Final assignments

Your final assignment, should you choose to accept it, is a 5-7pp. personal critical essay on a topic of your choice. I’ve written this up as a shared set of directions for both of my seminars in case seeing the other class’s essay options helps you think of something you would like to write about. You are welcome to adapt or abandon the questions I’ve written as you see fit.

Reminder: I’d love to see something from you in the way of final writing, but you will receive credit for the class whether or not you hand something in to me.

You’ll upload your assignment to Courseworks and I’ll send you a short email with comments before the end of May. I’ve included these hard deadlines because I don’t want you to feel open-ended stress about writing something for which you may not have the wherewithal, and I intend to submit the roster of Pass grades on May 22, but I’d be delighted to read anything for you in summer months if you find yourself working on a writing project of any kind and would like some feedback.

The term “personal critical essay” is possibly coined by me. It overlaps with the category called “creative nonfiction” and can be found more often on literary websites than in academic journals. These are some of its traits:

- Less formal in tone than an academic essay

- May quote a passage or passages from the reading, but won’t depend on extended close reading work or a fully developed analytic argument

- Personal thoughts and observations are welcome

- Getting your self into your voice on the page is to be desired rather than avoided

- May be structured as associative “musings” and probably won’t include conventional argument transitions

I’m going to share a few examples, though these are all at a higher level of polish and sophistication than I imagine you should shoot for if it’s your first attempt in this mode.

The first one, a lovely short piece for Electric Literature, was actually adapted from the final essay a student wrote for me when I taught the Epic Histories class in Paris – based on specific conversations we’d had about Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life” and the students’ own habits and preferences, I wrote an essay question about what it’s like to visit Sephora in Paris, and got this amazing set of reflections in response: Sarah Anjum Bari on visiting Sephora under the shadow of the Arcades Project (read it here).

And I’ll give you two more links to essays written and published by advanced PhD students in our department:

Liz Bowen’s New Inquiry review of the film A Quiet Place (read it here)

Carina dell Valle Schorske’s Lit Hub essay on Gwendolyn Brooks (read it here)

Finally, an essay that we’re going to read for and talk about during the final meeting of Clarissa: See-Young Chu’s “Woven: A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” published in Entropy. This is an upsetting one, and you should make sure you’re fortified for it before reading, especially if reading about sexual assault is triggering for you. You can find it here.

Epic Histories options

Original due date: Monday 5/11

New due date: Monday 5/18

1. Take one of Benjamin’s short chunks of text in the Arcades Project or elsewhere and use it as the epigraph for a personal essay about how we experience history in the time of covid-19.

2. We talked about several stumbling-blocks that made it difficult for Gibbon to write his own autobiography, the two chief ones being the challenge of how to represent a bad father given the bounds of decorum and the difficulty of retroactively defending a tendency towards religious skepticism that looked far more dangerous in the light of revolution in France. If you were going to set out to write your own autobiography, what would be the chief factor that would make it hard for you to tell an honest and fully represented story?

3. We switched from live to online meetings just before we moved on from Gibbon to Benjamin. How is reading the Benjamin of the Arcades Project different from reading Decline and Fall and/or Gibbon’s autobiographies? How is our online conversation different from the face-to-face ones we had for the first half of the semester?

Clarissa options

Original due date: Friday 5/8

New due date: Friday 5/15

1. Given that the novel Clarissa is so concerned with the problem of confinement, what was it like to read Richardson’s book in conditions of quarantine? Alternately, write a letter to a close friend in which you reflect on your current situation in a fashion that includes some thoughts about Richardson’s novel.

2. We talked about the “mad papers” and looked the typography Richardson the printer was able to use to supplement the textual meanings he created by way of words. Using a mix of visual and verbal methods (this might or might not be an essay!), create a single page layout, analog or digital, that integrates some bits of Clarissa and other texts you’re currently reading into a visual representation of your current state of mind.

3. How does a Columbia literature seminar create community? Is the physical classroom space essential, or do we find ourselves able to approximate many of its virtues on Zoom? If not, why not? How would you frame the virtuality of Zoom communication in terms of eighteenth-century epistolarity?

Gibboniana

What makes a sentence great?  Thanks to Sam Haselby for inviting me to write this one!

Language become gesture

From Colm Toíbín, On Elizabeth Bishop:

In certain societies, including rural Nova Scotia where Bishop spent much of her childhood, and in the southeast of Ireland where I am from, language was also a way to restrain experience, take it down to a level where it might stay. Language was neither ornament nor exaltation; it was firm and austere in its purpose. Our time on the earth did not give us cause or need to say anything more than was necessary; language was thus a form of calm, modest knowledge or maybe even evasion. The poetry and the novels and stories written in the light of this knowledge or this evasion, or in their shadow, had to be led by clarity, by precise description, by briskness of feeling, by no open displays of anything, least of all easy feeling; the tone implied an acceptance of what was known. The music or the power was in what was often left out. The smallest word, or the holding of breath, could have a fierce stony power.

Enjoying the scission

Stefania Heim interviews Wayne Koestenbaum at the Boston Review (Wayne is truly one of contemporary literature's great interviewees!):

The “room” that houses my book’s figures (writers, artists, opera singers, porn stars) is a studio (like M-G-M, in the old days); a system (like the periodic table or the alphabet); an opera house with a roomy backstage, big enough to store sets for all of early Verdi (I Lombardi set-flats cheek-by-jowl with Un giorno di regno); an AMG (Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild) brochure or catalog, the models’ attributes (preferred sexual position, penis size, etc.) signaled by hieroglyphs; a subway stop with a functioning john (“tea room”) and multiple transfers; an orientation session for new enrollees in the non-existent yet alluring New York School of Poets; a yard sale, where one may hope to stumble across an unattributed Forrest Bess that forever escapes the prison of the catalogue raisonné.

Courtesy of Dave Lull.

Greatness

I'm leading a class at the CUNY Graduate Center in a couple weeks: reading will be two of my favorite essays by Hazlitt, "On My First Acquaintance with Poets" and "The Indian Jugglers," plus an essay I wrote many years ago now about Toni Schlesinger's Shelter columns. In some alternate universe I am an essayist predominantly rather than any other kind of writer - in fact really I think I should be writing a lot more in that mode, along a spectrum from intellectual/analytic to more like this one. Something to ponder....

The blue meth

Dwight Garner on criticism:

By the time I was in high school my English teachers had turned me on to Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. I loved James Wolcott’s stuff, too. [. . . .] I remember going through the microfilm and microfiche machines, getting a sore neck, just to find Wolcott’s old stuff in the Village Voice and Harper’s. I still have those Wolcott printouts. They’re on those warped old pieces of prehistoric photo-print paper. I’m still a fan.

His stuff just popped off the page. It was the most vivid critical writing I’d ever read. His stuff shouted, the way good art does, “I’m alive.” I felt the same way about Kael and Marcus, among others. These people had things appearing in magazines like Rolling Stone, and in newspapers, and it felt like, to my blinkered perspective at any rate, a golden age.

I reread the work of my favourite critics—Orwell, Agee, Updike, Tynan, Sheed, Macdonald, Kazin and so on—all the time. Just to breathe that air. But there’s nothing like reading a critic in real time. That’s the blue meth. There’s nothing like going to see a film and coming back and inhaling the words of a critic like AO Scott or Stephanie Zacharek, now at the Village Voice. There’s nothing like getting that buzz in your head.

It is a terrible confession, but I just don't feel that buzz - it's partly why I don't like Twitter, I don't want to be peppered with news about things happening right now - I love instead that feeling of immersion in a deep elsewhere, preferably far in the past....

"The myth prescribes the garret rather than the Guggenheim"

I have been exhausted all week, but I think I am finally starting to feel more normal - failed to get up for projected early-morning bike ride today, but it was for the best, I needed the sleep more. Had a good swim yesterday but am feeling much thwarted by August swimming-pool closures.

All sorts of Seamus Heaney-related tabs open, waiting for a proper send-off, but I realize that I could wait forever, so here are a few good ones (I never took a class with him, but he was an active and benevolent presence during my undergraduate days in Adams House): Henri Cole interviewed Heaney for the Paris Review (this one's a must-read, all sorts of the things he says are quite arresting, including thoughts about living in two places); Andrew O'Hagan at the LRB on car trips with Heaney and Karl Miller (note blethering discussion, which strongly reminded me of my Scottish grandfather - it was a word he loved - that and shoogly are two Scots words that remain in my personal idiom).

A good interview with Ruth Franklin about the art of criticism.

Lee Child has an amazing apartment! (I like my current apartment very much, indeed it is somewhere I will very happily live until the day I die if that is the way things go, but at this time of year I hugely regret not having central air-conditioning - it is the nature of the Columbia housing stock to be pre-war and very beautiful/spacious, but the humidity right now is killing me, and it leaves me with the impression of my apartment being a sinkhole, even though really it is the same as always.) Very impatient for the new Jack Reacher book - if I am sensible, I will save it to read on Thursday in the airport en route to Madison for my race.

Light reading around the edges of copious trivial errands and obsessing about upcoming race and digging out books and papers for fall-semester classes: Mick Herron, Slow Horses.

Also I forgot to say I read Adam Phillips' Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life as my "airplane book" (I am ready for the silly rule about not using electronic devices during takeoff and landing to be abandoned - but in the meantime, I will continue to have some kind of nonfiction or essay collection with me to while away those stretches of Kindle-banned time). There are only about three worthwhile paragraphs in the whole book, but on the other hand it is a very short book. At his best, Phillips is transfixing, but one also feels he spools this stuff out without regard to quality - he could use a more challenging interlocutor at this point, I suspect, than his own ears!

Catch-up

I am safely home in New York, though so tired that I am eying the time and wondering whether I might possibly go to bed pretty much now!

That said, the JetBlue flight gets me home at a much more humane time than the Cayman Airways one - I was here before 5, not at all bad. Very happy to see little cat Mickey and also to find three finished copies of the novel.

Which also has its first post-publication review - Charles McNulty at the LA Times!

Someone who liked it less (I just saw this one last night, though I think it may have been up for a while): Walter Biggins at Bookslut.

In more alarming news, I think my Kindle is on the verge of giving up the ghost. I kept on having to reboot it last night and today on the plane, so that finally I had to give in and read my backup "real" book instead: Leonard Marcus's Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices. I thought Katharine Weber's piece was one of the most moving in the entire collection, but I was very glad that the cooler and more critical essay by Christine Jenkins was included: the two most serious criticisms I have of L'Engle's writing concern (a) the intolerable smugness of many of the characters we are supposed to like and admire (when I was a child, I did not understand why my mother was not as enthusiastic as I was about L'Engle's books, but I think in retrospect this must have been at the root of it!); and (b) the distressing homophobia in novels like A House Like a Lotus and A Severed Wasp, and Jenkins is very good on both these counts. I think that I would have worshiped Madeleine L'Engle if I had met her between the ages of ten and fifteen, but that I would not have liked her very much at all if I had only encountered her in adulthood: there are some very unattractive elements mixed up with the parts that people rightly found so compelling. Cynthia Zarin's controversial New Yorker profile of 2004 is available online for free in its entirety.

Aside from the usual minutiae (it is difficult to explain how much time I seem to spend thinking about when I am going to get to the allergy doctor's office for my shots!), I really need to get down to business tomorrow morning and finish a good final version of this particular detail essay. I would like to send it out on Monday or Tuesday, and I also still need to write my paper for the ASECS conference in Cleveland next week: I am arguing against the utility of the term "experimental" to describe any eighteenth-century fiction, and then turning around and saying that if we do want to keep it, it fits Richardson's method better than Sterne's. Looking forward to lively conversation on this count and others!

Light reading around the edges: I love Charlie Williams' Mangel series more than almost anything else I can think of, and the latest installment Made of Stone is truly a gem - possibly my favorite one yet. I also greatly enjoyed Bridget Clerkin's Kindle Single Monster.

Bonus link: Jenny Diski on Buzz Bissinger and the shopping business.

I have ordered a new Kindle Paperwhite, but it probably won't arrive till Monday. I hope this current device will last until then. It is very good for all sorts of novel-reading, but particularly invaluable when I want to run down to Chelsea Piers with a tiny trail backpack containing a change of clothes, wallet, keys, asthma inhaler and reading material for lunch and subway home! I do have the Kindle app on my phone, I guess I could fall back on that if I have to....

On criticism

Daniel Mendelsohn's manifesto.

Home again

Feel much more settled now that I am back at home with my little cat, who was flatteringly happy to see me last night.  I do not know why feline company should be so soothing, but there is no doubt that I am on a more even keel when there is a cat around. 

Read two good books on my travels: Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room (this guy is an awe-inspiringly good popular storyteller - the book gave me a yen to watch Hitchcock movies obsessively and see whether I couldn't craft such a formally perfect and atmospherically chilling narrative of suspense); and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers.  The amount and quality of reporting that went into this book is staggering: it is really a feat of human achievement like few other things!  It is not a criticism, but I am struck by the oddity of the fact that the style of narration really recognizably is still like what the cluster of mid-19th-century novelists that include Hugo and Dickens and Eliot and Balzac developed - ditto for The Wire - it is a powerful form of narration that, once discovered, has had considerable longevity.

Closing tabs:

Brent's friend Larry Thompson has printed a beautiful edition of "Tintern Abbey."

The National Eagle Repository.

This is the kind of writing I should really be doing.

The Girl Barber

Ed Park on Kim Jong-il's film criticism.

So true!

Maud Newton on David Foster Wallace and the problem of voice.

Staircase thoughts

Great interview with Marco Roth at Full Stop.

Subdued to what it works in

Interesting CNN bit on Edmund White and HIV in the 1980s.

Something I found absolutely inspiring: Michael Wood's LRB review of the latest volume of my colleague Edward Mendelson's edition of Auden's prose. I have to reread The Dyer's Hand, a book that made a great impression on me when I was a teenager but that I don't think I've read again since; but also, hubristically on my part, Wood made me want to strive to be a critic more like Auden!

I have a full draft of my theater-and-the-novel essay, but it needs a lot of editing and considerable library work to replace piecemeal editions with proper ones. I had a very good workout (double spin class) yesterday evening, but it caused my lungs to fill up with more phlegm this morning, so I'm taking a recovery day. Raced through Jo Nesbo's The Devil's Star last night; strange to say, it manages to be at once rather preposterous and quite excellent! The writing is very high-caliber, that I suppose is what lets him pull it off.

What the starling said

I was slightly mesmerized by Seamus Perry's very good essay on Thomas Hardy for the TLS; I have a secret internal other life as a Hardy critic, I think (I have been meaning to read D. H. Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, but that edition is expensive enough that I will be better off getting it at the library...).

Sterne's starling has been much on my mind recently, so it is not surprising that this is the bit of Perry that especially caught my attention:

The history of a poem such as “The Caged Goldfinch”, not one of the central masterpieces but absolutely pure Hardy, demonstrates all the virtues he discovered in keeping mum:

Within a churchyard, on a recent grave,
I saw a little cage
That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence save
Its hops from stage to stage.

There was inquiry in its wistful eye,
And once it tried to sing;
Of him or her who placed it there, and why,
No one knew anything.

It is a poem all about not knowing what is going on: the poem knows so little about the subject on which it has elected to speak that it hardly exists at all; and, since seeing people out of their depth can always be funny, it is “a little joke” in one way, amused at the thought of bringing the graveyard manners of Thomas Gray and Robert Blair into the sceptical, hesitant voice of modernity. But there is a real perplexity at work in the poem as well, feelings too unassuaged for the spirit of a joke wholly to absorb them. When Shelley (whom Hardy greatly admired as one might regard one’s opposite) addresses a skylark you know he is finding a way of speaking about his own selfhood and song. But the identification in Hardy’s poem between the trapped bird and the clueless figure of the poet, quite unable to perform in the high old Shelleyan style, is left implicit and the poem’s element of self-exposure remains tantalizingly oblique.

"O to tie parcels once more!"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on the latest volume published in the scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf's essays:

“writing articles is like tying one’s brain up in neat brown paper parcels”, she wrote to Ethel Smyth. “O to fly free in fiction once more! – and then I shall cry, O to tie parcels once more!”

Powers of Sontag

At TNR, Daniel Mendelsohn has a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay about Susan Sontag. (Link courtesy of The Elegant Variation.)

Mendelsohn makes the case that Sontag misunderstood her own strengths (as critic versus novelist) and affiliations (with the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth):

This journal reveals a person for whom, however much she saw herself as a sensualist, the cognitive and the analytical invariably dominated the erotic and the affective. ("Emotionally, I wanted to stay," Sontag wrote of her decision to leave home and family in Los Angeles for Berkeley. "Intellectually, I wanted to leave." She left.) The inevitable triumph of the head over the heart in these pages defies, I think, a description of his mother that Rieff gives in his preface. In speaking of Sontag's extraordinary literary ambition, he compares her to Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre, the hero of Lost Illusions, the talented youth who comes from the provinces to find literary fame in Paris: a comparison that concludes with his summary explanation of Sontag as a "nineteenth-century consciousness." It is a judgment, you suspect, with which Sontag, with her insatiable avidity for experience and her penchant for the Continental novel as model of the highest form of literary activity, would have concurred.

And yet when you survey her career with an eye as coolly dispassionate as the one she trained on so many objects, it becomes obvious that, temperamentally, she belonged to another century entirely. Her failure to understand just which century it was accounts for the sense you often get, taking the work as a whole, of aspirations that were at odds with her temperament and her talent; and it explains a great deal about both the strengths and the weaknesses of her work, and also the strange fascination that she exerted.

A new type of doughnut

Another nice piece on Penelope Fitzgerald's letters: Peter Terzian in the National of Abu Dhabi. (Link courtesy of Caleb.) A sample:

The few words she offers her correspondents on her novels and novel writing will likely have prospective fiction writers gnashing their teeth. She wrote The Bookshop in “rather a few weeks”. Anyone can write a single-consciousness novel, she writes to an editor, “if they can find a pen and a bit of paper”. Her tendency toward self-effacement – “My whole life is spent in apologising to someone or other, I’m afraid” – may have been a mask for her ambition and persistence. She must have been aware of, and fiercely protective of, the mysterious source of her creativity.

Fitzgerald’s letters are never malicious or gossipy. Still, it’s a pleasure to read her privately expressed opinions. Born into a clerical family, she was as intolerant of bad behaviour or impoliteness – “the dread Malcolm Bradbury seems to be made of some plastic or semi-fluid substance which gives way or changes in your hands” – as she was impatient with bad books: “Trying to conceal an absolute conviction that Salman Rushdie’s new novel is a load of codswallop.” She is generous with praise, of people (“Sybille Bedford a tower of strength”) and writing (“Ishiguro yes!”).