...which I can no longer afford to delay, now that I've finally read the last couple pages of "The Angel in the House." (Seriously, I don't know why more people don't read this poem. It's amazing in its ability to generate wtf? moments. I have a post about this up at the group blog where I use my own name, should anyone be interested.)
Okay.
I need to pick up the threads on my prospectus, which have been completely dropped since I crashed midweek. Before that, though, I was actually doing okay. I didn't do a lot of writing last week, but I did put in some intensive work on my bibliography, which mainly meant sorting out several stacks of files into piles that made sense--one stack for theory, one for general articles on the field (including both periodization and state of the field articles as well as ones that treat multiple authors or non-poetic texts) and finally, one for critical articles on individual poets. There's a lot on the bibliography that I will probably never look at, but I decided that it's easier to take things off the list than put them on there later on. And, for what it's worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of things I had looked at and did know about. (A lot of these particular files were from when I wrote the fake prospectus for a class in the spring of 2007.)
The bibliography thing also had the advantage of helping jog my memory about the state of the field. It's lucky for me that the big journal in my field published two issues devoted basically to self-reflection within the last five years, though I do wonder if the field is almost too-self-reflective to the point of being almost paralyzed. And in some ways, skimming through a couple of the articles (especially the ones that are calling for a greater attentiveness to language and performativity) helped me better understand the contribution that my article is going to make to the field and the kind of intervention that VIE was steering me towards. While I continue to see myself as a theorist more than a historicist, I've gotten to the point where I can deploy the historical strategically when I need to. And I'm beginning to think, too, that what I got in the habit of calling "historicism" (after The Professor) is probably closer to an untheorized materialism, the kind of scholarship that makes book reports from the archives. (I ran across a particularly egregious example of this recently, where the author was basically making a very basic argument about a certain poet, with the only real contribution being that s/he had OMG touched the book!) But I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to get anywhere, the field is going to have to get even more comfortable with explicitly theoretical gestures rather than crypto-theoretical arguments that attempt to erase their provenance. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can't totally do that here.) I think that my committee member who says that deconstruction has largely become an uncontroversial part of the tools of close reading; I'd say the same for gestures of attentiveness to historical context and the situatedness of the text. Where we go from there--as a field, as a profession, seems up for grabs.
It's possible that one of the reasons I've had such trouble getting the actual prospectus down on paper (as opposed to notes and paragraphs and sets of disjointed ideas) is that I was trying to start with the texts when I needed to start with the field. When I did the fake prospectus, I began with Tennyson, Arnold, and Wilde--now that it's for real, I realize that I may have to begin with the recent work in the field more generally. For some reason, this feels like a capitulation to...something: I mean, shouldn't my dissertation be coming directly out of the texts from day 1? There's a very specific place in Coleridge that sparked all of this: shouldn't my prospectus begin with that? I'm finding the answer to be no. What I realized when I was going through my files (especially those reflective issues of the journal in which I will soon be published) is that my thinking on this topic has always been directed, at least to a certain degree, towards making an intervention in the field. But I think my project makes more sense in that context. And that feels like a weird place to be. What I need to do today (one of the many things I need to do today) is to push back against that weirdness and just write the way it works. I think I'll be a lot better off when I get that down.
One of my other big realizations of early last week is that I've been a Victorianist all along, despite the forays into Romanticism. At least for dissertational purposes. I mean, I do still plan to talk a lot about Coleridge and a few others. But I don't feel compelled to talk a lot about, say, Shelley or Keats. (I managed to get through my orals with a Romanticism list that had no Keats on it.) On the other hand, I do still want to talk about things like the sublime, and I'm worried that there's going to be a huge time gap that I will need to somehow justify from a thematic perspective. Possibly by applying de Quincey. I'm suddenly aware of the ways that my interest in the Long Nineteenth Century is spread rather unevenly....I'm all about, say, the 1790s and the mid-1810s Coleridge. And then I don't really care about anything until the 1850s. I'm slowly inching into the 1860s and, with Augusta Webster, touching barely on the 1870s. And then there are several female poets of the late 1880s and 90s that I love but really can't justify writing about here. Ditto for Wilde. This leaves huge swaths of uncharted decades that are making me ever so slightly nervous. I may simply just have to atone for it all by promising to write my second book on the 1830s and 40s.
I've been walking around for several weeks saying that I'm going to write my chapters on concepts and themes rather than on a single poet or text. While I'm not going to discard that right away, I may do single-author chapter breakdowns. I can't really see past chapter 1 and whatever chapter the article becomes right now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to know what I'm writing about until I do the first chapter. This is a bit scary. But this is the point at which I should probably remind myself that the prospectus is less a document for planning the dissertation as it is the creation of a projected document that people would want to give you money to work on. Meaning that I don't necessarily have to write the dissertation that gets prospectused. If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to get it done fairly quickly, as I'm sort of frustratingly good at writing documents that predict interesting projects that I don't really intend to write. Of course, this makes me miserable later on, but it gets you through. And then I can go back to reading for a little while and perhaps coming up with an abstract or two.
I think I'm always looking for things in academic books that literary criticism is no longer able to deliver. And, as I begin my own project, it's possible that I'm beginning to realize the impossibility of my being able to live up to my own expectations.
On the plus side, the summer's article writing experiences seem to have had the effects of making me a more generous reader. Not in the uncritical "this is published so it must be good" way that I was when I started grad school, but in a way that nonetheless tempers the tendency to go into every article ready to rip it apart or be disappointed. That's probably a necessary stage to go through in grad school, and it's no doubt a side effect of certain seminar assignments, but in my case it was probably taken to more of an extreme because I was hanging around with The Professor so much. Cultivating a bit of generosity has, at least, begun to make my intellectual life a bit more rewarding.
I kind of just want to put off writing for another day and curl up with something old school like The Ethics of Reading, but I'm not going to.
Realization: my approach to my prospectus thus far has been plagued by the same problems as my approach to my personal improvement. Both of these projects have been undertaken with something less than the strategic organization that they require and as a result I've been wasting energy trying to think along too many different lines at once, forgetting what I already know, and having very little to show for the effort. I've also been worrying about the wrong things a lot of the time. I finally revisited the assignment sequence for the dissertation prospectus in our department's required course and realized the value of that kind of process and of at least revisiting it selectively to build on the work I completed a year and a half ago. Would that there were an assignment sheet for fixing one's life and not being all about the negative attention getting.
Anyway. Probably time to start working with the specifics that I can't post here. Either that or grading. (Shudder.)
Showing posts with label romanticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romanticism. Show all posts
10.05.2008
7.28.2008
Things that are being, have been, or will be revised
The Victorian Project
Sent the draft of the Victorian project to VIE yesterday afternoon--yes, a week after our original deadline. I haven't heard back from him, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will be okay since a) it wasn't a "real" deadline, just a suggestion to allow for another substantial revision before the real deadline and there's still time for that if necessary, b) he was on vacation until Friday, and c) I'm not sure that there was anything else I could have done to have made it go much faster. It's a 10,000-word piece right now, and between 7,500 and 8,000 of those words did not exist prior to this draft. And I think that it's probably one of the better things I've written, ever.
The Romantic Project
...is due at the end of the week. I'm still not as confident in this as in the Victorian project, but I'm feeling okay about it. Doing a read-through today, comparing notes, figuring out what to focus on. I want to tweak a few things, amplify some points, maybe ditch a couple of others as being more trouble than they're worth, but I'm actually starting to believe that Committee Member was right when she said that it was close, or at least fine to go out to the reviewers. Hopefully, this means that I'll be able to have a relatively normal sleep schedule this week, since last week really got out of control. As I am no longer 20 years old, I also no longer get the same kick out of seeing the sun come up at 4:45 on a Wednesday morning.
My feelings about the way The Professor read the Romantic Project
I made myself sit down after lunch today and actually read through The Professor's comments on the Romantic Project. It's possible that with the distance of a few weeks, and 10,000 decent words on my Victorian poet behind me, I was better able to handle it. Okay, so it wasn't a total hatchet job. Some of the comments were actually helpful, and a lot of what I'd been unhappy about was just him being him. And I get that. And I can take it. But it wasn't completely what I'd needed from him, and I'm still no longer sure that I should be writing everything to meet his approval. I'm not quite as angry as I was. We haven't communicated since he sent me the comments and I wrote a (somewhat passive-aggressively grateful) acknowledgment that I'd gotten them. He called me last week, but I didn't pick up the phone and since he didn't leave a message and I didn't call back. It's possible, of course, that he read my post here about that. But none of this is really at the top of my list of things I'm coping with this week.
Mornings
I've sat every morning (or whenever I get up, which has mostly been before noon, but sometimes just barely), except for Friday when I was with The Poet in DC. The second week has been harder than the first; I'm struggling a bit with the posture, trying to figure out how to make it work for me without slouching, and I'm finding that it takes me almost the whole time just to really get in the right position, and then my timer goes off. I do attribute a couple of insights about the Victorian Project to the sitting, though, and I think overall it's a good thing--helping me to, slowly, shift my understanding of what it means to do nothing. And maybe The Poet can help me work on some of this later in the week. In a more general sense, though, this is giving me the impetus to change the way I deal with mornings in general--instead of getting up and going right to the computer, which slows me down and stresses me out, I get up, have some coffee, sit, and get in the shower. Ideally, anyway. It's not getting me out of the house much faster yet, but I do feel a bit better.
Exercise plans
...have pretty much fallen off the table due to this latest round of intensive writing. I need to get them back in gear, since I only have the membership at Erstwhile Teaching College until the end of August and won't be able to renew it until later in September. I suddenly noticed yesterday that I've gained a bit of weight as of late. Probably time to drink a little bit less beer, make sure to eat all the beets I keep buying from the Greenmarket.
How I feel about Amtrak
The first thought I had upon arriving at Penn Station on Thursday morning, sweating and on about four hours' sleep was...clusterfuck. However, this was before I got on the train (not even an Acela) and discovered the joy that was the Quiet Car. This made for a lovely, lovely trip, except for the part between Philly and Baltimore, when it filled up with teenagers who I'm sure thought they were being quiet. The Poet and I took the Acela back up together and that was also fun, mostly because we had a lot of wine.
24 hours in DC
Had I not gone to the the college I actually attended, I would have gone to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service instead. That's what everyone who knew me at the time thought I was going to do. Coming back to DC for the first time in seven or eight years got me thinking about roads not taken, and about what I would be doing if I had moved to Washington instead of New York. And then, about a half hour after I got to the hotel, I started laughing, realizing that I'd probably be doing pretty much the same thing--having sex with a married politician in a hotel room on a Thursday afternoon. The Poet also thought this was hilarious, though I realize this is going to be one of those stories, like the "How I met K after German class" one, that not everyone finds funny.
In general, 24 hours in DC did for me what five days in Wisconsin didn't: namely, make me appreciate living in New York and want to go home. The restaurant where we had dinner was kind of a joke, and I got carded three times at two of the bars we went to--The Poet found that pretty funny. Our hotel bar was awesome, but closed at like 10. But, as 24 hour periods go, it was really nice, surprisingly relaxing--and it gave me a chance to spend time with The Poet in a way that I don't usually get to because of all the...well, all the extenuating circumstances. We had a really good talk on the train ride home, about all kinds of things. I also took a picture of us with my laptop camera. Now I just need to get another one where it doesn't look like I have roughly eight chins. Because I'm pretty sure I don't, at least not yet.
My idea for this blog post
This was a much more boring post than I was planning it to be, though I'm not sure what I expected, considering that I've spent most of the last week either writing or watching Grey's Anatomy. (I don't care what people say about it being realistic or not, but I find the Derek-Meredith dynamic completely realistic and very similar to K and me--though I've never met his wife and he was the one cheating.) Which means it's probably time to get back to work.
Sent the draft of the Victorian project to VIE yesterday afternoon--yes, a week after our original deadline. I haven't heard back from him, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will be okay since a) it wasn't a "real" deadline, just a suggestion to allow for another substantial revision before the real deadline and there's still time for that if necessary, b) he was on vacation until Friday, and c) I'm not sure that there was anything else I could have done to have made it go much faster. It's a 10,000-word piece right now, and between 7,500 and 8,000 of those words did not exist prior to this draft. And I think that it's probably one of the better things I've written, ever.
The Romantic Project
...is due at the end of the week. I'm still not as confident in this as in the Victorian project, but I'm feeling okay about it. Doing a read-through today, comparing notes, figuring out what to focus on. I want to tweak a few things, amplify some points, maybe ditch a couple of others as being more trouble than they're worth, but I'm actually starting to believe that Committee Member was right when she said that it was close, or at least fine to go out to the reviewers. Hopefully, this means that I'll be able to have a relatively normal sleep schedule this week, since last week really got out of control. As I am no longer 20 years old, I also no longer get the same kick out of seeing the sun come up at 4:45 on a Wednesday morning.
My feelings about the way The Professor read the Romantic Project
I made myself sit down after lunch today and actually read through The Professor's comments on the Romantic Project. It's possible that with the distance of a few weeks, and 10,000 decent words on my Victorian poet behind me, I was better able to handle it. Okay, so it wasn't a total hatchet job. Some of the comments were actually helpful, and a lot of what I'd been unhappy about was just him being him. And I get that. And I can take it. But it wasn't completely what I'd needed from him, and I'm still no longer sure that I should be writing everything to meet his approval. I'm not quite as angry as I was. We haven't communicated since he sent me the comments and I wrote a (somewhat passive-aggressively grateful) acknowledgment that I'd gotten them. He called me last week, but I didn't pick up the phone and since he didn't leave a message and I didn't call back. It's possible, of course, that he read my post here about that. But none of this is really at the top of my list of things I'm coping with this week.
Mornings
I've sat every morning (or whenever I get up, which has mostly been before noon, but sometimes just barely), except for Friday when I was with The Poet in DC. The second week has been harder than the first; I'm struggling a bit with the posture, trying to figure out how to make it work for me without slouching, and I'm finding that it takes me almost the whole time just to really get in the right position, and then my timer goes off. I do attribute a couple of insights about the Victorian Project to the sitting, though, and I think overall it's a good thing--helping me to, slowly, shift my understanding of what it means to do nothing. And maybe The Poet can help me work on some of this later in the week. In a more general sense, though, this is giving me the impetus to change the way I deal with mornings in general--instead of getting up and going right to the computer, which slows me down and stresses me out, I get up, have some coffee, sit, and get in the shower. Ideally, anyway. It's not getting me out of the house much faster yet, but I do feel a bit better.
Exercise plans
...have pretty much fallen off the table due to this latest round of intensive writing. I need to get them back in gear, since I only have the membership at Erstwhile Teaching College until the end of August and won't be able to renew it until later in September. I suddenly noticed yesterday that I've gained a bit of weight as of late. Probably time to drink a little bit less beer, make sure to eat all the beets I keep buying from the Greenmarket.
How I feel about Amtrak
The first thought I had upon arriving at Penn Station on Thursday morning, sweating and on about four hours' sleep was...clusterfuck. However, this was before I got on the train (not even an Acela) and discovered the joy that was the Quiet Car. This made for a lovely, lovely trip, except for the part between Philly and Baltimore, when it filled up with teenagers who I'm sure thought they were being quiet. The Poet and I took the Acela back up together and that was also fun, mostly because we had a lot of wine.
24 hours in DC
Had I not gone to the the college I actually attended, I would have gone to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service instead. That's what everyone who knew me at the time thought I was going to do. Coming back to DC for the first time in seven or eight years got me thinking about roads not taken, and about what I would be doing if I had moved to Washington instead of New York. And then, about a half hour after I got to the hotel, I started laughing, realizing that I'd probably be doing pretty much the same thing--having sex with a married politician in a hotel room on a Thursday afternoon. The Poet also thought this was hilarious, though I realize this is going to be one of those stories, like the "How I met K after German class" one, that not everyone finds funny.
In general, 24 hours in DC did for me what five days in Wisconsin didn't: namely, make me appreciate living in New York and want to go home. The restaurant where we had dinner was kind of a joke, and I got carded three times at two of the bars we went to--The Poet found that pretty funny. Our hotel bar was awesome, but closed at like 10. But, as 24 hour periods go, it was really nice, surprisingly relaxing--and it gave me a chance to spend time with The Poet in a way that I don't usually get to because of all the...well, all the extenuating circumstances. We had a really good talk on the train ride home, about all kinds of things. I also took a picture of us with my laptop camera. Now I just need to get another one where it doesn't look like I have roughly eight chins. Because I'm pretty sure I don't, at least not yet.
My idea for this blog post
This was a much more boring post than I was planning it to be, though I'm not sure what I expected, considering that I've spent most of the last week either writing or watching Grey's Anatomy. (I don't care what people say about it being realistic or not, but I find the Derek-Meredith dynamic completely realistic and very similar to K and me--though I've never met his wife and he was the one cheating.) Which means it's probably time to get back to work.
7.13.2008
I don't think this counts as making a joyful noise unto the Lord
It's quarter to one in the morning. Currently, there are two tour buses double parked and idling outside of my apartment building, much as they were doing for over an hour earlier in the day. As a new refinement, however, there is a small car--triple parked, I suppose--with one of those bone-rattling stereo systems playing at (what I certainly hope is) full-blast. The riders of said tour buses are milling around on the sidewalk--at least *they* seem to be reasonably quiet, though it's hard to know.
From the best I can tell, these buses, etc. are related to a fair that one of the churches up my street was having, which makes it rather doubly ironic that they're not showing a lot of concern for either air or noise pollution in the neighborhood. And while I've more or less grown hardened to the depredations of car stereos on this street, this is actually physically stressful.
At least I'm not actually trying to sleep--the lack of blogging in the past ten days has been due largely to my desire to complete a draft of the Romanticism project that I can send to my committee member, The Professor, and possibly a few other people and then not think about for a week while I work on the Victorian project. The work has been progressing slowly, but more or less steadily, but I really want a break tomorrow and in order to do that I have to finish it tonight. And I didn't really want to swoop in like this, but the vibration is making it difficult for me to concentrate on the willing suspension of disbelief.
Fortunately, I think actually switching accounts to make this post has done the trick--the buses, loud people, and obnoxious car have all departed. I wonder what other annoyances I can write away. Hey, how about those nasty little bugs that keep crawling up my kitchen sink? I will expect them gone in the morning through the magic of blogging!
Since I'm here...well, not a whole lot to report. Schedule drama with teaching, but maybe it's not the worst thing in the world to only end up with one class. A good conversation with a high school friend. Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, which is also a kind of sublime, but with more boobs. Study / writing dates that keep me sane even if they don't get a total lot of work done. Discovered the joys of the $4 pints in the afternoon at the bar near my apartment; was less thrilled by the place being filled on a Saturday afternoon with people with babies and funny looking college students. More tastiness from the greenmarket, especially in the form of beets, interesting-looking summer squash, and goat cheese rolled in cinnamon and dried cranberries. Tonight's dinner was a sauteed pork cutlet, ratatouille, and crusty bread.
I haven't been talking to The Professor lately because I still don't feel like sparring. And I've had a couple of emails with K, but I didn't see him in the library this week, and I feel like maybe that's okay.
I'm going to a bar in Williamsburg on Monday night to celebrate the City Hall wedding of my old friend A. I wrote about the last time I saw her here. We've exchanged a couple of more or less cordial emails since then, around the time of my exam, but there wasn't really an effort to get together. I plan to be perfectly nice and to not really talk about my personal life.
Except that...I finally changed my Facebook status from "single" to "it's complicated," admitting something that has been true for awhile now, which is that I'm in a relationship with The Poet. It's been about four months, actually, since I started seeing him regularly, and that makes it the longest actual relationship I've had since breaking up with the Ex in February of last year. Well, the longest romantic relationship I've had, anyway. My relationship to to the Romanticism project is almost at the two-year mark, which may explain some of my fatigue in trying to refine my interpretation of the sublime over and over again. But--to go back to the main point--this clearly means something, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps that I'm just more willing to own it lately, to see it, as my often eminently reasonable fellow Victorianist M puts it, as simply "having sex with someone who makes me happy." And he does make me happy, regardless of how the relationship looks on paper or to other people. So I'm just going to go with that for now.
Okay, I should get back to work. What's frustrating is that none of what I'm trying to write is new, exactly--I have pieces of it scattered everywhere, and one of the weird things about this long term relationship with a text of my own making is that I keep finding places where I anticipated myself. (Oh, and I also found my notes to the Biographia Literaria, which I blogged about not being to find during my orals reading.) But the transitions! And the framing! But at least I have more or less followed my committee member's advice and just stopped reading for the time being....
From the best I can tell, these buses, etc. are related to a fair that one of the churches up my street was having, which makes it rather doubly ironic that they're not showing a lot of concern for either air or noise pollution in the neighborhood. And while I've more or less grown hardened to the depredations of car stereos on this street, this is actually physically stressful.
At least I'm not actually trying to sleep--the lack of blogging in the past ten days has been due largely to my desire to complete a draft of the Romanticism project that I can send to my committee member, The Professor, and possibly a few other people and then not think about for a week while I work on the Victorian project. The work has been progressing slowly, but more or less steadily, but I really want a break tomorrow and in order to do that I have to finish it tonight. And I didn't really want to swoop in like this, but the vibration is making it difficult for me to concentrate on the willing suspension of disbelief.
Fortunately, I think actually switching accounts to make this post has done the trick--the buses, loud people, and obnoxious car have all departed. I wonder what other annoyances I can write away. Hey, how about those nasty little bugs that keep crawling up my kitchen sink? I will expect them gone in the morning through the magic of blogging!
Since I'm here...well, not a whole lot to report. Schedule drama with teaching, but maybe it's not the worst thing in the world to only end up with one class. A good conversation with a high school friend. Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, which is also a kind of sublime, but with more boobs. Study / writing dates that keep me sane even if they don't get a total lot of work done. Discovered the joys of the $4 pints in the afternoon at the bar near my apartment; was less thrilled by the place being filled on a Saturday afternoon with people with babies and funny looking college students. More tastiness from the greenmarket, especially in the form of beets, interesting-looking summer squash, and goat cheese rolled in cinnamon and dried cranberries. Tonight's dinner was a sauteed pork cutlet, ratatouille, and crusty bread.
I haven't been talking to The Professor lately because I still don't feel like sparring. And I've had a couple of emails with K, but I didn't see him in the library this week, and I feel like maybe that's okay.
I'm going to a bar in Williamsburg on Monday night to celebrate the City Hall wedding of my old friend A. I wrote about the last time I saw her here. We've exchanged a couple of more or less cordial emails since then, around the time of my exam, but there wasn't really an effort to get together. I plan to be perfectly nice and to not really talk about my personal life.
Except that...I finally changed my Facebook status from "single" to "it's complicated," admitting something that has been true for awhile now, which is that I'm in a relationship with The Poet. It's been about four months, actually, since I started seeing him regularly, and that makes it the longest actual relationship I've had since breaking up with the Ex in February of last year. Well, the longest romantic relationship I've had, anyway. My relationship to to the Romanticism project is almost at the two-year mark, which may explain some of my fatigue in trying to refine my interpretation of the sublime over and over again. But--to go back to the main point--this clearly means something, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps that I'm just more willing to own it lately, to see it, as my often eminently reasonable fellow Victorianist M puts it, as simply "having sex with someone who makes me happy." And he does make me happy, regardless of how the relationship looks on paper or to other people. So I'm just going to go with that for now.
Okay, I should get back to work. What's frustrating is that none of what I'm trying to write is new, exactly--I have pieces of it scattered everywhere, and one of the weird things about this long term relationship with a text of my own making is that I keep finding places where I anticipated myself. (Oh, and I also found my notes to the Biographia Literaria, which I blogged about not being to find during my orals reading.) But the transitions! And the framing! But at least I have more or less followed my committee member's advice and just stopped reading for the time being....
6.30.2008
Me vs. the Gothic
I'm beginning to think there's a common reason for some of the difficulties that I'm encountering with my two projects. (I think maybe I'll just start calling them the Victorian and the Romantic, though I've mentioned the specific authors / texts here frequently enough that it probably doesn't matter.) On the surface, they don't have a lot in common: the Victorian project has me reading books on live burial and playing around with what I can see of popular periodicals of the nineteenth century, while for the Romantic project I am mostly still treading water with philosophy--lots of Kant, some Hegel, and a smattering of more recent people like Nancy and Lyotard. (Derrida, as I was discussing with some faculty from my department last week, is oddly absent from both of my bibliographies right now, though I think that "No Apocalypse, Not Now" may end up having some relevance to the Victorian project.)
In both of these projects, however, I keep running up against The Gothic. And it's making things hard. The Gothic has always sort of skirted the edges of the work I do--last summer at this time I was working on an earlier version of the Romantic paper and it was centered around the theme of humiliation. I did a fair bit of coursework around early Romantic / late eighteenth century texts (particularly those by Godwin and Wollstonecraft) from the perspective of the discourse of sensibility, and the best thing I ever read in the last American lit class I took (more than three years ago now--it was my first year in grad school) was Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which I still plan to teach and publish on someday. Dealing with these kinds of texts and just generally being someone who works on long nineteenth century literature means that I have to have a decent working knowledge / awareness of the Gothic and how it works.
But that doesn't mean, on the other hand, that I'm particularly interested in it. Okay, that sounds more horrible than I meant it to. I mean, I do like a good Gothic potboiler every now and then, and I feel like I can certainly appreciate what it is and how it does what it does, why it was important at the time, and so on. I guess it's more that my own critical investments are elsewhere right now and have been for a long time. What seems to be happening right now, though, is that the texts, concepts, and passages that I'm working on, have all largely been labeled as Gothic, and I'm finding that this makes reading them against that particular grain to be something of an uphill battle. And it's not even that I find myself wanting to argue that these texts are not Gothic (I mean, premature burial, yo), but rather that calling a poem "Gothic" or identifying its sites of sexual guilt or whatever doesn't actually constitute an interpretation these days. While the work of people like Eve Segdwick and Judith Halberstam (both of whom I've been skimming madly since last week) is aimed at showing the Gothic to be worthy of study and complex in itself, I wonder if the term as used by others is falling back into a critical shorthand. Not one used to dismiss entire passages--about 22 years ago, my adviser dismissed the passage at the center of my Victorian project as being "luridly gothic"--but certainly as a way to imply that there is a certain group of texts whose readability (and even whose unreadability) is assured according to this set of codes. And so the question for what I'm doing largely becomes one of the supplement, the so what, and the why bother. And I find myself wanting to say, "because it's just more interesting," but I do feel like I'm fighting against the weight of a historicist juggernaut here. But I soldier on.
The other common thread between these two projects, by the way, if the feeling that I'm completely behindhand on my de Man.
---
Mostly unrelated, before I go scavenge myself some lunch: a "Dickensian" toilet policy? Really?
In both of these projects, however, I keep running up against The Gothic. And it's making things hard. The Gothic has always sort of skirted the edges of the work I do--last summer at this time I was working on an earlier version of the Romantic paper and it was centered around the theme of humiliation. I did a fair bit of coursework around early Romantic / late eighteenth century texts (particularly those by Godwin and Wollstonecraft) from the perspective of the discourse of sensibility, and the best thing I ever read in the last American lit class I took (more than three years ago now--it was my first year in grad school) was Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which I still plan to teach and publish on someday. Dealing with these kinds of texts and just generally being someone who works on long nineteenth century literature means that I have to have a decent working knowledge / awareness of the Gothic and how it works.
But that doesn't mean, on the other hand, that I'm particularly interested in it. Okay, that sounds more horrible than I meant it to. I mean, I do like a good Gothic potboiler every now and then, and I feel like I can certainly appreciate what it is and how it does what it does, why it was important at the time, and so on. I guess it's more that my own critical investments are elsewhere right now and have been for a long time. What seems to be happening right now, though, is that the texts, concepts, and passages that I'm working on, have all largely been labeled as Gothic, and I'm finding that this makes reading them against that particular grain to be something of an uphill battle. And it's not even that I find myself wanting to argue that these texts are not Gothic (I mean, premature burial, yo), but rather that calling a poem "Gothic" or identifying its sites of sexual guilt or whatever doesn't actually constitute an interpretation these days. While the work of people like Eve Segdwick and Judith Halberstam (both of whom I've been skimming madly since last week) is aimed at showing the Gothic to be worthy of study and complex in itself, I wonder if the term as used by others is falling back into a critical shorthand. Not one used to dismiss entire passages--about 22 years ago, my adviser dismissed the passage at the center of my Victorian project as being "luridly gothic"--but certainly as a way to imply that there is a certain group of texts whose readability (and even whose unreadability) is assured according to this set of codes. And so the question for what I'm doing largely becomes one of the supplement, the so what, and the why bother. And I find myself wanting to say, "because it's just more interesting," but I do feel like I'm fighting against the weight of a historicist juggernaut here. But I soldier on.
The other common thread between these two projects, by the way, if the feeling that I'm completely behindhand on my de Man.
---
Mostly unrelated, before I go scavenge myself some lunch: a "Dickensian" toilet policy? Really?
6.23.2008
Resolution and possibly some stab at independence
Summer Mondays dawning with possibility, though it's a possibility with a couple of asterisks--okay, so I futzed around last night doing the crossword online and whatever, but I still slept for almost eight hours and I didn't drink last night, so why am I so tired? The only thing I can think of is the humidity, so I may have to run the air conditioner tonight. Greyskies again, which I don't mind so much now that I'm inside, but, again, humidity and the like. My one heavy framed picture (an animation cell from an old Sunbeam commercial with Linus and Snoopy, signed by Bill Melendez) fell down again this morning. This is completely my mother's fault--she claimed I was hanging my pictures too high on the wall and moved this one down--it fell once while she was still on that visit, and now this. Argh. At least I've been there both times this has happened. (In other domestic news, the soapdish is back on the wall, but now my tub isn't draining all that well--a problem that I have never had in this apartment. I think that the guy who repaired the soapdish must have just washed all the excess plaster down the drain. Brilliant.)
But I'm back here for another week, a new set of goals I haven't failed at yet. I've passed through another period of wretchedness, sloughed off another set of distracting desires. That's what a lot of this is about, after all, and I don't need to be a Buddhist to know that, just a midwesterner. Because it's Monday and still the morning, I can say things like I will not be distracted, I will not spend 2:30-4:00 obsessing about whether K. will show up, I will not spend 4:00-6:30 obsessing that he is here. I will make it to the gym, as this is the one day I know I can go in the evening. I will make do with what I have. I will write five pages today and hope that two and a half of them will be good. I will simply write to write and edit later. I will not obsess about whether I'm actually going to see E. tomorrow. I will bracket all the other conflictedness that might have been raised over the weekend. I will use the online timer I found last week. I will not get bogged down by reading things of minimal relevance and maximum frustration. I will stick to the plan I had for this piece of writing, the one that impressed the guest editor--if there was something horribly off base, I will assume she would have told me in February. I will concentrate, I will be in the moment, I will take on one thing at a time.
In all of this, of course, I feel very close to Coleridge. Because I often forget things that I blog about (something that has always added a kind of frisson of risk to all of this), I can't remember off the top of my head whether I mentioned here or not the fact that I was so tired / hung over / stressed out by K that all I ended up doing on Friday afternoon was writing out stanza VI of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." The resolutions I am making here, the ones I have been making for the last several days, are all indebted to this example--for better or worse.
But I'm back here for another week, a new set of goals I haven't failed at yet. I've passed through another period of wretchedness, sloughed off another set of distracting desires. That's what a lot of this is about, after all, and I don't need to be a Buddhist to know that, just a midwesterner. Because it's Monday and still the morning, I can say things like I will not be distracted, I will not spend 2:30-4:00 obsessing about whether K. will show up, I will not spend 4:00-6:30 obsessing that he is here. I will make it to the gym, as this is the one day I know I can go in the evening. I will make do with what I have. I will write five pages today and hope that two and a half of them will be good. I will simply write to write and edit later. I will not obsess about whether I'm actually going to see E. tomorrow. I will bracket all the other conflictedness that might have been raised over the weekend. I will use the online timer I found last week. I will not get bogged down by reading things of minimal relevance and maximum frustration. I will stick to the plan I had for this piece of writing, the one that impressed the guest editor--if there was something horribly off base, I will assume she would have told me in February. I will concentrate, I will be in the moment, I will take on one thing at a time.
In all of this, of course, I feel very close to Coleridge. Because I often forget things that I blog about (something that has always added a kind of frisson of risk to all of this), I can't remember off the top of my head whether I mentioned here or not the fact that I was so tired / hung over / stressed out by K that all I ended up doing on Friday afternoon was writing out stanza VI of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." The resolutions I am making here, the ones I have been making for the last several days, are all indebted to this example--for better or worse.
6.16.2008
Bloomsday Edgestories
I learned today from reading Jean-Luc Nancy's The Discourse of the Syncope that the feminine form of Kant--die Kante--means "the pointed, the thin and sharp edge, the angle, of a ridge or divide" (91). I am thinking of this as a razoredge or a tightrope or--to think less laceratingly for the moment--the silvering of the mirror (and I'm thinking here of Derrida's reading of Ponge's "Fable," mostly in "Psyche: Invention of the Other") and watersurfaces of the kind that lend themselves to a confusion of shadow and substance, as in the scene in Book 4 of the Prelude--a kind of multiple vision--the sky and trees reflected there, but also the reeds and fish underneath the surface, a dual visibility that in some sense makes the surface "itself" in-visible. (This all seems, at times, like a hopelessly old-fashioned exercise in deconstruction deployed to cover over my own personal stupidities. If I could set the scene for you I would, but I'm not sure I could do it unless I could make it into the third person first and even then I'm not sure I would despise myself any less.)
And I am thinking, on this Bloomsday (inevitably a legacy of my ex-boyfriend; there are certain textual transmissions that occasionally make it hard for me to do what I do) of tightrope acts and walking on water and I have been trying for the last couple of hours to recover from a certain multiday stupefaction (something like this always seems to happen when I should be writing--I end up reading, and badly) and to think in paragraphs, to make another try at staking out a position within the Critique of Judgment and I am turning around on what seems to me to be the dual question of the essential spontaneity of aesthetic judgment and the suspension that secures the instance (I hear this with a French accent today) of freedom. (Simply being here is to risk a complete collapse; I come here, I say, so that I will be more productive and more disciplined than I would be at home; coming here, though, is always a risk, and there is so much that can go wrong, so many ways to force myself into a kind of disappointment. Why can't that be me? Suspension is exhausting; I didn't know what I would be getting into; in some ways the forced lightheartedness is almost worse; having him know what he knows about my life is worse than him not knowing anything at all; this is not conductive to writing about the sublime except when it is and I wouldn't have written this if I had stayed home today.) I find myself wondering as I contemplate this spontaneity--and I'm not sure Kant ever uses the word, only implies it--this instability--I find myself recurring again and again to the question of the razor edge and the water surface, specifically: Do you ever get used to walking on water?
The story goes that Peter was okay until he looked down. What's the opposite of looking down? What did it mean for him to look down? Is it simply a matter of knowing or not knowing what you're doing? This seems to make faith a matter of ignorance--no, it's more than this, to walk on water you almost have to know what you're doing at every moment. (I see you past the shoulder of the person I'm talking to don't you realize that all I wanted was to be able to do this with you, to work side by side? This is all I've ever really wanted of the people I've loved, and perhaps this is why it would be difficult, as things stand now, to fall in love with The Poet, who seems very far from here as it is.) To know but not to look--some sort of action, some kind of energy--nervous energy, tension, a suspension that is almost a churning, lifting you just far enough above the water not to fall. You can't get used to walking on water--that's when you fall, that's when you go slack, you let your guard down and you become ever so slightly too heavy--there was never much of a margin for error to begin with and now it's over and you might never be able to regain that first lightness, you will have to learn some other trick. (It's only now that I come face to face with how much I have been depending on some illusion of a singularity that went both ways--not in an absolute sense, but at least in terms of the immediate context--and by a bad accident of positioning, a choice that I made before anyone else was here this morning--I get to watch this get chipped away moment by moment--)
And I am trying to write about Kant and get myself back to Christabel and I am still turning over the same set of ideas, more or less. I call it something different now, moving beyond humiliation and its overdeterminations, thinking now more broadly in terms that I am preparing to live with for years--funny, how one's longest relationships are revealed to be with texts, with certain words, as people themselves come and go.
Late on Friday night I told The Professor what I have been thinking for several weeks now--that I would be happier if I could write something like poetry, if I could regain the kind of relation I used to have to theory, philosophy, and literature, that graphomania that had me writing in several locations and in several discourses all at once. No doubt this was dangerous when I was 20 and 21; no doubt there would be risks this time around, too, not the least of which being a kind of absolute self-indulgence or just trying too hard. I might be happier, too, if I could slip into the third person sometimes, like I did one afternoon sitting in the St Mark's Churchyard in the summer of 2000. I used to write to survive; when I stopped writing, I stopped surviving. I am still working alone; I have been looking outside to see if we're getting the storm they promised us (we're not); I need to decide what I have the heart to do the rest of today; maybe I will let myself get beer if I go to the gym first.
And I am thinking, on this Bloomsday (inevitably a legacy of my ex-boyfriend; there are certain textual transmissions that occasionally make it hard for me to do what I do) of tightrope acts and walking on water and I have been trying for the last couple of hours to recover from a certain multiday stupefaction (something like this always seems to happen when I should be writing--I end up reading, and badly) and to think in paragraphs, to make another try at staking out a position within the Critique of Judgment and I am turning around on what seems to me to be the dual question of the essential spontaneity of aesthetic judgment and the suspension that secures the instance (I hear this with a French accent today) of freedom. (Simply being here is to risk a complete collapse; I come here, I say, so that I will be more productive and more disciplined than I would be at home; coming here, though, is always a risk, and there is so much that can go wrong, so many ways to force myself into a kind of disappointment. Why can't that be me? Suspension is exhausting; I didn't know what I would be getting into; in some ways the forced lightheartedness is almost worse; having him know what he knows about my life is worse than him not knowing anything at all; this is not conductive to writing about the sublime except when it is and I wouldn't have written this if I had stayed home today.) I find myself wondering as I contemplate this spontaneity--and I'm not sure Kant ever uses the word, only implies it--this instability--I find myself recurring again and again to the question of the razor edge and the water surface, specifically: Do you ever get used to walking on water?
The story goes that Peter was okay until he looked down. What's the opposite of looking down? What did it mean for him to look down? Is it simply a matter of knowing or not knowing what you're doing? This seems to make faith a matter of ignorance--no, it's more than this, to walk on water you almost have to know what you're doing at every moment. (I see you past the shoulder of the person I'm talking to don't you realize that all I wanted was to be able to do this with you, to work side by side? This is all I've ever really wanted of the people I've loved, and perhaps this is why it would be difficult, as things stand now, to fall in love with The Poet, who seems very far from here as it is.) To know but not to look--some sort of action, some kind of energy--nervous energy, tension, a suspension that is almost a churning, lifting you just far enough above the water not to fall. You can't get used to walking on water--that's when you fall, that's when you go slack, you let your guard down and you become ever so slightly too heavy--there was never much of a margin for error to begin with and now it's over and you might never be able to regain that first lightness, you will have to learn some other trick. (It's only now that I come face to face with how much I have been depending on some illusion of a singularity that went both ways--not in an absolute sense, but at least in terms of the immediate context--and by a bad accident of positioning, a choice that I made before anyone else was here this morning--I get to watch this get chipped away moment by moment--)
And I am trying to write about Kant and get myself back to Christabel and I am still turning over the same set of ideas, more or less. I call it something different now, moving beyond humiliation and its overdeterminations, thinking now more broadly in terms that I am preparing to live with for years--funny, how one's longest relationships are revealed to be with texts, with certain words, as people themselves come and go.
Late on Friday night I told The Professor what I have been thinking for several weeks now--that I would be happier if I could write something like poetry, if I could regain the kind of relation I used to have to theory, philosophy, and literature, that graphomania that had me writing in several locations and in several discourses all at once. No doubt this was dangerous when I was 20 and 21; no doubt there would be risks this time around, too, not the least of which being a kind of absolute self-indulgence or just trying too hard. I might be happier, too, if I could slip into the third person sometimes, like I did one afternoon sitting in the St Mark's Churchyard in the summer of 2000. I used to write to survive; when I stopped writing, I stopped surviving. I am still working alone; I have been looking outside to see if we're getting the storm they promised us (we're not); I need to decide what I have the heart to do the rest of today; maybe I will let myself get beer if I go to the gym first.
5.16.2008
Another Friday, in disjointed form
I'm feeling better today than I've felt on recent Fridays. Possibly the big change being that I woke up to a mouse poop-free kitchen this morning. The Poet helped me pull out the stove yesterday morning to figure out where the mice were coming from, and I sealed up the hole with some tinfoil and about a gallon of caulk. (Left over from when my mom was here and the soap dish fell off the wall in the shower.) And, at least for now, this is holding. That was easier than I expected it to be, but it's still the kind of thing that needed another person and a leveler head than mine to force me to deal with it. I mean, I would have figured something out eventually, but I'm sure this would have ended up being a huge, distracting, and stressful issue.
And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.
If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.
It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.
He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.
I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.
But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.
I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.
I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.
I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.
And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.
If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.
It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.
He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.
I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.
But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.
I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.
I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.
I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.
5.01.2008
Somebody said they saw me swinging the world by the tail
I recovered from last week well enough to cope with the rest of my weekend--a day of grading, another of working, trying to prep the rest of the semester, and cleaning this place up. Then my mother came on Monday. The plan was that she was going to be there until Friday, but through a chain of events involving a mistake with the calendar, she's actually not going home until next Tuesday. This is a long time. It's not particularly helpful for my orals being in three weeks. Or for just my being myself. It's the wrong kind of interaction with other people--I haven't really been alone at any point--even if my mother's out, I still have to be on the line for stuff.
Meanwhile, back in St Louis, my little brother got his appendix out last night.
It's okay, I guess, and I'm getting a few things out of it--mainly a new bed, hopefully--but still. It's disruptive. I like to be able to choose my disruptions better.
Other things. It looks like I'm getting an article out of the conference paper I gave, as I have gotten a couple very charming emails from the very important scholar in my field since then. This means I'm basically writing two articles this summer. I have to keep in mind that I'm not working from scratch, that one is basically a revision (albeit an extensive one) and the other is more or less a chance to work up everything I cut out of the conference paper. But, in order to be able to eat, I'm also trying to get a job at the law firm where the husband of a friend of mine is a partner. Best case scenario would be that I work there 2-3 days a week, spend 10 hours in the library on the other days. This kind of arrangement scares me, though, and that was partly what last Friday's meltdown was about. I say that only because I combined the working / paper writing thing during my first grad school summer and I remember it being miserable and lonely. But I'm trying to convince myself that the structure wasn't the problem and that I was miserable and lonely because my ex (then boyfriend) was making it so. Also, I really do think the first summer of grad school is awful. So I'm hoping this will be better. Also hoping that I get the class(es) at Not My School for the fall, since that would allow me to make some decent money for what will in a lot of ways be different and hopefully slightly less frustrating work.
The Poet has been in Chicago for the last couple of days on a business trip partially scheduled to coincide with my mother's visit. I sent him to the L&L a couple nights ago, and he called me from there. Somewhat ironically, the fact that he's in Chicago means that we can actually talk on the phone at night, which we can't do when he's home. It's nice to be able to do this, gives me the closest thing I've had to private space this week. I think he's coming back to New Jersey today, though, and it's still going to be almost a week before I see him. Needless to say, I have been pretty quiet on the issue of this whole relationship while my mom's been here--I've said merely that he lives in Jersey, is in my department but also has a real job, on a business trip this week too bad you can't meet him. Oh, and he makes me happy. In the meantime, we had dinner with The Professor last night and have made tentative (and work-killing!) plans to go to the Cloisters / Upper West Side with him on Sunday. My mother pronounced him charming but didn't seem to be too disappointed that we aren't a couple.
Also, K. called me on Tuesday night and we talked for awhile. That was the one real bright spot / personal-life accomplishment of Spring Break--becoming friends with K. again. I can thank Facebook for providing the space to let that happen. Well, Facebook and my being drunk enough to finally resolve just to add him as a friend and see what happens. But it was good. We exchanged several emails that allowed us to establish a kind of common narrative about what happened--a nice change of pace from recent experiences with that. And, if nothing else I think we're finally moving past the whole slightly hurtful stressy non-encounters in the library, maybe even figuring out how to be friends. I think to some extent our friendship will always involve a bit of playing with fire, but maybe that's okay. I'll probably have a little bit of a crush on him for awhile. But I can live with that. We're tentatively planning to hang out next week when my mother is finally gone. But I kind of want to see The Poet more. That's how things probably should be.
I read a lot of Shelley for my committee member meeting yesterday. I'm in a very different place with Shelley than I was two years ago. I found it very hard to get past the biographical elements of "Epipsychidion"--in part because I feel like there's an enormous ethical problem with turning women into heavenly bodies. And even as I knew that my response was incredibly simplistic in a lot of ways and tried to fight it (I spent a lot of time reading Shelley when I was in coursework, so I do *know* more or less what I'm supposed to get out of a sympathetic reading of him), I couldn't really feel comfortable with a lot of it. (Oddly, I still really love Prometheus Unbound in some ways.) A lot of this has to do with my ex, who really does have a Shelley complex--this sort of totalizing visionary existence, where anyone who resists you on anything can't ever be doing it for legitimate logical or ethical reasons, rather they must be stupid or perverse or fearful. I had that feeling while reading Shelley this week and it really did bring me back to that relationship. And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that I loved Shelley most when I loved D. the most.
On the other hand, I reread Frankenstein kind of reluctantly, but have never loved it more--in part because I'm finally at the point where I can geek out on the romanticist intertexts.
I'm actually done with all the primary texts on that list. Not so the others, and it doesn't help to not really have time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow is the big Victorian conference that my department holds every year. I'll be moderating the afternoon session and am apparently going to have to find the bios of the people myself. Should probably get on that while I can still print them.
I'm sure it will all be fine, and that next week at this time I'll have a real-person mattress and will be with The Poet.
Unrelated side note (because everything else in this post has been so coherent). There's an actual real live bar in my neighborhood--like a block away. This is the most lovely news I've gotten about this place in awhile. Who needs a decent grocery store when you can stop at the beer garden on the way home from the crappy grocery store? This news somewhat mitigates the fact that the soap dish in my bathroom fell off the wall while my mother was in the shower. I may have perhaps been overzealous in scrubbing the tiles last weekend--all that cheap white paint really is holding this place together.
Meanwhile, back in St Louis, my little brother got his appendix out last night.
It's okay, I guess, and I'm getting a few things out of it--mainly a new bed, hopefully--but still. It's disruptive. I like to be able to choose my disruptions better.
Other things. It looks like I'm getting an article out of the conference paper I gave, as I have gotten a couple very charming emails from the very important scholar in my field since then. This means I'm basically writing two articles this summer. I have to keep in mind that I'm not working from scratch, that one is basically a revision (albeit an extensive one) and the other is more or less a chance to work up everything I cut out of the conference paper. But, in order to be able to eat, I'm also trying to get a job at the law firm where the husband of a friend of mine is a partner. Best case scenario would be that I work there 2-3 days a week, spend 10 hours in the library on the other days. This kind of arrangement scares me, though, and that was partly what last Friday's meltdown was about. I say that only because I combined the working / paper writing thing during my first grad school summer and I remember it being miserable and lonely. But I'm trying to convince myself that the structure wasn't the problem and that I was miserable and lonely because my ex (then boyfriend) was making it so. Also, I really do think the first summer of grad school is awful. So I'm hoping this will be better. Also hoping that I get the class(es) at Not My School for the fall, since that would allow me to make some decent money for what will in a lot of ways be different and hopefully slightly less frustrating work.
The Poet has been in Chicago for the last couple of days on a business trip partially scheduled to coincide with my mother's visit. I sent him to the L&L a couple nights ago, and he called me from there. Somewhat ironically, the fact that he's in Chicago means that we can actually talk on the phone at night, which we can't do when he's home. It's nice to be able to do this, gives me the closest thing I've had to private space this week. I think he's coming back to New Jersey today, though, and it's still going to be almost a week before I see him. Needless to say, I have been pretty quiet on the issue of this whole relationship while my mom's been here--I've said merely that he lives in Jersey, is in my department but also has a real job, on a business trip this week too bad you can't meet him. Oh, and he makes me happy. In the meantime, we had dinner with The Professor last night and have made tentative (and work-killing!) plans to go to the Cloisters / Upper West Side with him on Sunday. My mother pronounced him charming but didn't seem to be too disappointed that we aren't a couple.
Also, K. called me on Tuesday night and we talked for awhile. That was the one real bright spot / personal-life accomplishment of Spring Break--becoming friends with K. again. I can thank Facebook for providing the space to let that happen. Well, Facebook and my being drunk enough to finally resolve just to add him as a friend and see what happens. But it was good. We exchanged several emails that allowed us to establish a kind of common narrative about what happened--a nice change of pace from recent experiences with that. And, if nothing else I think we're finally moving past the whole slightly hurtful stressy non-encounters in the library, maybe even figuring out how to be friends. I think to some extent our friendship will always involve a bit of playing with fire, but maybe that's okay. I'll probably have a little bit of a crush on him for awhile. But I can live with that. We're tentatively planning to hang out next week when my mother is finally gone. But I kind of want to see The Poet more. That's how things probably should be.
I read a lot of Shelley for my committee member meeting yesterday. I'm in a very different place with Shelley than I was two years ago. I found it very hard to get past the biographical elements of "Epipsychidion"--in part because I feel like there's an enormous ethical problem with turning women into heavenly bodies. And even as I knew that my response was incredibly simplistic in a lot of ways and tried to fight it (I spent a lot of time reading Shelley when I was in coursework, so I do *know* more or less what I'm supposed to get out of a sympathetic reading of him), I couldn't really feel comfortable with a lot of it. (Oddly, I still really love Prometheus Unbound in some ways.) A lot of this has to do with my ex, who really does have a Shelley complex--this sort of totalizing visionary existence, where anyone who resists you on anything can't ever be doing it for legitimate logical or ethical reasons, rather they must be stupid or perverse or fearful. I had that feeling while reading Shelley this week and it really did bring me back to that relationship. And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that I loved Shelley most when I loved D. the most.
On the other hand, I reread Frankenstein kind of reluctantly, but have never loved it more--in part because I'm finally at the point where I can geek out on the romanticist intertexts.
I'm actually done with all the primary texts on that list. Not so the others, and it doesn't help to not really have time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow is the big Victorian conference that my department holds every year. I'll be moderating the afternoon session and am apparently going to have to find the bios of the people myself. Should probably get on that while I can still print them.
I'm sure it will all be fine, and that next week at this time I'll have a real-person mattress and will be with The Poet.
Unrelated side note (because everything else in this post has been so coherent). There's an actual real live bar in my neighborhood--like a block away. This is the most lovely news I've gotten about this place in awhile. Who needs a decent grocery store when you can stop at the beer garden on the way home from the crappy grocery store? This news somewhat mitigates the fact that the soap dish in my bathroom fell off the wall while my mother was in the shower. I may have perhaps been overzealous in scrubbing the tiles last weekend--all that cheap white paint really is holding this place together.
3.31.2008
Learning from the sublime? A Coleridgean footnote
This is from the end of a long footnote in chapter 4 of the Biographia where he's discussing the hostile reaction to Lyrical Ballads. I record it here so I can come back to it when I'm working on my important summer project:
“the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with the person who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician” (BL 1.73n).
“the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with the person who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician” (BL 1.73n).
3.28.2008
On Mary Wollstonecraft and running to stand still
What a long time it requires for us to know ourselves; and yet almost everyone of has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself. I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart, though I may venture to assure you that a further acquaintance with mankind only tends to increase my respect for your judgment, and esteem for your character. --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
My committee member and I met to talk through Godwin and Wollstonecraft this afternoon. When I got to the coffeeshop (the same one where I once saw Paul Bettany), I told her that I'd figured out what Godwin meant about the Letters... being a book calculated to make a reader fall in love with its author.
Unfortunately, it came out sounding a little bit lame. But it still had the feeling of a profound revelation for me when it first crossed my mind this morning in the frenzy of preparation for the discussion now over (this has been the general motion of the week). This is how I wrote it in my notes this morning:
Does G find the letters to be calculated to make the reader fall in love with the author in part because the author is still in love with the person she’s addressing? Actually, it just occurred to me that there’s another thing here…there’s something hot for a certain kind of man about an obviously intelligent woman who feels—-and feeling here is almost entirely inseparable from suffering and from doing so with a kind of frankness—-allowing oneself to be seen at one’s lowest point: as W herself says at one point: “I felt like a bird fluttering on the ground unable to mount; yet unwilling to crawl tranquilly like a reptile, whilst still conscious it had wings.”
I should have just blogged this thought when I had it because it looks lame here, too. It felt more profound in the context of rereading my notes on the Letters and also, I think, in light of the fact that this week I have begun to articulate to some of my committee members and friends and really anyone who will listen the emotional effects of my orals reading. Namely, that I have been much happier since I got Charlotte Bronte out of my system. Because that was also about suffering and the reification of it by others. Yet, it's also connected to well, shallower things, more personal ones, some just ridiculous. The emotional equivalents of the ligers and tigons that distracted me from Tennyson earlier in the week.
But perhaps I should go back further. I started working on Wollstonecraft about two years ago. And I realized today, in going back and rereading certain texts and my notes on others, that I am much better positioned to understand Wollstonecraft than I was in the spring of 2006. If nothing else, I am profoundly grateful that a woman like her existed and that she left an archive. And I am grateful that Godwin wrote the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even with all its misreadings (and they are legion), imprudences, and, indeed, reifications of her as a suffering subject. (There's a particularly unforgettable image early on where the young Mary throws her body on top of her mother to shield her from her father's blows.)
In part, the fact that I can read around Godwin's impositions on Wollstonecraft is due to my internalization of the latter and also to the experience of the last two years, to my own reflections on why I once told The Poet that I don't believe in narrative (like many other people in my life, he thinks I should write a novel, which is laughable to anyone who reads this blog, I'm sure).
This post is also about feeling like I've spent this whole week doing work that gets consumed almost right after I produce it. Like I've been waking up at 7:00 in the morning to prepare for things that are over by 3. This is a weird way to live sometimes, especially because I don't feel actively stressed out. (Looks like there may be an advantage to dating a Zen master after all.)
---
Related but tangential: Is there a bad version out there of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"? This may be one of the most beautiful songs in the world.
----
I hope that the effort it just took me to type all of this out is worth it in terms of clearing my mind so that I can work this weekend without obsessing. I really must get ahead on prep and finish the conference paper. And apply to the next conferences, of course. And read Coleridge, Gaskell, and perhaps some early Tennyson.
Now off to Williamsburg for drinks and dinner.
3.19.2008
Tangential
So, I'm typing my notes from reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and I find myself wondering whether The Matrix isn't, at bottom, an inherently Rousseauistic text. I mean, okay, it's a little bit too communitarian in the end, since Rousseau is all about the solitary individual, but what these works seem to share is the sense that man (against anything that Hobbes et al. would say) is essentially good (think Morpheus's defense against the Agent Smiths in the first movie, a scene that has always bothered me precisely because I am something of a misanthrope [yes! Shocking! I know.] and am also still shaped by a certain kind of Calvinist upbringing and would thus never suffer for those kinds of ideals) and a suspicion of "progress" in general as increasing our interdependece in a way that is ultimately detrimental to ourselves. And the Matrix movies also seem to share a belief that transparency in our language and interactions should be a goal--even if it can't be fully achieved--I mean, isn't that what the point of getting unplugged is?
I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)
I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)
2.09.2008
What I just said, but in Wordsworth's language
I deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation;
...
the soul—
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not—retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain they still
Have something to pursue. (Prelude [1805] 2.331-32, 334-41)
This is particularly nice because it resonates with a certain Hegelian formation of going-beyond. I also like that he links memory with "possible sublimity"--it's philosophically elegant.
Of shadowy exultation;
...
the soul—
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not—retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain they still
Have something to pursue. (Prelude [1805] 2.331-32, 334-41)
This is particularly nice because it resonates with a certain Hegelian formation of going-beyond. I also like that he links memory with "possible sublimity"--it's philosophically elegant.
The temporality of the sublime: an idea suggested by some lines in the Prelude
Quick note: When I moved into my current apartment in November, I got the keys about a week early and was able to be here before my official move in date to clean the place and buy a few things. This is essentially what I'm doing in this online space at the moment. I do plan to "introduce" myself more officially and lay out some of my ideas for this blog. But I'm also being pulled ahead by other work and other thoughts that I'd like to put here. Also, I haven't formally wrapped things up at my previous blog, though I know that the next post I make there will be my last. Perhaps there's a value in dispensing with some of those formalities anyway, in not making so many promises, setting up too many identities, and simply letting the writing set something up. So, on with the show.
I wrote out the following in a .doc file that's supposed to be dedicated to my notes on Wordsworth's Prelude. But I quickly moved on to some more "meta" reflections and realized that I needed to save some of them elsewhere, both to preserve the focus (such as it is) of my notes and to establish a separate archive for broader reflections. Enjoy, but cite.
“Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost, as it seemed,
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears…” (Prelude 1.341-49).
What if the sublime is never accessible to a single consciousness at a single point in time, but is constituted through an act of recollection, in which two time bound consciousnesses come together? It’s memory, yes, but also not that simple—it requires that the adult look back on the child without attempting to lodge the sublime there. I’m not being clear. To go from a different direction. It seems that Wordsworth is able to get closer to the representation of the sublime than he’s really supposed to. The passage I’ve quoted above is a good example of how he can do that. The image is one of sublime peril—it doesn’t quite come out in the delivery, which is calm, but the more we think about the image, the more we can see that it’s a child quite literally putting his life in peril. That in itself is not sublime, since Kant tells us that nothing can be fully sublime if you fear for your life. The tone of the passage is controlled by the adult poet, reflecting on the situation. We know that the child survives because he has grown up to be able to reflect upon and write about this situation—so the fear for one’s life is not present in the consciousness and present of the writing of the scene. However, this site is not an occasion for the sublime either, since the other side of Kant—at least the way I read him—is that of overwhelming force—you have to take the danger as far as it can go, you have to project and in a sense give yourself up to overwhelming force. The paradox of Kant’s dynamical sublime is thus that the “safe place” necessary to the sublime is also what prevents the realization of the sublime. WW seems to attempt to resolve this conflict through a very specific mode of recollection: we take the peril and unknowingness from the child’s perspective and the safety from the adult writers—thus, the sublime (if it can be said to take place, and this question must always remain open in discussions of the sublime—this, to me is the point of Lyotard’s asking the “is it happening?” question in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”) takes place in this collision or collusion of the two consciousnesses, without ever being able to inhabit or decide them. Neither gets priority, and, for this reason, the sublime moment itself remains inaccessible and just beyond representation—it only “works” to the extent that words can be said to put these two moments into motion—the words on the page are a kind of gutter experience.
My structuring of this experience (and it doesn’t really have to be a child/adult divide either, though this is helpful as a preliminary discussion because it makes the differences more obvious) comes out of my attempt to explain the difference between Dickens’ representation of childhood experience in David Copperfield (1850) and de Quincey’s in Suspiria De Profundis. I’m still turning over the idea in the latter that “it is not the child who speaks”—for de Quincey, the child takes in experiences that he, as an adult, interprets later on. The structure in DC is much different—despite the fact that we know the conceit of the novel is an adult David Copperfield reflecting on his life, with the exception of only a handful of proleptic interventions, Dickens skillfully, but subtly, remains within the knowledge and perceptions of his narrator at whatever age he’s narrating. (This is a good example of a situation in which we need to rigorously distinguish the narrator and the focalizor.) the “Brooks of Sheffield” joke in the early chapters is a good example of how Dickens pulls this off; we also get this effect in Dickens’ judicious use of the present tense throughout the novel. Thus, in David Copperfield, it is always the child who speaks. So to speak. And this is why, though I do enjoy DC, it can never be a work of sublimity in the way that I think Suspiria (and the earlier and better-known Confessions of An English Opium-Eater) is. DC operates, more or less, on a continuous march of temporality, with anticipations that function as exceptions that prove the rule; de Quincey’s work—and, I think, WW’s Prelude—offers a ruptured and ultimately more flexible temporality that leaves room for the occasion of the sublime. (It is my intention to start speaking less and less of the sublime as such and more and more of the sublime occasion.) I should say, however, is that I don’t think this is the only way to work/write around/for the sublime—this is not, for instance, the methodology of Coleridge, which depends more on the troping of suspension. Of course, it's the image of suspension that first arrested me on these lines of Wordsworth's--a good example of the need to be attentive to slippages and overlaps.
I wrote out the following in a .doc file that's supposed to be dedicated to my notes on Wordsworth's Prelude. But I quickly moved on to some more "meta" reflections and realized that I needed to save some of them elsewhere, both to preserve the focus (such as it is) of my notes and to establish a separate archive for broader reflections. Enjoy, but cite.
“Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost, as it seemed,
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears…” (Prelude 1.341-49).
What if the sublime is never accessible to a single consciousness at a single point in time, but is constituted through an act of recollection, in which two time bound consciousnesses come together? It’s memory, yes, but also not that simple—it requires that the adult look back on the child without attempting to lodge the sublime there. I’m not being clear. To go from a different direction. It seems that Wordsworth is able to get closer to the representation of the sublime than he’s really supposed to. The passage I’ve quoted above is a good example of how he can do that. The image is one of sublime peril—it doesn’t quite come out in the delivery, which is calm, but the more we think about the image, the more we can see that it’s a child quite literally putting his life in peril. That in itself is not sublime, since Kant tells us that nothing can be fully sublime if you fear for your life. The tone of the passage is controlled by the adult poet, reflecting on the situation. We know that the child survives because he has grown up to be able to reflect upon and write about this situation—so the fear for one’s life is not present in the consciousness and present of the writing of the scene. However, this site is not an occasion for the sublime either, since the other side of Kant—at least the way I read him—is that of overwhelming force—you have to take the danger as far as it can go, you have to project and in a sense give yourself up to overwhelming force. The paradox of Kant’s dynamical sublime is thus that the “safe place” necessary to the sublime is also what prevents the realization of the sublime. WW seems to attempt to resolve this conflict through a very specific mode of recollection: we take the peril and unknowingness from the child’s perspective and the safety from the adult writers—thus, the sublime (if it can be said to take place, and this question must always remain open in discussions of the sublime—this, to me is the point of Lyotard’s asking the “is it happening?” question in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”) takes place in this collision or collusion of the two consciousnesses, without ever being able to inhabit or decide them. Neither gets priority, and, for this reason, the sublime moment itself remains inaccessible and just beyond representation—it only “works” to the extent that words can be said to put these two moments into motion—the words on the page are a kind of gutter experience.
My structuring of this experience (and it doesn’t really have to be a child/adult divide either, though this is helpful as a preliminary discussion because it makes the differences more obvious) comes out of my attempt to explain the difference between Dickens’ representation of childhood experience in David Copperfield (1850) and de Quincey’s in Suspiria De Profundis. I’m still turning over the idea in the latter that “it is not the child who speaks”—for de Quincey, the child takes in experiences that he, as an adult, interprets later on. The structure in DC is much different—despite the fact that we know the conceit of the novel is an adult David Copperfield reflecting on his life, with the exception of only a handful of proleptic interventions, Dickens skillfully, but subtly, remains within the knowledge and perceptions of his narrator at whatever age he’s narrating. (This is a good example of a situation in which we need to rigorously distinguish the narrator and the focalizor.) the “Brooks of Sheffield” joke in the early chapters is a good example of how Dickens pulls this off; we also get this effect in Dickens’ judicious use of the present tense throughout the novel. Thus, in David Copperfield, it is always the child who speaks. So to speak. And this is why, though I do enjoy DC, it can never be a work of sublimity in the way that I think Suspiria (and the earlier and better-known Confessions of An English Opium-Eater) is. DC operates, more or less, on a continuous march of temporality, with anticipations that function as exceptions that prove the rule; de Quincey’s work—and, I think, WW’s Prelude—offers a ruptured and ultimately more flexible temporality that leaves room for the occasion of the sublime. (It is my intention to start speaking less and less of the sublime as such and more and more of the sublime occasion.) I should say, however, is that I don’t think this is the only way to work/write around/for the sublime—this is not, for instance, the methodology of Coleridge, which depends more on the troping of suspension. Of course, it's the image of suspension that first arrested me on these lines of Wordsworth's--a good example of the need to be attentive to slippages and overlaps.
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