Saturday, August 25, 2012

Jonson's CXXVIII, "To William Roe" (Saturday Sonnet)

I've been thinking this week about poetry's role within a community. If lyric is sometimes an expression of inwardness, after all, it also anticipates an audience, and even sometimes engages with that audience directly. This engagement, in turn, can foster a sense of community--particularly among absent friends, connected by the lyric and its material/remembered presence. Here, as an example, is Jonson's CXXVIII, "To William Roe":

Roe (and my joy to name) th'art now, to go
countries, and climes, manners, and men to know,
to extract, and choose the best of all these known,
and those to turn to blood, and make thine own:
May winds as soft as breath of kissing friends
attend thee hence; and there, may all thy ends,
as the beginnings here, prove purely sweet,
and perfect in a circle always meet.
So when we, blest with thy return, shall see
thyself, with thy first thoughts, brought home by thee,
we each to other may this voice inspire;
This is that good Aeneas, passed through fire,
through seas, storms, tempests: and embarked for hell,
came back untouched. This man hath traveled well.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Spenser's Amoretti 63: Saturday Sonnet

Every once in a while, when it seems like everyone in the Renaissance is staggering about under the weight of unrequited love, I pick up Spenser's Amoretti. Below: the words of the poet who actually got the girl.

After long storms and tempests' sad assay,
which hardly I endured heretofore,
in dread of death and dangerous dismay,
with which my silly barke was tossed sore;
I do at length descry the happy shore,
in which I hope ere long for to arrive.
Fair soil it seems from far and fraught with store
of all that deare and dainty is alive.
Most happy he that can at last achieve
the joyous safety of so sweet a rest,
whose least delight sufficeth to deprive
remembrance of all paines which him oppressed.
All paines are nothing in respect of this;
all sorrows short that gain eternal bliss.

[sonnet 63]

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The Acid Test: Sleep in the work of Dorothy L. Sayers

I've been planning the introduction to my dissertation recently (which means that it's almost done! Deep breaths!), and I've been re-reading the passages that led me to think about watching a sleeper in the first place. Principal among them is a gorgeous piece of prose from the Renaissance scholar Dorothy L. Sayers--who translated Dante, but is most famous for her detective stories. In this passage, Lord Peter Wimsey (her main sleuth) has gone punting with Harriet Vane (the woman he loves, and has loved, unrequited, for years). When he falls asleep in the boat, Harriet studies his sleeping form:

"It was a neat and noiseless kind of sleep... but asleep he undoubtedly was. And here was Miss Harriet Vane, gone suddenly sympathetic, afraid to move for fear of waking him and savagely resenting the approach of a boatload of idiots whose gramophone was playing (for a change) 'Love in Bloom...' Another person's sleep is the acid test of our own sentiments. Unless we are savages, we react kindly to death, whether of friend or enemy. It does not exasperate us; it does not tempt us to throw things at it; we do not find it funny... But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty..." (Gaudy Night, Hodder and Stoughton, New English Library [1935] 2003, 361).

That passage has always stopped me cold. Sayers never comes out directly and says that Harriet has fallen in love with Peter. Instead, there is a look, there are a few brief reactions--and then there's this passage, the observation of a suddenly beloved sleeper, a simultaneous admission of his vulnerability and her own. With the option open to her, Harriet chooses not to indulge in "conscious superiority"; the acid test has shown her feelings for a vulnerable man who cannot openly reciprocate them yet, and she reacts by resenting the boatload of idiots (and their gramophone).

Then, fabulously, she goes through Wimsey's belongings, and starts reading his books until he wakes up. First up: Religio Medici. Second: Donne. With the choice of these books/writers, Sayers is framing the encounter in the context of not only sleep/love, but sleep/death, and--more specifically--sleep/early modern death. How and why is she doing this? To what end? What does the acid test tell us about viewers of sleepers in early modern literature itself? Will Peter and Harriet ever get together?? Tune in for the next installment...

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Shakespeare, Sonnet #116: Saturday Sonnet

I've been reading the quirky and thought-provoking Radioactive, by Lauren Redniss. It tells the story of Marie and Pierre Curie, as they discover radium, polonium, and their terrifying properties. It also explores the imbrication of marriage, love, decay, fallout, light, heat, and death, in a provocatively visual way. This week's Saturday sonnet is an old favorite that takes up all of these themes, newly reinflected for me by Redniss' work.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments. Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove--
oh, no. It is an ever-fixed mark
that looks on tempests and is never shaken;
it is the star to every wand'ring bark
whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come;
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error, and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Twitter as Memory Theater

In her thoughtful book Shakespeare's Memory Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2010), Lina Perkins Wilder says that props, actors, and the space of the performance area "provide the vocabulary of Shakespeare's memory theatre, but they do not function merely as physicalized reminders or mnemonic res... Rather, in their frequent absence such objects become a way to evoke a mind and a past that move between the common (shared by the audience, staged elsewhere in the play) and the comparatively private (unstaged, but described in ways that evoke the physical materials of the stage)" (2).

I've been thinking a lot about the role of Twitter in my research recently, and this quote made me think about the status of individual tweets. If Shakespeare's actors, props, and even spaces could be not only reminder-objects but points of merger between a "common" and a "comparatively private" space, could tweets somehow be the modern equivalent of those objects, allowing past and present, thinking and viewing, absent and present, to merge?

I've recently found myself tweeting mnemonically, for lack of a better way to describe it. There's a great Folger blog post on signatures that I know I'll want to find again, for example, and so I sent a tweet about it to remind myself where it is and what it said. Even as that tweet serves me as a memory device, though, it's also an act of performance with an audience: I'm publicly remembering, in such a way that other Twitter users can access a virtual space, and remember the same thing that I'm choosing to remember. Absent things and people (the Folger blog, my Twitter followers) are entering a dialogue with the things that I'm currently doing and writing. I'm not sure if that makes the Twitterverse a giant memory theatre, or something more along the lines of a giant, group-accessible diary. What do you think?

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 39: Saturday Sonnet

There's nothing like starting your weekend with a big breakfast and a piping hot sonnet. This week, we have Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella #39 ("Come sleep.") Enjoy!

Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw:
O make in me these civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, softest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head;
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.



Friday, August 3, 2012

Models for Academic Communities of Dissertators, Part Two

Like the early modern period (see previous post), our own era has one or two helpful models of community that could be applied to dissertators as well. Here they are:

  • Twitter. I love Twitter. It forces me to think in small units (i.e., units smaller than dissertation chapters). And then it lets me share those small units with other people, who actually--improbable as it may sound--are also interested in Ben Jonson's birthday. There are two benefits here: 1) the forging of a larger scholarly community, through direct interpersonal interaction, and 2) the production of a  record of these interactions. So I can go back through my tweets and remember when Ben Jonson's birthday was, and who else is interested. Twitter is great.
  • Facebook. Also useful, but less professionalizable than Twitter. It still produces a record of interaction, though, and provides almost instant access to my local team of Latin language experts. (Salve, guys!) For that alone, Facebook is invaluable. But slightly less cool than...
  • The Borg. Wouldn't that be fabulous? Borg-ness would be particularly helpful while teaching. Instead of saying "Well, Billy, I'll have to look that up and get back to you by e-mail," you could say "Fabulous question, Willliam. According to my colleague in the history of science, that happened in 1625. On a Tuesday."
So there we have it. Early modern and modern models of community, for folks who stare at laptops most of the time.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Models for Academic Communities of Dissertators, Part One

The early modern period had a range of useful ways to think about community, and (in my sitting-by-myself-at-a-desk-with-my-laptop mode) I'm wondering if any of them would help create a sustained/more official approach to community for grad students who are writing most of the time. So, in no particular order, here we go:


  • Compulsory weekly attendance at an event? (For the Elizabethans, this was church: you heard a sanctioned, official sermon, saw a bunch of local people, and--if you were Shakespeare's dad--avoided the group entirely, so as not to get thrown in jail for debt.) This could work for dissertation writers: we could substitute mock job talks for sermons, and ban debt collectors while we're at it.
  • Eating together? (This is also church-driven--in fact, by a process called communion. In the 1600s, whether you thought the bread and wine was metaphorical, literal, or (trans)figurative, you got together with like-minded folks to partake pretty frequently. While we do have "brown bag" events in my department, they're geared toward learning a specific skill or interacting with a guest speaker--we could have regular eating events with no agenda, just for the sake of communing with each other.
  • The maypole? Okay: this is mostly aimed at my desire to see department members skipping around with ribbons. Still--there are some department intramural athletic teams. Maybe I could go into training, learn not to trip on myself, and join them.
Next time: Non-early modern models of community for dissertators (with possible Star Trek references...)