Blakeathon Part I: Poetical Sketches (1769-1777, pub'd 1783)

Embarking on my long-delayed voyage into the rocky ocean of William Blake. Reading in order of publication. First up: Poetical Sketches (pub'd 1783), which contains some (literally) adolescent verse as well a laughably bad (and wisely aborted) drama on Edward III. Said incomplete drama features Dagworth, a soldier so enraptured by the prospect of facing the enemy that he bursts into psalmic parody: "Now my heart dances and I am as light / as the young bridegroom going to be married." Even allowing for intentional authorial irony, this is horrendous. Exhibit B: A lengthy philosophical discussion between Dagworth and William "his man" continues to moralize ad nauseam until it finally concludes with a limp attempt at self-derision: "Thou [William] art an endless moralist." Taken on their own, though, these examples can't do justice to the overall sense of the drama's grade B-ness. See also: "Stop, brave Sir Walter; let me drop a tear, / then let the clarion of war begin." MST3K is called for.

Favorite moments: prose poem The Couch of Death is overwrought, but decent. Reminds me of a much less affecting DFW's "Incarnations of Burned Children." Also, the random mention of a "Gordred the Giant" in Gwin King of Norway ( = long and lurid proto-Marxist call for a worker's revolution).

The Time's They Are a-Changin': Brainstorm Criticism Tone Poem Rant Thingie

incipit. Ovid's Metamorphoses v. fittingly anonymous genius's Beowulf. Both deal with time/change. Both see the changeableness of things, but write in different flavors. Ovid is more of the "littera scripta manet" variety (see his (facetious?) concluding auto-epigraph), and sees change/time as a positive/creative thing. Beowulf sees change in a much more melancholy, negative light. But, the Metamorphoseon also depict change as patternless, arbitrary and empty. Ovid's time has a certain "terrible lightness of being" quality: time expanded so infinitely that it becomes hollow. In Beowulf time plods ever on and on, growing in weight at the same time that it shrinks with age and weariness. In Beowulf history is much sadder, much older, but much more meaningful. fin.

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Reading Chesterton's biography of Blake in preparation for upcoming Blakeathon. Delivers w/ the usual poise and intellectual rigorvigor. In re John Flaxman (1755-1826), Chesterton states: 

He would admit no line into a modern picture that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even foreshortening and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque about them -- as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly considered, than the fact that one's own father is a pigmy if he stands far enough off. Perspective really is the comic element in things.

This in the midst of philosophical expositions on Blake's early life & work. He eventually says that "Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake" (i.e. Blake inherited Flaxman's con- and precision, but applied it with Blake's characteristic taste for the topsy-turvy. I heart Chesterton.

Also, rather like Flaxman's stuff for its precision. May try some copies.

Tolkien's Beowulf and the "Ubi Sunt?" of Anglo-Saxon Literature

Taking a break from Langsdorff to read the recently-published translation of Beowulf written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the mid 1920s. I bought the book for the extensive (300-odd pages worth) commentaries on the original poem, assuming that the prose translation itself was a school exercise and wouldn't provide much in the way of literary insight or artistic enjoyment. However, I found the translation immensely gratifying. Writing from beyond the grave, Tolkien provides a little glimpse into that infinite well of "time-feeling" and über-"ubi sunt?" that characterizes Beowulf, and imbues the prose with that rhythmic, tempestuous, thunder-and-lightning, glittering tone of pride and sadness that is Anglo-Saxon literature.

Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.

How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been. (The Wanderer)

Langsdorff's Voyages & Travels

Langsdorff's Voyages and Travels, a report written on the Russian circumnavigation 1803-06. Best anecdote to date: a "crossing the line" ceremony in which a Russian sailor donned a fur-lined custom of Neptune, complete with harpoon-trident, and raced around deck for hours sprinkling people with water.

Mtmrphss X.520

nihil est annis velocius

Spem in Alium

Interesting synchronicity of the day #1, a passage from Fitzie's This Side of Paradise:

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live ... and now we have no real interest in her ... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years...

Synchronous, I say, because I had just been arguing that the best literature is grounded in something other than itself, and the author accepts the fact that he is reworking material rather than producing art out of thin air (i.e. Michelangelo cutting down from a block of clay, rather than lumping it together.) Creation (technically, "sub-creation") necessarily entails deletion, since it requires delineation and exclusion of that which is not ("sub-")created. To be expounded in the literary criticism section of my Hegelian knock-off literometaphilolinguoreligiosophical magnum opus "Spem in Alium,"* publication TBA. Anyway, above quotation anecdote.

*Extrinsicism v solipsism, love is all, meaning as connection / connection as meaning.

Metamorphoseon: Plectrum

I've been picking my way through Ovid's Metamorphoses for the better part of two months now. The Latin's a bit beyond my ability, so I'm basically translating line-by-line with the help of lots and lots of dictionary searches. One interesting word that I should already know is the imposing-sounding "plectrum" (English pl. plectra), better known as the "pick" used to play guitars (as well as harpsichords).

I will wax lyrical on the splendiferous Metamorphoses as a whole once I finish it (at X.149 at the moment).

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In other news, Fitzgerald's 1920 début This Side of Paradise, is a witty, rather début-novel-ish showcase of literary ability for the young Francis Scott Key Fitz. Shares a number of things in common with Gatsby, e.g. fatal car-crashes, explorations of intimate relationships, and a brooding, unclear concern with WWI. Random poetical interpolations also give it an odd, off-kilter quality that enhances the 1920 it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world feeling. Haven't finished it though, so I will try to reserve judgment until then. Fitzgerald's way of talking (rather not talking) about the war reminds me of Mann's Der Zauberberg. Also, PURPLE ZEBRAS. [Bear in mind, most of this comes from "Book I: The Romantic Egoist." I have yet to delve into "Book II: The Education of a Personage."

Assorted Nautical Curiosities

Proa
Binnacle
Kelson

Also: link #1 and link #2

A Whale of a Book

Rereading Moby Dick for the first time in years. I had forgotten both the bizarreness (contrary to its reputation as highschool death-by-boredom, Doby Mick is hee-lair-ee-us), as well as the beauty in certain passages. Ahab's soliloquy to the whale's head in Chapter 70 is a particularly fine example of this mixture of madness and beauty, i.e. "where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home," and "O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!" Diva.

The cook Fleece's sermon to his "congregation," a swarm of sharks which he addresses as "belubed fellow-critters, concludes with the benediction "Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust -- and den die."

Chapter 55 features a rant on "Monstrous Pictures of Whales," lamenting the woefully inaccurate representations of whales in art. Depicted Science compiled most of Melville's references here.

Also mentions the memoirs of Grigory Heinrich von Langsdorff (1774-1852), a naturalist who participated in the Russian circumnavigation expedition of Adam Johann Ritter von Krusenstern (Ива́н Фёдорович Крузенште́рн). Von Krusenstern wrote a detailed Reise um die Welt... (Erster Theil, Zweiter, Dritter), while von Langsdorff wrote his own Voyages and travels in various parts of the world... (here).