Pop Goes the Culture

Whenever I hear bands like America or Jefferson Airplane, I marvel that so many people once took such great comfort in these things that most now consider rather silly. This keeps on happening: a movie will define a generation only to be laughed at by the next. Is this a necessary function of popular culture?

I complained to my friend Alan Jacobs about the bad timing of my releasing  a new book of poems just when all the bookstores in America closed down and he replied “thankfully, poetry is news that stays news, so people will eventually find it”.  News that stays news.

That phrase has haunted me since he said it. Because I am—aren't you?—not only uninterested, but basically disgusted by yesterday's news, to say nothing of last weeks'. We throw out as garbage what we we're very eager for just hours before. By contrast, how much consolation, how much joy I have had in Constantine Cavafy's poems from a century ago!

I am trying to think about why this should be or why it might matter. The poet Percy Shelley often thought about the eternality, or lack thereof, of artistic productions. He admired painting, but worried that its shelf life was necessarily short due to the degradation of its materials. Sculpture he found the more lasting, but was still upset by the way later curators felt free to alter it, adding fig leafs, or whole limbs to replace missing ones. Poetry he saw as eternal, not, I think, only because it is his own chosen medium, but because of the thing I'm talking about here. A Shakespeare sonnet that I read now is not similar to, but identical to the one recited at the court of Elizabeth I. If the past is any indication of the future, we can be fairly certain that in another 100 years, or 500, the sonnets will endure and endure in precisely their same state, losing none of their affective power due to the half-life of certain molecules.

So, it seems, the problem isn't in the lyrics: either in the ideas or in their enunciation in sentences. But the problem also doesn't seem to be in the music. Duke Ellington's three-minute miracles are every bit as powerful today as they were nearly a century ago. Beethoven, though he likely sounds a little different, likewise. The work doesn't sound dated. We don't listen to it for nostalgic purposes but because we find it beautiful and useful in the present: as full of power as it ever might have been.

My question then is the following: what is it about combining lyrics and instrumentation that reduces so the use-by date? I suppose to engage it, you'd have to believe that it does. I can imagine some people arguing that The Beatles haven't really aged. They'd be wrong, and hilariously so, but I can imagine it. My sense is the that the Fab Four endure almost purely for nostalgic, and then for ideological reasons. Those of us who listen do so to remember certain times or feelings from our youth, or to sign up for the rebellious posture they advocate--down with religion! Your teachers are stupid! The government is evil! Whether one supports such rallying cries is irrelevant to the issue that that's a large part of the band's appeal. I can hear people saying Bob Dylan music is beyond time as well, but I don't think that's right either. There is nothing eternal or universal in that music. But given that you're a normal person, surely you'd have to admit--even if the music of your upbringing was great, like mine was, that it begins to show its age eventually. Some records I unashamedly love, even still from 30 years ago; others I can only love because I have decided to place their obvious emotional manipulations to one side, to look past their excesses in the same way I agree to look past their hair or attire.

Even if you don't agree completely with the way I've framed the question here, don't we think this odd? Poems last forever. Non-vocal music lasts a rather long time, sometimes centuries. But put them together and it starts looking not only threadbare, but comical, embarrassing, within a decade, if that. It doesn't seem to me self-evident why that should be the case and yet there are literally thousands of examples.

To further complcate matters, it seems also as if the breadth of appeal is inversely proportinate to the linear. So, Richard Marx reached across nearly the entire spectrum in the English-speaking world in the early 1990’s, but did so insanely briefly, only to be so cringeworthy as to be unlistenable, not long thereafter. I think there is more going on here than the sense of backlash, our corporate embarrassment over having loved something so much. It seems to me more like rose bushes that only have so much energy inbuilt. They can spend it on fragrance, or color or size or lasting-ness, but they must still choose somehow which.

Skeptics on Percy Shelley's Drowning

It has been 196 years since Percy Shelley drowned in the Bay of Lerici, and to mark the occasion, the Guardian UK has reposted an essay of Richard Holmes’ on Shelley’s drowning. The Keats-Shelley house in Rome forward it to my Twitter feed which is where I found it. I have a few problems with it. Not with the facts per se that Holmes puts forward--though he's a little fast and loose with those on occasion — but more with interpretation of what things we know from the historical record.

For example, Holmes says "Mary Shelley and Jane Edwards [were] still on the balcony at Casa Magnani staring out over the Bay of Lerici expecting the boats to come home." But he also lists this among the things we shouldn't believe, among the things that overly romanticize nature of Shelly's death story. There's no reason to do this. Is he suggesting that though their house looked over the water where their husbands were drowned, the women didn't stare forlornly into the distance hoping they would come back? That seems to me uselessly skeptical. 

Furthermore, though Edward Trelawney was a fabulist, there isn't any reason to think that he made up or spread the rumors of the pirates’ attack on Shelley’s boat the Don Juan as Holmes claims. There was after all a bag of cash on board, and it was after all the largest ship in the entire region belonging to an English milord who everyone in town knew to be wealthy. And there were pirates then who occasionally stole things. Rumors spread around that it might've been a pirate attack because it might have been a pirate attack. The possibility of the pirate attack doesn't "disappear upon inspection" as Holmes claims it does simply because there were still valuables among the wreckage. As Holmes says in the same piece, "the boat went down so quickly that Williams did not have time to kick off his boots." Surely then, it is conceivable that pirates rammed the boat, thinking to board and loot it, but found that it sank too quickly to grab anything. There’s no reason to call Trelawney a liar, even though he did sometimes stretch details.

When the article is not overly skeptical, which it is most of the time, it is sometimes overly romantic: the very crime with which Holmes charges others spreading around Shelley's death. For example, in his rendering, as the ship went down, "Shelley thrust a new copy of Keats's poems into his jacket pocket, so hard that it doubled-back and broke the spine." Homes thinks this because the covers have been bent back in the copy we found. But we must think for a moment: would a man about to drown in the ocean, or at least a man who can't swim about to fall into the ocean really grab a copy of poetry to take with him? Not likely. Even if Shelley valued Keats’ poems, and he did very much, he likely would not have had the presence of mind to take the volume with him rather than, say, a life preserver or a cask of wine or the bag of cash. No, it is just as likely that Shelley read the poems often and bent the covers so that they would fit in a trouser pocket on another occasion or that they were bent back while it was on Shelley’s person as he turned over and over in the tide. He was in the water for three weeks and his face was unrecognizable when they pull them out; it is very possible that the book was less recognizable than once might have been for the same reasons. 

Still Holmes does us a service reminding us of the details of Shelly's death. I also like that he raises the possibility of Shelley’s eventual self-sacrifice, giving the dinghy to the two shipmates rather than jumping aboard himself. It would be perfectly in keeping with his character. 

Teaching Cenci

 I recently taught Shelley’s play The Cenci for this course at the University of Washington. It struck me as “unstageable” for the same reasons it did so for the play’s early readers: the sexual episodes are too extreme for the (especially late-Romantic) stage, and the characters deliver exhausting monologues that would bore any live audience. Besides, the language is to full, so intellectual, that hearing it spoken by an actor, one loses half of the meaning. I know, Shakespeare managed to write just as rewardingly for the page and for the stage, but then, he was Shakespeare, wasn’t he? 

But what a relevant play. The Cenci is a play about a corrupt Pope and bishopric turning a blind eye to sexual abuse in the parish. It’s about the powerlessness of victims and uneven appointments of justice based on gender and age: young people not able to stand up to their elders. So far, so applicable. It’s also a play about paintings, having been inspired by Guido Reni’s portrait. In that, it’s a play about ekphrastica, and historical reconstruction, which are at least as relevant (if less exciting). A recent debate about the painting’s provenancegave the class a kind of detective function, assembling the opposing arguments and adjudicating a real contemporary dispute. 

Thank God, it seems like the Catholic church is coming out at last from a dark period in her history. For awhile there, the news had it that the church’s main business was settling abuse claims from 30 years ago. One hears less of that now, and more about the humble, graceful actions of Pope Francis. 

The Cenci isn’t read much these days, I fear, neglected even among Shelleyan’s in favor of the weightier Prometheus Unbound, but short, provocative, and immensely rewarding, it should be.

Teaching Cenci

 I recently taught Shelley’s play The Cenci for this course at the University of Washington. It struck me as “unstageable” for the same reasons it did so for the play’s early readers: the sexual episodes are too extreme for the (especially late-Romantic) stage, and the characters deliver exhausting monologues that would bore any live audience. Besides, the language is to full, so intellectual, that hearing it spoken by an actor, one loses half of the meaning. I know, Shakespeare managed to write just as rewardingly for the page and for the stage, but then, he was Shakespeare, wasn’t he? 

But what a relevant play. The Cenci is a play about a corrupt Pope and bishopric turning a blind eye to sexual abuse in the parish. It’s about the powerlessness of victims and uneven appointments of justice based on gender and age: young people not able to stand up to their elders. So far, so applicable. It’s also a play about paintings, having been inspired by Guido Reni’s portrait. In that, it’s a play about ekphrastica, and historical reconstruction, which are at least as relevant (if less exciting). A recent debate about the painting’s provenancegave the class a kind of detective function, assembling the opposing arguments and adjudicating a real contemporary dispute. 

Thank God, it seems like the Catholic church is coming out at last from a dark period in her history. For awhile there, the news had it that the church’s main business was settling abuse claims from 30 years ago. One hears less of that now, and more about the humble, graceful actions of Pope Francis. 

The Cenci isn’t read much these days, I fear, neglected even among Shelleyan’s in favor of the weightier Prometheus Unbound, but short, provocative, and immensely rewarding, it should be.

ICR: Shelley Among the Ruins of Language

So should we save an absence? Should we save the void and this nothingness at the heart of the image? -Jean Baudrilliard

Last month, I flew down to Phoenix to give a paper at ASU staged by the International Conference on Romanticism, on the broad topic of "Catastrophes." I've attended the ICR once before, when it was held at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, and had a collegial and intellectually-rewarding time, and was eager to find myself in such company again.   

Conferences get short shrift in these hyper-connected times--why fly across the country to read a paper out loud that you could just as easily email to all the members, who could then read it on their own time? Are the ten pages of notes I took worth the price of the flight?--but I find them immensely useful.  One meets the few true colleagues we have in an era of specialization and those meetings often turn into real research: I ended up in Germany for a year because of a conversation I had while balancing plastic cup of champagne on my hors d'oeuvres plate at NASSR Vancouver. What's more, one gets a sense of the field--its upcoming directions, its major players, a ranking of the relative esteem in which specialists hold various journals and publishing houses, and a hundred other corrections, spurs, that are unavailable, or indecipherable anyway across digital media, or even a row of spines. 

Here is the abstract for my presentation:

Recent collections like Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (2010) edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig, and Literary and Poetic Representations of Work and Labor in the Romantic Era, edited by Christopher Clason (2011), have shown renewed interest in the formal properties of poetic difficulty, even poetic disaster. This paper means to introduce to that discussion a poetic economy wherein nothing is lost. Even the weakest lines and most faltering spans of attention contribute, in this economy, to the launch of a larger conceptual framework unachievable without the original defeat, which suggests a new and recuperative way of reading weakness and displacement by contextualizing their discussion under the heading of performative aesthetic loss.

In Shelley Among the Ruins of Language, I argue, (adopting Levinson’s terms in The Romantic Fragment Poem) that an “authorized fragment” (one wherein the poet has an opportunity to finish the work, but doesn’t, as opposed to an “accidental fragment” wherein he drowns, loses the mss., etc) constitutes a thing a la Bill Brown and Jean Baudrilliard’s “thing theory,” and that it thereby deserves unique consideration. When poets promise something, and fail to deliver, often--if these are to become active failures or redeemed catastrophes, they are suggesting something about the greatness of their original conception. With their argument, I mean to highlight not only the difference between “authorized” and “accidental” fragments in Romantic poetry, which distinction Levinson maintains too, but to differentiate between fragments that should be read as remnants-- pieces meant to be read as parts oferstwhile wholes, and those that should be read as ciphers, pieces of truncated production meant to imply a never-present but imagined wholeness.

The whole thing was handled beautifully by Mark Lussier and Ron Broglio, and I felt especially lucky to hear presentations by Marilyn Gaull and Angela Esterhammer; most exciting though, was a chance to see my friend and former colleague Jeffrey C. Johnson, and Frederick Burwick, who I seem to run into around every corner.  

I was also glad to hear papers by my co-panelists in the "Theorizing Disaster" session:

• Kimberly DeFazio: “Material Events: de Man, Badiou, and Romantic Disaster”
• Caroline Heller: “‘What manner of man art thou?’: The Catastrophic and Autobiographical ‘Life-in-Death’ in S.T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”

Great thanks to ICR for arranging this banquet, to ASU for hosting us, and to my own Department of English at the University of Washington for making my trip possible.