power of plutocracy. He considered artists to form a social elite "born to rule" but not as a part of a democratic mandate. "Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists."

As far back as 1914 Pound had written that the artist "has had sense enough to know that humanity was unbearably stupid. But he has also tried to lead and persuade it, to save it from itself." He wrote in 1922 that the masses are malleable and that it is the arts which set the moulds to cast them.

Week 3: Pound and Provence

'Cino' and 'Na Audiart' as examples of Pound's working with Provencal themes and modes; and 'Near Perigord' as the great poem of his early years. Req'd reading: Eliot's "Tradtion and the Individual Talent".

Response to "Tradtion and the Individual Talent":

Essence of the image (an intellectual and emotional complex)

Pound - 'The Spirit of Romance': spirit of lyricism, religious sensibility, awakened in Provence, then to Italy (Petrarch, Dante etc...). The sonnet rose out of Provence.

Pound saw the lyric tradition as being reawoken in Provence->Italy, then Northern Europe and Elizabethan England (then disappearing). He wanted to reawaken the tradition, as a living force.

[Cantos - the vision destroyed, then reasserted.] Again cf The Waste Land - poetic engagement with the notion of tradition.

Writers with a tradition: Eliot/ Pound/ Joyce/ Beckett.

Joyce: myth as a structured force, cf the Provencal tradition.

[/Modernism - Transcendentalism without God] -> something of transcendental mysticism.

Eliot/Pound: spirit of literature/ tradtion (in place of spirit of God)

Pound: "Make it new" best of the present/ best of the past.

"Na Audiart": Troubadour "clus" (trobar clus): a poetic style composed of complex metrics, intricate rhymes, and words chosen more for their sound than for their meaning.

"fashion" / "pass I on" - wit underlining reverence and love

cf "When you are old, under the candellight" ... you will regret...
- the tragedy of age // preciousness of beauty and youth

i.) Phanopoeia: light (visual imagination)
ii.) Melopoeia: sweet (lyrical/ musical imagination)
iii.) Logopoeia: word (illusions and cultures created through words)

"Near Perigord": Think - what is the motivation of Bertrans? Enigma... Come back to this.
The riddle of the love poem - cf Canto 28 of the Inferno (Bertrans into Hell and severed head) = source (borrowings)

Week 2: Early Eliot - 'Prufrock' and 'Portrait of a Lady'

...as imitation of the Modernist mode, but with reference to Browning and James as precursors of the dramatic psychological portrait. Req'd reading: Browning, 'My Last Duchess'

Impressions of 'My Last Duchess':

My Big Idea

Requires a few concepts as given:

That language is a mediator between different peoples' thoughts.
That thought is continuous (in the data sense, not the time sense).
That words (and therefore language) are discrete (data sense again).
That the right choices of words (skill with language) can effectively mediate thoughts from person A to person be as precisely and effectively as possible.

Therefore, appeals to common knowledge/ allusions/ word-associations in poetry and prose act as 'keys' in effective language.

So:

1.) My thoughts in my head are continuous data, like a sine wave.
2.) If I, unskillfully, try to explain my thoughts, it doesn't translate to someone else as continuous, but a disjointed sine wave, with steps and gaps.
3.) With more skill (or appeals to common knowledge/ impressions), not necessarily more words, the thoughts can be represented in the other people's head, relatively exactly.

This clearly nothing new, but it's how I think of good writers - and especially SoC writers like Woolf/ Joyce - they manage to mediate thoughts with only words, to re-present those thoughts in their readers' heads, so that the point of the piece of writing is re-created in its entirety to the reader.

The kind of skill in writing that can do this to an idea is of course present in all forms of writing, but it is primarily in SoC writing that the sense of the idea, of interiority, is re-presented so clearly, so accurately.

NB - I often think in graphs regardless of their being values (belief systems/ numerical places or otherwise) at stake. I think the analogy here is thoughts/ words with continuous data/ discrete data, that is, i) a complete set of values on an interval (continuous), ii) separate and distinct data (discrete) i.e. - separable- data.

Of course, the idea of the word as a unit of data only works well if words are "stripped of the dull patina of use", as William Caros Williams said. Again, there are links to Modm and the rejection of associated and implied meanings for words...

Also ties here to postmodernism (again) but the sense is the same, to "make it new", to stop writers being lazy and relying on years of connotative meanings for words.

Cf. ->Stein as a modernist: "A rose is a rose is a rose..." In a circle. This is what a rose is.

Update (after receiving comments on the above): I suppose, in the above example, a text (pure text) would be just language written down, the language-as-object that can be consumed. Just a physical way of mediating thoughts.
And the idea of 'noise' as well: It's very important, to be sure. Just very hard to quantify. Perhaps with translations it would be easier to compare a few different translations of the same source text. cf Pound talking about "not blocking the road" while translating, not using more than "say 4%" unneccessary "verbiage", or "blanks".
And it's a good point to compare this to Pound in the direct presentations of the image. Imagism is all about reducing the noise.

Notes and Quotes

Form: to prevent the "connections of life" differently, freshly.

Language is no longer seen as transparent, something that, if used correctly, allows us to see through to reality.
It is, instead, seen as the complex, nuanced site of our construction of the real: language is thick, its multiple meanings and varied connotative forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of (and cultural construction of) reality.

[Fragmentation/ Juxtaposition/ Motif/ Symbol/ Allusion]

"Art always attempts to 'imitate' or re-present reality; what changes is our understanding of what constitues reality, and how that reality can best be represented ... to the mind and senses ...."

So... What am I expecting from the course?

- to be able to discuss the -isms with some knowledge,
- to read (and respond to) the key modernist texts
- to develop an awareness of the shift of writing styles
- emphasis on the aesthetics of writing, of reading these texts as an enjoyable and meaningful experience -> putting the "fun" back in.

So, I want to find, in the course and the texts, my own version of
*Joyce's "epiphany"
*Hopkins' "inscape"
*Woolf's "moment of being"
*Benjamin's "jetztzeit" (literally, "now time")

In my (limited) experiences with modm, the thing that sticks is the use of open endings - stories/ novels that are more true to reailty, where events don't always resolve themselves. ('A Girl in the Head' from last year's ENGL317).

Also -> from Faulkner's 'S&F' - the shifts in time, orchestrated by Faulkner to provoke the reader - combine meanings and move scenes to echo each other, to be 'inside'. The world is also moved 'inside'.

The world - structured symbolically/ metaphorically.[Remember, it's transcendent, but without God]

I think I also expect to see some experiments in form. I'm not sure how.

More notes

[The city life as a central force in society...]

[Reliance on intuitive insight - that one can see the essence (or the soul) of things.] cf Inductive Reasoning/ Empirical Methods.

Think: 'The Waste Land': IMAGISM -> MODM.
- broken, fragmented images, anti-narrative, generally disjunctive. Metaphor of seeing and vision.

Seeing and vision = central to Modm (see to the heart of things). But, in TWL, the reader doesn't see so much... The narrtor promised to show the reader a different meaning / to show the reader how to make meaning from dislocation and from fragments. "The construction of an exclusive meaning was essential to Modm."

Formal Characteristics of Modm:
- Open Form
- Free Verse
- Discontinuous Narrative
- Juxtaposition
- Intertextuality
- Classical Allusions (cf Romanticism)
- Borrowing from other cultures/ languages
- Unconventional use of metaphor

This is all sounding remarkably like post-modernism. PoMo, is, after all, entirely reliant on what came before. I mean, it has to be, in order to reject it.

Thematic Characteristics:
- Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
- Alientation of the individual within their (broken and fractured) community
- Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
- Valoristion of the despairing individual in the force of an unmanageable future
- Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology
- Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes

-isms I enjoy reading about: Symbolism, Impressionism, Expression, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism.

Update (after receiving notes on the above): On Centrifugal vs Centripetal readings...
Just to clarify this for me:
I seem to remember from studying physics that what we think of as centrifugal force is just centripetal force. Certainly centripetal force is what we get when we're being spun around ("centripetal" = Latin for "centre-seeking"). So it's the force required to stay in the same place (realtive to the centre) while being spun. If centripetal force isn't enough, or is removed, then the object will fly off on a tangent.

So "centrifugal force" and "centripetal force" is the same phenomenon, just the reaction of an object's inertia when released from rotation (centrifugal), or retained in rotation (centripetal). So there's some confusion there, I guess. Not the least of it from me.

In terms of readings, a centrifugal reading would leave the idea ("centre"), and a centripetal reading would stay circling it.

So Modernism would be, to me, a centripetal reading of the formal characteristics... And by the same token, Postmodernism could be seen as a centrifugal reading of these, literally "fleeing" the centre. It doesn't reflect too well on PoMo, though, if the "centre" is a place that one wants to be.

Of course, if we lived in a discernably rotating system (like a space station or something similar) and got the timing right, then centrifugal force would release an object on a straight line from the centre of the rotation. Amusingly enough, I found this comic last week and thought it was great (click the image to enlarge it):

(From XKCD, a maths/humour webcomic.)

Image and Aesthetic - A Commonplace Book

About Me

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Sunday, October 15, 2006

More Lolita links

Unreliable narrator

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Wilde - the shudder

Friday, October 13, 2006

Keats: Art and Beauty

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Week 24/25: Nabokov

Friday, September 29, 2006

One more Borges link

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Week 22/23: Borges

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Week 20/21: Lowry and genetic criticism tangents

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Week 18: Pound's Pisan Cantos - cursory notes

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Pieta - last entry

Friday, August 04, 2006

Pieta - two more references

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Pieta - more notes

Week 17: Beckett: "Malacoda"/ "Dante and the Lobster" - brief notes

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Quick note

Monday, July 31, 2006

More Dalloway: Hermione Lee

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Week 16: Mrs Dalloway

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Update

On Andreas Divus and George Chapman.

Notes on the Cantos, pt 4

Notes on the Cantos, pt 3

Notes on the Cantos, pt 2

Friday, July 21, 2006

Notes on the Cantos, pt 1

A note on translations, and an idea...

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Week 15: Pound's Cantos

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Primium Mobile

Manuscript info, links

More on "Meditations"

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Week 14: Yeats' "Meditations in Time of Civil War"

Friday, June 02, 2006

Week 13: Pound, 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberly'

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Hyacinths and symbolism

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land III

Friday, May 26, 2006

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land II

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land I

Friday, May 05, 2006

Week 9: Eliot's quatrain poetry: "Sweeney"

Friday, April 28, 2006

Week 8: Yeats - Meditations

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Ulysses - Man in the Macintosh

Monday, April 17, 2006

Joyce - Ulysses

Friday, April 14, 2006

Week 7: Joyce's 'The Dead' => Ulysses: "Hades"

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Week 5: Joyce - The Dead

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Cubism + Futurism = Vorticism (give or take a few definitions)

Knot and Vortex

Friday, March 24, 2006

Week 4: Imagism

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Pound on Provence

Saturday, March 18, 2006