I upon my frontiers here / Keep residence

The grand narrative of irrepressible chaos is illustrated by very mundane examples. Miltonista lives by himself in a one-bedroom apartment. How is it that unless I perform various forms of cleaning (dishes, vacuuming, marking off boundaries with golden compasses, &tc.) every day, disgusting upheavals quickly ensue?

Two (Miltonic?) dilemmas

For the last couple of years, Miltonista has felt like he's been going through some sort of transition from young to full-blown adulthood--a second, less physiologically dramatic puberty. This transition has been marked by two rather banal but nonetheless acute problems. As a narcissistic reader, I can't help but think these are somehow Miltonic problems*.

1. I'm intensely social (I grew up as a latchkey only child, so I think I've spent enough time alone for a lifetime already), but I increasingly find the great majority of people intolerable, their conversation maddeningly inane or worse. Five, six, seven years ago, I was far more tolerant, willing to hang out with people whose company I didn't necessarily enjoy all that much just for the sake of socializing. I still succumb to this impulse now and then, but I've discovered that I tend more or less to shut down when I'm surrounded by people I'd rather not be around.

This is clearly related to my second dilemma.

2. I admire generous thinkers--people who really have a knack for seeing how others think. Despite his eccentric and deeply ingrained mode of thought, my advisor is just such a generous thinker. I've come to believe that he can, more or less, anticipate how I'll react to a certain text or idea; even though he doesn't really agree with me on fundamental points, he's come to see how I think and even to value some of the outcomes. Unfortunately, I find generosity of mind a struggle to maintain. I'm not necessarily a dogmatist--methodologically, for example, I'm mostly an ad hoc poacher--but I find it increasingly difficult to accommodate positions and perspectives that are opposed to my own (unless they happen to be articulated so brilliantly that they blow mine out of the water).

Maybe all of this merely means that I'm growing into the sad, tired role of cranky elitist. Let's just hope I don't go blind.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* - In the case of #2 above, for example, Milton is the capacious thinker who believed in the benefit of disagreement (Truth as Osiris, etc.) and could cherish the intellectual camaraderie of Roman Catholics on the Continent. He's also a petulant, dismissive polemicist. The trick, I suppose, is figuring out what the relationship between these two habits really are: youth vs. age, two sides of the same dialectical coin, occasional strategies, etc.

RIP

I just learned today of Al Labriola's passing earlier this week. As a relative newcomer to the Milton world, I didn't know Al well, but I benefited from his meticulous dedication. I was a grad student when I submitted a chapter of my dissertation to Milton Studies, and I was thrilled when I received a revise & resubmit request. Since I'd done a lot of cutting and had a bigger chapter to draw from, I revised quickly and sent off a new draft. This began a protracted back-and-forth over the next few weeks: Al personally read each draft I prepared and suggested new revisions. I think this happened about six times, and he always got my drafts back to me in a matter of days. I'm sure he was exasperated by me--in fact, at one point, he suggested I slow down and take some more time with my revisions. On my end, I was baffled that an editor would take so much time, but it also dawned on me how much care he was putting into the journal and into my work; a less patient editor wouldn't have invested so much time into making sure a grad student's work would make it into print.

I got to meet Al in person at the first Milton Society Dinner I attended. Anyone who's ever been will know how much care he put into such events, and how much calm pleasure he took in them. Al was a gatekeeper into the Milton community. Fortunately for anxious up-and-comers like me, he played the role with generosity and genuine thoughtfulness.

Call me Goosequill

Miltonista recently picked up a used copy of Peter Ackroyd's Milton in America and starting reading it on the airplane. Shameful that it took me so long, I know, and even more so because it's quite interesting (to use a completely banal word so I can reserve actual judgment).

Interesting enough, in fact, that I started thinking about the kind of engagement that Ackroyd must have with Milton's writings--with Milton himself--and wondering how it might be similar to and different from my own. To be more frank: I started thinking about the deficiencies in my kind of practice as a professional (chortle) reader. Perhaps my thoughts have been influenced in part by Derrida's Archive Fever, which I've also been reading lately (very slowly, even though it's a thin book). That book, more than any other, has shown why and to what end the language of specters and haunting (which I've tended to find trite and unnecessary) persist. I think I've hit a point in my dissertation-turning-into-manuscript where I feel like I want to have a monologue with Milton, like Yerushalmi's with Freud. 

I suspect that I should, just as a heuristic exercise, try something like what Ackroyd has done. But I'm not sure, at this juncture in literary studies, at this juncture in my own intellectual development, how to conduct that particular seance.