Yeah.
25 August 2008 ~ St. Catharines.
Upon staying at your friend’s home when they are away (a book-related inquiry).
19 August 2008 at 3.51 pm (General musings)
Not only do you feel like an uncanny visitor in their not-quite-familiar abode, you also discover weird habits they keep:
Kari. Why do you keep your Dostoevsky in the cupboard under the bathroom sink?
The revolution is over, my dear.
19 August 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Es tu miserable?
8 August 2008 at 1.08 pm (General musings)
I must figure out how to connect my scanner. Translations for the squares are as follows:
[3] “Marcel, you are miserable! What’s wrong?”
[4] “I can’t find and ending for my book…and they are out of madelines.” [I wanted this to say "I can't find an ending for my book, it just goes on and on...&c." but there wasn't room.]
[5] The text here is the first stanza of “Ruin” in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs de Mal [ Flowers of Evil]. It reads:
Incessantly a restive devil frets
And chafes my flesh, impalpable as air;
I swallow and he fills my burning breast
With subtle and insatiable desire.
[6] “I’m Balzac”
[10] “What are you doing, Victor?”
[11] “Research!”
Back to work with me.
Works Cited:
Baudelaire, Charles. The Complete Poems. Transl. Walter Martin. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006.
08 August 2008
Reflections on writing (or, new means of procrastination).
2 August 2008 at 4.20 pm (General musings)
Tags: Ben, Roland Barthes, thesis
I’ve been wondering lately why editing my own work seems such a nuisance to me. Given twenty student essays, I can generally edit a ten-page paper in around twenty minutes. When it comes to my own work, however, the thought of revising tends to reduce me to the state of a petulant child (ohhh, do I have to?! I don’t want to do this anymore!).
I’ve spent most of the last two weeks finding any alternative I can to editing: watching the complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and reading short fiction, graphic novels, and non-Ben-related essays. I think the only Ben-related activity on which I’ve spent any serious amount of time is my construction of the Globe theatre from my early-modern and medieval literature.
I’ve also been drawing/painting, an activity which gives my thoughts considerable time and space to mull over my current anathema towards revision; I think I’ve come up with an explanation.
I took some art classes while in secondary school, and even considered work as an illustrator [i]. While I love working with graphite, acrylics, and oil, however, I tend to work slowly and painstakingly (emphasis on the “pains”), taking cares to develop each component of the work as accurately as a can. By the time I’ve produced a substantial piece of work, I’ve spent so much time, effort, and costly materials that, even if a
work seems to be lacking a certain effect, I tend to leave it alone, not wanting to ruin the fairly decent quality of the composition.
Consequently, I tend be a rather mediocre artist: visual art depends upon the artist’s ability to be take risks: to know when to deviate from the designs, studies, and thumbnails: to include spontaneity in one’s work. My best compositions tend to be the ones which I both design and create with rapidity. This applies to my written work as well.
My second chapter was the easiest portion of my thesis to write. The New Inn is one of my favourite Jonsonsian plays: it is, I think, one of his most entertaining, and also yields a lot of discussion concerning politics, the carnival, gender, performativity, and the festive and romantic genres which it parodies. Too, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, while not one of my favourite Shakespearian plays, is at least, well-known to me. Consequently, I came to chapter two calmly, knowing the subjects and the scenes of the plays I wanted to discuss. After writing only a brief outline of the argument, I wrote, allowing the paper itself to dictate when analyses of an additional scene should be included, and the order in which they ought to be discussed: not knowing exactly what was going to happen, it was a pleasant surprise to find myself discussing the relationship between cuckoldry and knowledge.
The language of the argument was somewhat disorganised, and contained more than the usual number of grammatical errors: the argument itself was interesting and a lot of fun to write.
Chapter three, conversely, was the chapter I had dreaded from the beginning of the project. Cynthia’s Revels is, along with Cataline, the dullest of Jonson’s plays, and I struggled to find a way to produce an interesting discussion from it. Additionally, the task of addressing all the hitherto-unanswered questions I had introduced in the previous two chapters, in a novel way (with The Magnetic Lady), as well as addressing a new (but not entirely unforeseen) theoretical problem, and all in the same argument, seemed nigh-impossible.
I found myself re-reading and re-reading again, both Cynthia’s Revels and The Magnetic Lady, filling pages of notes and outlines. By the time I had produced what I felt was an extant, organised argument, I found myself unwilling to now write the thing: having selected every scene I wanted to discuss, noted the points of discussion, and arranged them in exactly the order they would appear in my final argument, I found myself bored with the entire process. The argument was interesting, but the anticipation was gone: by the starting point, I knew where I was going to end up: all spontaneity had been lost.
Finally, I forced myself to simply write the paper, and managed to produce thirty pages in a couple of days. The quality of the writing was, I suspected, poor, and my suspicions were confirmed upon reading. Moments of tiredness showed in unclear grammar, bored inattentiveness resulted in repetitions in argument, while frequent breaks during writing displayed themselves in rhetorical and structural discontinuities.
The poor quality of the writing, however, meant that I spent the greatest amount of time revising chapter three, and after submitting it, it is apparently one of my better chapters, being the most straightforward and clearly-written.
Not that I want to turn down a compliment, and even I’m impressed that I managed to produce a fairly interesting post-structuralist reading of at least one very dull play, yet I find myself vaguely disappointed. Spontaneity (and fun) produced the greatest raw product of my thesis: it is the laborious original planning, however, and an attention to the re-organisation and grammatical revising of an argument that determines the final quality of a composition. [ii] I have neglected this revision process in second chapter thus far, and I feel I have cheated it somewhat.[iii]
Time for serious editing.
End Notes:
[i] an illustrator. Of (science) textbooks. I was an unusual child.
[ii] final quality. As I adore ordering terrified verbs and nouns into proper syntax, I suppose I have chosen the right career.
[iii] cheated it somewhat. I’m also confused: chapter three, so painful to write, is my best chapter; similarly, my the Jameson paper which is probably the best piece of work I’ve produced was written on four hours sleep, late at night, during an illness, and, at the time of submission, I could barely discern my own argument. Does a painful writing process always produce the greatest results? Probably not, given that the papers I wrote under similar conditions for my lit. crit and lit. theory redux courses last term were the two worst papers I’ve submitted. There doesn’t seem to be any continuous factor or condition of producing a consistent quality of work.
I suppose this is a truth of the writing process: writer’s minds and states are simply not consistent. Incidentally, I’m currently reading John Mullan’s Anonymity (London: Faber, 2007). In his discussion of Currer Bell/ Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot/Mary Anne Evans, Mullan discusses the need to attribute a single consistent style to a single author (in the case of the former, whose inconsistent style led her contemporaries to surmise her work was the product of two genders), and a single name to a consistent style (several alterations in name during her lifetime, Mullan surmises, suggest why we continue to print Evans’s works under her pseudonym, while Brontë’s pseudonym is largely forgotten). Given that continuity in an author’s mind/works does not exist, why are we so obsessed to attribute a work on a clearly-identifiable author? Mullan has not yet mentioned Barthes or Foucault; I hope he does, as such a discussion would be both interesting and relevant to study in anonymity.
Sorry about the tangent.
2 August 2008 ~ St. Catharines
A new page?
2 August 2008 at 12.18 am (General musings)
Tags: early modern philosophy, EEBO, Gaurav, Sigmund Freud
You, my devoted reader, may have noticed the addition of a new page on this archive. Liking his “Battle of the Bindings” post from Gaurav’s new “blog”, I decided to adapt* the idea on a permanent basis. This decision is motivated by a pair of notions: first, it gives me the appearance of writing while exerting little effort, and next, there simply isn’t time enough to extensively review all the books which, between research and my haphazard reading habits, I read in a week.[i] At least if I record these works in a list, you, dear reader, can leave remarks, queries, or reviews. In my (admittedly absurd and extraordinarily narcissistic) imagination, my list will provide grounds for the germination of stunningly intellectual debates (at the very least it will act as a handy reference for those wishing to buy me gifts[ii]).
A third reason for this list, however, became apparent as I attempted to recall the works I had read in the last three months[iii]. This process was a bit unsettling. My “Books Digested” list, while containing a healthy 21 entries[iv], seems disproportionate to the the number of hours I’ve actually spent reading. Having no active employment until the fall term begins, yet possessing friends who work during the day, results in most of my daytime hours for the last fourteen weeks having been spent largely in the company of fictional characters and critics. Where then, did all those texts go?
Attempting to account for these lost texts, I started to think over the list of reading material I haven’t included in my list: single chapters from books (research), journal articles (more research), books I never intended to complete (short stories, essays, or poems from various anthologies), and books I’ve read before (none of Jonson’s or Shakespeare’s plays make the list, though I read As You Like It and The Magnetic Lady a few times each over the summer)[v]. Books I can’t remember reading, for obvious reasons, also don’t appear on the list.
This process of cataloguing (sort of) what I’ve read (or not) led me to muse over the sheer amount one actually reads in a day: my list obviously also does not include online reviews, newspapers, websites I frequent, my morning comics, articles I read while waiting in line or at the bus terminal, or emails.
If I extend the list further, I include directions on signs, directions on forms, bills, bank statements, advertisements, film subtitles, library receipts, other receipts, word-a-day calendars…
In my early modern textual collection class last year, I was astounded by the sheer amount of text (including textual ephemera) from surviving early modern documents available for study. Even limiting available material to the digitised copies of English texts from 1473-1700 available on EEBO, the database offers more than 118 500 pieces of material: another 5-10 years are expected to digitise the remaining available texts from 125 libraries contributing to the project.
I can hardly imagine the amounts of material offered by similar databases covering texts from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, or the medieval period, as well as online translations of continental, colonial, and classical literature. Yet this staggering amount of text is, I also imagine, dwarfed by the amount of both material and non-material texts produced in contemporary life: it seems unlikely that we possess the archival capacities to collect all the pamphlets, advertisements, magazines, movie tickets, bills, receipts, &c. produced every day, [vi] or to even list the text available on the seemingly non-spatially-limited internet.
Turning to an early modern example, literary critics have oft commented upon Montaigne’s essay “On Books,” and Montaigne’s faulty memory, and his habit of “noting at the end of every book — I mean those that I do not intend to read again — the date when I finished it and the opinion I had formed of it as a whole, my purpose being at least to remind myself of the character and general impression of the author that I had conceived when reading it (171-172). Considering Montaigne, in his 14-page essay, cites at least 34 authors he has read, it is easy to imagine that the plethora of material available bears some responsibility in causing Montaigne’s faulty memory.
Though Montaigne discusses the problem of studying history, stating that it is necessary for the student to “run through all sorts of authors, both old and new, in French and in gibberish, without distinction, to learn from them the various things they teach” (169), Montaigne also states, in the passage I have cited in my “Book Dossier,” “when I meet with difficulties in my reading, I do not bite my nails over them; after making one or two attempts, I give them up” (161). Good reading habits, then, involve a system of sifting through huge quantities of text and quickly deciphering what is good (well-written) and necessary, and what can be ignored or discarded.
How much more necessary is this skill now, when the quantities of translated, available literature/text produced vastly exceeds what is possible to read in a lifetime. Further, how (perhaps ironically) necessary it is to produce more text in the form of critical commentary which can serve as a means of illuminating the contents of a text and its quality, in order that other readers may “run through” our contemporary textual collection more easily (not that my list will do any of this, though it may help me, when fall term arrives, to recall what I’ve read, when, and for which class, a bit more easily). This necessity for critical commentary, as well as the ability to read skillfully also, I think, suggests the necessity for both literary critics and educators in the contemporary world.
Finally, and on a bit of a non-sequitor closing note, I occasionally wonder what I would do were I suddenly and catastrophically unable to read: I’m reassured, at least, that I have hobbies:
The Globe Theatre: not to scale. vii
End Notes:
[i] in a week. Unless I were willing to quit work and general socialising, in which case the friends and colleagues with whom I often share my reviews would drop off considerably.
[ii] buy me gifts. This is, of course, me an example of the kind of narcissism this archive nurtures in my being.
[iii] three months. The list begins at the start of summer term: beyond this time, my memory of texts becomes a bit hazy, what with the usual end of term reading/writing panic.
[iv] 21 entries. Though half of these are under 200 pages.
[v] over the summer). Incidentally, Moby Dick falls under both the categories “books I didn’t intend to complete” and “books reread”. Being one of my favourite books, I like to reread chapters of it whenever I’m bored, ill, or when it is raining, as it has been most of this summer.
[vi] every day. Not that any time period has ever collected all ephemeral (or even non-ephemeral) texts: as much as EEBO has to offer, more frequently one crosses references to title and tracts which are irrevocably lost.
[vii] not to scale The monster eating the Globe Theatre is my guinea pig, Job. Note also, Sigmund Freud as Hamlet (he’s on stage alone, so I assume he’s delivering a soliloquy).
I am a sad little person.
Works Cited:
Montaigne, Michel de. “On Books.” Essays. Trans. JM Cohen. London: Penguin, 1993. 159-173.
2 August 2008 ~ St. Catharines
Glossary of Terms:
adapt. v. See “steal”.
Apology (the defensive kind).
1 August 2008 at 7.49 pm (Maintenance)
Tags: Ben, Frederick Jameson
My Dearest Archive,
I don’t know what you mean by this: writing me a letter demanding an explanation of my doings of the last few weeks. I am the last person to condone a lifestyle of reckless abandonment. Were I to disappear for weeks, or even days at a time without offering any hint of my whereabouts, I would hardly condemn your o’erwatchfulness: indeed, I would expect it and, though I might outwardly curse your interrogations, I know that in the rational part of my soul, I would be grateful for such loving interference.
Such a situation as described above cannot, I think, be fairly applied to my behaviour of the last month or so. True, I have been absent from you, but I never departed without leaving some brief description of the ‘why and wherefore’ of my leave-takings. As to your charge that “whilst gone, I had no news of your doings, nor thoughts, nor welfare, which (I imagined) was of the most hapless condition,” I must defend myself by reminding you that I have written at least once a fortnight (and often with more regularity).
I must, however, have space and time to work, and you, my dear, must not stifle my productivity with your patriarchal watchfulness. Yet let us not quarrel, my archive. As a conciliatory gesture, I offer you some inclination of my activities of the past weeks.
First, I must observe that, even with a light shower around tea time today, it is the first fine day in weeks, and thus among the first opportunities I have had of communicating with you: frightfully dangerous storms being hardly conducive to the act of composition (and even were I to manage the task, I suspect the effects of foul weather during delivery would have made reading illegible.)
The weather has not prevented me, however, from meeting with Lord and Lady C—-, who assure me that my work on the late Frederick Jameson holds potential: they have lent me some works of his, and I shall be revising my paper for submission to the Royal Society (I hear, however, they are difficult group with which to communicate. No matter, if they will not have me, I shall try for publication in the Canadas.)
In further regards to my education, I have registered for classes at the beginning of last month, and am anticipating their beginnings in another four weeks. (I shall write of them in greater detail later, but can reveal that I will be further studying the poets of the English Renaissance, as well as American and Parisian literature of the nineteenth century.) I am also hoping for employment in my departments come the beginning of term.
Aside from these activities, there is not much news to share. I have been attending the cinema and the symphony occasionally, reading some, and of course, continuing my revisions concerning the work of the Renaissance dramatist and poet, Benjamin Jonson. I shall send you a copy when I am done, and invite you to the defense in late August.
I hope this satisfies your curiosity concerning my whereabouts. I shall write again soon, though, if I do not, please attribute it to general busyness, coupled with the lethargy of the summer months, and not to any carelessness on my part. I shall attend to you with more regularity during the autumn term: in the meanwhile, I charge you “have patience, and do not suspect my affexions!”
Respectfully yours,
The English Undergraduate.
(Post scriptum. Enclosed is a photograph of the great Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose Scheherezade we heard last week: what a stunning beard!)
1 August 2008 ~ St. Catharines
