Comments on: Who rained on that parade?

By: john

john — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:02:02 +0000

Michael [Winky],
If you send me some lyrics for the Pseudoindividuals to play, I’ll write some music.
It’s tricky to rock the dialectic, to rock the dialectic without feeling dyspeptic, it’s tricky!
Rock on!

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:52:13 +0000

Ange – I think it’s more in keeping w/ Adorno’s thesis that even in advertising & popular culture the possibility of negation can be glimpsed although not realized: these forms incite the knowledge that a better world is possible. (It’s tricky to rock the dialectic.)
best,
[Winky Emoticon & the Pseudoindividuals]

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:11:20 +0000

I think the current absence of what we think of as the poet-critic has less to do with either Marxism or Theory than with the level & energy of general public discourse. It parallels the supposed decline of the “public intellectual” or the independent “person of letters”. & this has less to do with the academic disdain for “belletrism” than with the migration of so many poets themselves into academia. The excitement of the “poet-critic” is the combination in one person of poet and independent writer (the journalist, the observer of society, the diarist of public life).
There have probably always been accomplished poet-critics who are really scholars, who write from their deep & erudite researches in literary history. But if they lack this quality of writing for the general public, then they cannot contribute to any sense of a presence of the “poet-critic” in society at large.
Of course the rise of Theory, Politics & other fogs can be blamed for this situation… but poets themselves probably bear the most responsibility. They’re the ones hanging about the greeny groves all day.

By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:20:22 +0000

I will look up that Hill essay, Bobby. It reminds me of this passage from Agamben:
Johan Huizinga reports the case of Denis the Carthusian, who tells how once, upon entering the Church of St. John at Bois-le-duc while the organ was playing, he was immediately entranced by the melody and brought to a prolonged ecstasy: “Musical sensation was immediately absorbed in religious feeling. It would never have occurred to Denis that he might admire in music or painting any other beauty than that of holy things themselves.”
As an aesthete myself, it serves to remind me of my limitations.
And Michael: Does the idea of “a bulwark against the closed world of bureaucratic domination” bear any resemblance to the idea — I may be fuzzy cuz it’s, like, Kafka via Bakhtin via Susan Stewart — that we must have God because the idea of no third person — no one to overhear — in the interrogation room is too unbearable?
Don, full disclosure, I actually just sat on a panel with Steve Burt about the state of poetry reviewing. So this really has been much on my mind, and Starnino’s essay was a good summation of the problem (such as it is) … the suspicion surrounding the poet-critic. But at heart I am an epicurean. For me, it’s hard to improve upon “Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:15:31 +0000

“These academic ambiences / really do get to me. / They’re always done in some new unfam- / iliar shade of gloomy…”
George Starbuck, Talkin’ B. A. Blues; The Life and a Couple of Deaths of Ed Teashack; or, How I Discovered B.U., Met God, and Became an International Figure; a Rhyming Fiction in Seven Chapters

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:52:43 +0000

Bukharin to the Academic Marxist Poet-Critics
What he said, in 1913, or thereabouts,
when even the Central Committee
was variegated as a Comment Box:
To the factories, comrades!
To the community colleges!

By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:38:09 +0000

On the subject of Geoffrey Hill and the adversarial imputation of religion, can I suggest his brilliant but somewhat bizarre little essay "Between Politics and Eternity"? The piece is about Dante's Monarchia, and it ends with these lines, which serve a better brief for the essay than I could presume to give:

Between politics and eternity, aesthetic considerations, as, for instance, 'taste' and 'enjoyment,' are quite simply irrelevant; alien to the purpose and quality of the Monarchia as they are to the work of Antonio Gramsci who dismissed Croce's aesthetics and would have rejected Eliot's had he known of them. As an Anglo-Catholic conservative, I arrive at this conclusion reluctantly but hardly with surprise.

By: john

john — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:35:01 +0000

One of my favorite anthologies is a collection of the verse that the commander of British forces in the Middle East and later southern Asia during WW2 had memorized, and published during WW2, “Other Men’s Flowers.” I mention it because of how the editor is credited on the cover of the posthumous edition I picked up for a quarter:
A. P. Wavell
The Late Field Marshal
Earl Wavell
P.C. G.C.B. G.C.S.I. G.C.I.E.
C.M.G. M.C.
I just looked up Earl Wavell on Wikipedia, which told me what all those initials are. (I hadn’t known.)
So, Michael, your wish to list your initials has precedent!
Also, [Winky Emoticons] is the best unclaimed band name I’ve come across in a while!

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:16:01 +0000

ARRGH. Apologies for posting three times in a row, but vanity demands that I correct a typo that makes me look rather less sophisticated than we all know I am [winky emoticon]. Raymond Geuss’s last name is not “Guess.”

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:08:37 +0000

Ange - Samaritan is wonderful, but not, I think, as good as Freedomland, although my favorite Price is now Lush Life. You'll have to let me know what you think (did you see James Woods's review in The New Yorker? weird). The Wire is my favorite show as well. The final season was a bit hinky with the speechifying, but i already miss it. Thank the gods for Battlestar Galactica. You make me feel bourgeois indeed with yr library card! I really shouldn't be buying crime novels in hardcover. Best, mr