Casual Fruition

2009-12-09T11:17:00.000-05:00

I've come out of hiding to wish Milton a happy 401st birthday.

I'd been meaning to update on my Milton-related activities, but I've been somewhat despondent about the Milton world. I'll try to perk up and start posting again.

'Cause teacher, there are things / That I don't want to learn

2009-09-27T13:21:00.003-04:00

In an ideal universe, Gregory Bredbeck would have titled his essay about Milton's Ganymede & homoeroticism in Paradise Regained "Don't Let the Son Go Down on Me."

On the bandwagon

2009-09-16T23:48:00.000-04:00

Hey Milton, I'mma let you finish, but Du Bartas...

Never mind.

Milton on Health Care

2009-09-16T15:41:00.008-04:00

Back in January, Miltonista rambled about the passage in Book XI in which Adam sees all manner of horrible illness. Since then, I've thought occasionally about the exchange that ensues. Adam grants it just that we should all suffer for debasing God's image, but ventures to ask if there might not be a better way to die.

There is, said Michael, if thou well observe
The rule of not too much, by temperance taught
In what thou eat'st and drink'st, seeking from thence
Due nourishment, not gluttonous delight,
Till many years over thy head return:
So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop
Into thy mother's lap, or be with ease

Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature . . . .

This strikes me as a little too similar to John Mackey's libertarian/personal-responsibility bullshit. These lines really baffle me. They'd be inexplicable enough if they had been written by any poet with enough world experience to know this isn't how things work, but they come from a supremely temperate man who nonetheless turned blind and gouty. Are these lines bitterly ironic (another case of angels just not quite getting what it's like to be human)? A manifestation of the sheer force of ideology? Both?

Hubbub strange

2009-08-24T19:41:00.005-04:00

I hear through the grapevine about an upcoming talk that asks if Jesus is a terrorist in Paradise Regained. I'm guessing the paper will actually start by acknowledging the silliness of the title (standing up on top of a building is not the same as...) and go on to say reasonable things. But I'm really hoping that the titles of Milton papers and talks start to sound less and less like things shouted at town hall meetings.

Or else! I swear to God the Almighty Terrorist that I'll win this game of one-upmanship. You can expect papers like "Was Milton of Hitler's Party Without Knowing It? Early Modern Republicanism and the Rise of National Socialism"; "Milton and the Hartlib Circle Jerk: Scattering the Seed of Republican Virtue"; "Pro-Choice Milton: Plunging Into that Abortive Gulf." And so on.

Why I read Milton the way I do (maybe)

2009-08-01T23:22:00.004-04:00

It struck me, randomly, that I've never actually shared this info with anybody, and I thought this would be the fitting venue.

When I was in high school, I became a devout evangelical and biblical literalist. I had identified myself as Christian since attending a small parochial school from kindergarten to grade five, but my latter conversion was somewhat peculiar--a combination of Christian radio and self-motivated reading of the Bible. (I would go on to read it cover-to-cover six times. I have to confess, though, that without much scholarly or editorial apparatus, this doesn't lead to very comprehensive knowledge. A big part of the problem is the ordering of books in the Christian/Protestant Bible.)

But this much people know about. What I haven't shared is that, early on in these studies, I rejected Trinitarian doctrine. And for a simple reason: the New Testament doesn't really say a whole lot to support it.

Once I wanted to join a religious community, though, it became clear that my views were heretical. And so I caved by coaxing and convincing myself that, yes, Father, Son, Holy Ghost were three distinct persons but one God. But doubts persisted for a long while.

NB: Miltonista now considers himself something like an anti-theist; he believes that even if there were a God, ample empirical evidence exists that that God would likely be incompetent and/or a jerk, not someone worth getting to know.

Milton Metal

2009-07-04T21:11:00.004-04:00

Recently watching Anvil!, a documentary about a Canadian metal band who never made it big, confirmed something I've thought for years. The biggest omission in the volume on Milton in Popular Culture--and maybe in all of the tedious brouhaha over whether/why Milton is still culturally relevant--is metal. Check out the lyrics from Anvil's "666":

I'd rather be a king below than a servant above
I'd rather be free and hate than a prisoner of love
You heard my warning but you didn't, didn't, didn't learn.

The thread of cultural influence would be interesting to follow (Milton-->Blake-->[???]--->death metal-->Trapper Keeper designers, etc.).

N.B.: I cut-and-pasted the lyrics from a youtube comment; I make no claims of accuracy.

Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air

2009-06-24T19:12:00.003-04:00

Forthwith up to the clouds

With him I flew, and underneath beheld
The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide
And various: wond'ring at my flight and change
To this high exaltation.

- PL 5.86-90

I'm posting this entry in the middle of a transcontinental flight, thanks to a free trial run of on-board WiFi. Looking out the window gives me access to a sight that Milton could only have imagined, that Eve could only experience as a sinful dream of prophetic wish-fulfillment.

This--the idea that technology enables what previous generations could only imagine--is banal stuff, but it reminds me of an idea that's been implanted in my head for a while. Implanted in my head since I heard two talks: the first about science fiction and globalization, the second about mapping in the early modern world. For me, what united these two talks was a question of tropes and metaphors in their relation to technology. Science fiction, according to the first talk, does something new with poetic language by providing a new way to literalize tropes. I asked this speaker what, precisely, the difference is between an Elizabethan poet describing his lover's cheek as roses and a science fiction writer describing a beautiful cyborg constructed with actual rose petals in its face. I realized later that the answer has something to do with belief and time: the Elizabethan poet never expects the reader to believe roses can actually be in cheeks; the reader of science fiction can believe that in the future it might be possible to construct a rosy-cheeked cyborg. As I listened to the second talk, weeks later, I realized that this kind of shift helps us to account for the Renaissance trope of mapping--a trope that oscillates rapidly between fiction, present fact, and future possibility.

I wonder if technology is the missing component of, say, de Man's famous discussion of allegory versus symbol.

Know to know no more

2009-06-22T11:31:00.003-04:00

In recent weeks, Miltonista has submitted a rather zany abstract for a conference, and has drafted his talk for the 2009 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, TN (hereafter called MuRFBRo2k9). When I first started this blog, I thought it'd be a fun place to share random ideas; I'd especially like to get feedback on the abstract since I haven't actually written the paper yet (and am not sure what I'm going to say). But the pressure to preserve my anonymity compels silence. In the future, I'll have to figure out more ways to say substantive things without blowing my cover.

Such are the courts of God

2009-05-30T00:37:00.004-04:00

Upon watching the Lakers trounce the Nuggets in game six of the NBA Western Conference Finals, I recalled Stanley Fish blogging about his love of basketball a while back. This got me thinking: the Miltonists should organize a basketball tournament in Murfreesboro.

And if there's one thing that basketball needs more of, it's intergenerational, quasi-Oedipal strife. I propose a game of the under-forties taking on the over-forties. Chippy youth and speed v. experienced wiliness and gravitas! Potential matchups:

Point guard

Su Fang Ng v. John Rogers

Rogers probably flows on the court as smoothly as William Harvey's circulatory system (sorry, I tried), but I bet Ng taught Blake Griffin at OU.

Advantage: Ng

Shooting guard

Anthony Welch v. Annabel Patterson

Welch is guaranteed to be a scrappy contender, but Patterson could make anybody miss a basket with the mere force of stern disapproval. And if that doesn't work, an elbow to the ribs.

Advantage: Patterson

Small forward

Tom Fulton v. Stephen Fallon

I'm guessing Fulton has a silky-smooth mid-range jump shot. But on the court, Fallon is free to reveal the bilious spleen that lies under those piercing eyes and heart of gold.

Advantage: Fallon

Power forward

Daniel Shore v. Tom Corns

Shore already has a Hanford award under his belt. Corns could crash the boards, but do they even play basketball in Bangor?

Advantage: Shore

Center

Feisal Mohamed v. Paul Stevens

The paint will be dominated by the Canadian towers. Stevens brings his military training to the court, but I'll put my money on Mohamed's baby hook. He's also the Miltonist most likely to be able to dunk. (If we play with a nine-foot rim.)

Advantage: Mohamed

Coach

Jeffrey Shoulson v. Jason Rosenblatt

Oh no, I didn't! But c'mon--compared to amassing an encyclopedic knowledge of the Talmud and Midrash, drawing up some basketball play's gotta be a breeze. But Rosenblatt gains the edge with his administrative experience as department chair.

Advantage: Rosenblatt

Final prediction: the kids win by 6.

In me is no delay (Sike! [sic])

2009-05-26T16:23:00.009-04:00

I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted. (It's less difficult to believe that what I last posted was stupid.) There's a reason, or at least an excuse, for my silence: I've been in a kind of limbo state between one accomplishment (quasi-finished revision of a chapter that turned into two chapters) and another (need to rewrite the last main chapter of my dissertation-turned manuscript). A generous observer would say that I've been letting ideas percolate; another might describe me as having been a waste of time/space.

Baby steps: I submitted a proposal to an MLA panel based on an idea about Paradise Lost and Oroonoko I've harbored for quite a while. My proposal was rejected, but I remain convinced that the basic premise is sound and original. I hope to churn out an essay sooner rather than later. I'm currently working on another conference abstract. This one I'll post here once I complete a rough draft--it's so weird and idiosyncratic that I don't think anyone could make enough sense of it to steal it.

For now, though, I transcribe what is one of the meatiest, wittiest (yes, meaty and witty!) sentences I've read in a long time. From James Nohrnberg, "Paradise Regained by One Greater Man": "The reflection of bodily well-being and whole-being in the cognate flesh of the mother calls the ego to the periphery of a diffuse romance pleasance; the outlines of the object call into being the coddled or self-boiled entity of the ego as body and subject."

It's the "coddled or self-boiled" part that kills me.

Is there an "Ass" brand of cellular phones?

2009-04-16T12:13:00.002-04:00

Miltonista recognizes the deadly capabilities of this product.

Long choosing, and beginning late

2009-04-13T12:19:00.002-04:00

Miltonista has recently entered a low-level panic about his book project (which is not necessarily a bad thing, since low-level panics tend to be pretty productive). I just discovered that a rather senior Miltonist is working on (most likely putting the finishing touches on) a book that'll cover a lot of the same ground as my project. And I'm guessing he has a contract already.

I have one more chapter to write/re-write; it's time for some less-than-casual intellectual fruition.

I upon my frontiers here / Keep residence

2009-03-27T20:25:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-26T13:22:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-14T16:13:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-05T22:32:00.006-05:00

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.

Ingrate!

2009-02-24T14:40:00.003-05:00

Miltonista has been trying to bone up on Spenser scholarship*. (Fret not, reader--I'll never become a Spenserista, no matter how hard I try. I just don't think that way.) I've been learning a good bit, but this is by far my favorite snippet of information, from the Acknowledgements page of Andrew Hadfield's Spenser's Irish Experience:

This book was originally conceived as a D. Phil thesis at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, supervised by Professor Robert Welch, 'a loose, baggy, monster' . . . .

Now that's just rude.**

- - -

* - I have assiduously avoided quoting that thing Milton says about Spenser vis-a-vis Aquinas and Scotus.

** - Yes, yes, if you keep reading the sentence you learn that Hadfield is talking about his thesis, not Welch. And I'm sure this has been pointed out to him since.

Buy your own damn fries

2009-02-11T15:36:00.002-05:00

Click on this link. If you haven't witnessed this before, you'll thank me.

I suppose I could make some feeble attempt to make this post Milton-related. But I'm a bit groggy this afternoon, so I'd much rather have any of you that happen to be reading give it a shot. (Yes, this is a shameless attempt to ring up my comment count as well as a pathetic attempt to preserve the Miltonic purity of this blog.)

All Feavorous Kinds

2009-01-28T14:42:00.010-05:00

Aside from that one time infant Miltonista's intenstines decided to digest themselves (or something like that--I've never quite gathered what happened with any clarity, but the scar remains), and from that one time college sophomore Miltonista was hospitalized for four days after contracting pneumonia as a camp counselor, I've never had anything like a near-death experience. But it doesn't take much to trigger my moribund instinct. Several years ago, I was bitten by a squirrel (probably the lesser of the two squirrel stories in my life). I was relieved when the doctors told me I didn't need a rabies shot, but for the next week or so, I thought about what it'd be like if I were the second person in the U.S. to contract rabies from a squirrel bite. (It didn't help that I vividly remembered having watched a 20/20 segment about rabies as a child. Once you start exhibiting symptoms, you're doomed.)

Recently, I've been holed up inside, suffering from nothing more exotic or exciting than the common cold. But now that I'm starting to perk up, I can muster up some resentment at having wasted my time and at having been more than a little bit uncomfortable for the last several days. My thoughts wandered to Adam's first vision of illness in Book 11:

Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeard, sad, noysom, dark,
A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas'd, all maladies
Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes
Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous kinds,
Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs,
Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs,
Dæmoniac Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie
And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie
Marasmus and wide-wasting Pestilence,
Dropsies, and Asthma's, and Joint-racking Rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair
Tended the sick busiest from Couch to Couch;
And over them triumphant Death his Dart
Shook, but delaid to strike, though oft invokt
With vows, as thir chief good, and final hope.

When I was teaching my Milton course last semester, I was startled by these lines--I had never noticed before how the gross bodily nature of the descriptions churn with a vitality that might even exceed some of the descriptions of Hell but, by the same token, come close to being too laughably grotesque. I suppose I noticed these lines because I had had a bit of an accident over the summer--nothing, ultimately, that was too catastrophic, but was scary at the time and had put me in one of my moribund funks. I've learned that incidents like that expand my capacity for empathy, occasionally to absurd levels. And these lines become, for Adam, an occasion for empathy:

Sight so deform what heart of Rock could long
Drie-ey'd behold? Adam could not, but wept,
Though not of Woman born; compassion quell'd
His best of Man, and gave him up to tears.

These strike me as curious lines; they tow a kind of very familiar weeping-as-effeminate-weakness topos while, at least to my ear, creating the undeniable impression that this weeping is gracious and wholesome. I'd like to think that this ambivalence is at least a partial reversion of the pat formula that precedes this scene: "What miserie th' inabstinence of Eve / Shall bring on men." A little later, Michael tows the party line again when he declares that gross illness befalls those who "serve ungovern'd appetite . . . a brutish vice, / Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve."

I actually think I'd like the world better if diseases were handed out in contrapasso fashion, that my cold was produced by some mildly unruly bacchanalia. Too bad shit don't work that way.

2009-01-19T14:50:00.005-05:00

The day before the presidential inauguration (cause for genuine if cautiously optimistic jubilation), Miltonista finds himself thinking somewhat dark thoughts. It's not just the tanking economy (if you haven't done so already, double check your credit card APRs! Miltonist was shocked the other day to find that his had skyrocketed to usurious levels!) and all the other woes at home and abroad. What also weighs heavily on my mind is the question of how ecumenical this spirit of excitement about our new president really is. Or, to put it more simply, what about those 58 million people who voted for the other guy and his stupid running mate? Even more troubling is the twenty-five or thirty percent of the populace who still approve of the current president. Sure, I suppose that's a low enough number to merit some righteous we-told-you-so indignation. But that still represents tens of millions of people who are deluded or willful or bitter enough to think Bush has been doing a good job.

The central crisis in Milton's political thought is still our own: a commitment to liberty and representative government can easily clash with deep-seated, carefully formed convictions when the citizenry doesn't seem to abide by them. This might initially seem like a banal by-product rather than a true crisis: we all have different convictions and democracy will inevitably frustrate all of us at some point. Those on the Left, the Right, in between, and beyond can all share the lived experience of absolutely knowing your own convictions to be the right ones, of knowing that the other side is wrong, and of watching as your own side loses (or wins by 53%).

But part of the deeper crisis of democracy is a rift between political action and knowledge. Adherence to democracy seems to demand at least some level of relativism: yes, I am given the right to cling to my own convictions passionately, but I recognize that you, too, believe in your convictions, and I must respect your right to uphold them. And if 53% of the populace votes against my convictions, I will not go out and try to kill 3.5% of the populace that disagrees with me. (I realize that here, I'm probably straying away from Milton and toward Zizek). But what room does that leave not only for maintaining but also acting upon non-negotiable convictions?

For academically minded left-leaners (or, for that matter, for Milton himself) one option is, for lack of a better word, elitism. In The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, a text that reacts to the English hurtling back toward monarchy, Milton suggests that one of those ways might be "to well qualify and refine elections: not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualified to nominate as many as they will." The reference to the "rude multitude" will strike us as jarring, crabbed, outdated. Elitism should not be the right answer. But doesn't this response actually only serve as evidence of the crisis described above? Yes, the rhetoric of the rude multitude isn't very nice, but what does it mean to live in a society in which being qualified intellectually or desiring intellectual qualification in our leaders almost automatically carries the stigma of being an elitist? Let's be frank: is there a way to diagnose the fact that those who still approve of Bush are deluded or wrong without lapsing into that position of knowledge that we often label elitism?

For me, one of the most vein-popping moments of the presidential debates was when McCain tried to poke fun at Obama for being eloquent. The audacity of any American who aims for eloquence! (All of this points to the other deep crisis in any representative government: what happens when voters can't seem to choose candidates based on merit, or when charisma and/or single hot-button issues overshadow merit? Thank god we have a president-elect who combines charisma with knowledge and skill, but for every Obama there's a Reagan or a Ventura or a Schwarznegger.)

Of course, Milton wasn't just some simple, pig-headed dogmatist. For all of his polemical feistiness, Milton clearly realized that political action requires finesse and provisional alliances. But what we'll witness tomorrow when Rick Warren delivers the opening prayer--what we've already witnessed in the angry writings about his presence at the inauguration--is the obnoxiousness of maintaining those alliances, of pandering to people who we believe to be wrongheaded. But democracy demands just this.

I left my liver in San Francisco

2009-01-05T21:34:00.005-05:00

I'm sure that MLA 2008 has already been relegated to cultural oblivion, but I promised that I'd write about it and write about it I shall. My memories are quickly becoming a hazy mess--especially when it comes to that one night when I indulged in a dozen too many drinks. (Hearty apologies to Flavia's friends, who apparently thought I was insane when I was, in fact, blind drunk.)

First, the fun, social stuff. I hadn't been to San Francisco for the better part of a decade. I'd always had fond memories of the place, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly this time around, but I was surprised at how I'd somehow conveniently forgotten about the myriad panhandlers in the city. Some were creative and funny (I couldn't help but smile when I passed the guy who asked for a contribution to the "United Buy a Negro a Hamburger Fund"). Most were unobtrusive. But a few were really aggressive. I shared with my MLA roommate how the experience made me feel like a complete bourgeois asshole ("They should really do something about all these panhandlers!").

And in the spirit of sounding like a complete bourgeois asshole, I'll add that I enjoyed some amazing food in San Francisco. Had two wonderful and relatively inexpensive meals at Sakana, and some downright cheap, yummy food in the Tenderloin. The real lowlight was at the aptly named Sushi Man, where one sole sushi chef took an hour to get our decent but unmemorable food out to us (even though the place was mostly empty).

The real highlight, of course, was hanging out with great friends--some of whom I only get to see a few times a year. This kind of interaction might lead to binge drinking (multiple outings to the Chieftain, a quasi-dive "Authentic Irish" pub next door to our hotel), but cirrhosis is a small price to pay for some serious bonhommie, no?

Miltonista is sorry to report that he certainly didn't live up to his name when he missed the first two Milton panels. But he did make it to the panel on Lycidas on the final morning. John Rogers started off with a pretty lively talk; especially illuminating was his discussion of St. Peter's speech that erupts from the heart of the poem. Doug Trevor followed with a talk about the figure of Damoetas, and Jeff Dolven filled in for an absent Gordon Teskey. The session left Miltonista feeling pretty frisky, so he went to the seventeenth-century panel. Unfortunately, two of the talks were more or less repeats of talks delivered at the Milton Symposium in London: Paul Stevens on the topic of nationalism and Catherine Gimelli Martin on Milton's view of Venice. Christopher Warren gave a fine talk that was related to but considerably different from the talk he gave at the Symposium--he spoke about the legal status of early modern diplomats, and related such concerns to figures like Raphael and Michael in Paradise Lost.

To be perfectly frank, Miltonista originally envisioned much more elaborate summaries of and responses to some of the talks mentioned above. But see above re: alcohol's effects on the hippocampus. Happy in the haze of a drunken hour, &tc.--maybe next year, I'll have to write my MLA field report as the event unfolds.

Redundant locks robustious!

2008-12-31T20:24:00.003-05:00

Post-MLA reflections to follow. But first, I wanted to put in a plug (proleptic pun alert!) for a website, an advertisement for which I saw while using a urinal in a restaurant bathroom.

Disclaimer: Miltonista has no affiliation with the website linked above. Miltonista has no medical expertise and cannot vouch for the effectiveness or safety of the services offered through said website.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

2008-12-26T21:35:00.002-05:00

Miltonista is going to wake up very, very early (or, perhaps, just stay up super late) to head to San Francisco tomorrow. Many of my comrades seem to be there already.

See you at the hotel bar. (I've made the un-Abdiel-like decision to skip the Milton Society's dinner this year, but I may try to join the cocktail hour.)

Ho, ho, ho

2008-12-25T10:44:00.005-05:00

Milton would hate the word "Christmas," so he wishes you a Feliz Navidad. Not being anti-Catholic myself, Miltonista wishes you Merry Christmas. (He himself, however, isn't so merry--grades still need to be turned in; bags need to be packed for MLAmas; his car needs to be retrieved from the auto shop that screwed up his car and needed to keep the car for two days instead of one hour.... but I digress.)

* * *

This is the month, and this the happy morn, &tc.

A little too late for Christmas shopping

2008-12-24T12:57:00.003-05:00

An unexpected result of receiving student essays via my gmail account: Google knows that I'm interested in Milton, and flashed this link to Milton goodies at cafepress.com. No, I'm not affiliated with this site nor will I receive any kickbacks (although they sure would be welcome). It just strikes me as funny that a Milton gift shop online would be a serious enough venture to advertise itself through Google mail.

The Sorrows of Young Miltonista

2008-12-18T18:58:00.007-05:00

Confession: I, Miltonista, am petty, easily excitable, and not (yet) terribly accomplished. And thus, when one of the organizers of The Young Milton Conference e-mailed me inviting me to submit a proposal, I pumped my inner fist and declared that I had finally entered the ranks of the anointed.

Small problem: I don't really write about Milton's earlier writings. In fact, my current project is quite explicitly focused on Milton's later writings.

Less small problem: the CFP is due tomorrow. Except I'm on the gauche side of the pond, so tomorrow is actually today. Fortunately, the abstracts only have to be two-hundred words long, but I'm not sure what I've been producing holds any water. But I've promised one friend/colleague that I'd apply so I'd better give it a shot.

(I realize that this entry gives away the fact that I am not any of the Miltonists whose abstracts already appear on the website. My apologies to those of you who were hoping I was Robert Appelbaum. Come to think of it, I might be happier if I were Robert Appelbaum--but that's the petty Miltonista talking.)

Of education

2008-12-16T16:33:00.004-05:00

Yesterday marked the last official day of my semester, and my day ended with my Milton class. This particular class provides extra impetus for some retro- (if not intro-) spection because it was the first time I'd taught a full-on Milton course.

It was, for most of my students, a long and hard-fought campaign. Especially tough were the early poems. I think I eased the students in on the first day of class with "On Shakespeare," which they found relatively accessible with a few bits of explanation from me. But the second day featured "On the Death of a Fair Infant" and the Nativity Ode, and, well, the students looked at me like I was a madman as I tried to talk about grim Aquilo. That session kick-started some lean weeks, when students struggled to get a basic sense of what Milton was saying. (The most memorable highlight of those weeks: seeing them perk up at the gums of glutinous heat, especially when I mentioned Debra Shuger's wet-dream argument.)

The prose, too, was tough, but students started getting into some of the fundamental impasses in Milton's thought--they were particularly riled up about the clash between championing liberty and freedom on the one hand and a strong sense of propriety and the good on the other. At this point, however, the class sessions started to confirm my fears that students were engaging with some Miltonic ideas, but not necessarily directly with the text. Example: we'd read an excerpt, I'd point out some provocative stuff about it, to which students would often ask, sometimes petulantly, "Are you saying...?" To which my response was normally, "I'm not saying anything. I'm just trying to explain what Milton's saying here." And so forth. Alas, this pattern often dogged our discussions of the major poems. The class did pick up considerably, and I, at least, had a really good time talking through the texts. But I never really was able to shake the feeling that there was too much summarizing and paraphrasing. (I'm not sure if this means I'm more or less resistant to using something like Daniel Denison's "translation"--am I fundamentally opposed to paraphrasing or do I find it unavoidable? If the latter, do I want someone else to do the paraphrasing, or do I want to shoulder that responsibility?)

I tried, as much as possible, to present a balanced Milton, and not just the Milton I happen to believe in & construct in my own scholarship. This proved difficult. Most of the students, for example, bought the Satanist angle even though they seemed impressed by the elegant neatness of the Surprised By Sin argument. I often made qualifications in class like, "For a Satanist/reprobate/sinful reader like me...." But having my own ideas challenged by the material was quite a welcome experience. This time around, I was really struck by how difficult it is to swallow completely the revisionist reader of Samson Agonistes. Perhaps this was the most trite and mundane of epiphanies, but the last several weeks of class made me realize how, as I revise my chapter on Paradise Regained and Samson, I'll have to find some ways to move away from (if not out of) the orthodox/revisionist positions. I think it'll have something to do with eating, but more on that in another post (I dare not say anon).

To the question of what I'd do to improve the course next time, I don't have any crystal clear answers. The difficulty of teaching Milton, especially the shorter, non-lyric poems, is his damned allusiveness. I realized that explaining a juicy allusion is like explaining a funny joke: the very fact of explanation ruins things. There were exceptions, of course, including the dragon's teeth in Areopagitica or the Eve-Narcissus-Echo connection. But even the Cupid-Psyche allusion at the end of Comus was surprisingly tough going. Perhaps my biggest challenge in subsequent attempts at teaching Milton will be to find new ways to motivate students to track down allusions actively on their own. Only time will tell whether that struggle will be Herculean, Sisyphean, Psychic, Promethean, or Narcissistic.

Milton on the Radio

2008-12-10T12:21:00.004-05:00

Surely the whole Samson-terrorism angle is a bit played out, but this BBC Radio interview with Neil Forsyth and Feisal G. Mohamed on the topic is still worth checking out. (Fast forward to about minute 14 or 15 to skip the other stuff--I think it's about Shakespeare or something.) I think I'll play some of this for my class tomorrow to kick-start our second discussion of Samson.

Because it's already tomorrow in England

2008-12-08T23:05:00.005-05:00

"How soon hath time," &tc.

2008-12-08T01:17:00.008-05:00

A couple of years ago, I was on a Milton panel at a conference, and for some reason I can't quite recall, I asked one of my fellow panelists about Intelligent Design theory and what Milton might've made about the recent debates about it. This panelist declared (somewhat unsurprisingly) that he thought Milton would've endorsed Intelligent Design, and then went on to proclaim (more surprisingly) that atheism would be proven but a minor blip in the history of ideas. Another panelist was sufficiently taken aback by this claim to point out that the Intelligent Design party is so very stupid (his word) and that Milton was enough of an intellectual snob to dissociate himself from such a crowd.

I recall this minor exchange because it raises, in my mind, a silly question with big consequences: if we could resurrect Milton and give him a few years to catch up on the last several centuries worth of history, would he remain a devout Christian or would he become an atheist? A silly question, of course, because it's a playgroundish bit of impossible what-if thinking. But I think it's important because our answer reveals what kind of Milton we imagine. Answers to this question aren't simply black-and-white, since we have to allow for a suppler definition of what it means to be a devout Christian. Still, I think that divergent answers to this question will ultimately point to a belief in the different Miltons that John Rumrich has described: either a doctrinaire Milton who knows the answers to the big questions, or a Milton who asks the big questions sincerely, in a spirit of genuine interrogation. (And, yes, I am simply assuming that developments in history--intellectual and otherwise--between Milton's time and our own have pointed to atheism as the more reasonable position.)

As much as my sympathies lie with Rumrich's claim for the open-ended Milton, it's also clear that the capacious or "progressive" attitudes that we find in Milton all have clearly defined limits. Familiar examples abound: belief in intellectual/spiritual compability as essential to marriage encounters a limit in adherence to patriarchy, so that only a husband should be able to seek divorce; the claim against censorship and for freedom in publication and enquiry does not extend to Roman Catholics. It seems simply true that theism itself would be such a limit: sincere intellectual enquiry might only be sanctioned insofar as it upholds rather than challenges a basic belief in God. The Chorus in Samson Agonistes, echoing the Psalmist, declares that if atheists even exist, "they walk obscure, / For of such doctrine never was there school / But the heart of the fool." And Adam's first waking experience is a kind of Intelligent Design fantasy, as his unaided reason quickly reaches the conclusion that "some great Maker" must have made the nature around him as well as himself. (Eve, on the other hand, reaches no such conclusion on her own.)

I do want to leave some wiggle room for the flexible Milton, the one who might allow even a belief as seemingly non-negotiable as theism to be shaken by debate and reason. Much of Milton's appeal as a thinker stems from his unending struggle toward the truth, from his quest to constantly refine his ideas about God, self, and world. On the other hand, much of his appeal as an artist stems from clashes and fundamental impasses, from the intensity of his effort to balance principles and commitments that prove simply incompatible.

Maybe a present-day Milton would remain a devout Christian, but would internalize so many challenges to his belief system as to undercut it severely. Maybe Milton would quit himself like Milton by being in the camp of foolish atheists without ever admitting it to himself.

Because the last entry was way, way too long

2008-12-06T01:40:00.003-05:00

Most overrated book on Milton: C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost.
Most underrated book on Milton: W. B. C. Watkins, An Anatomy of Milton's Verse.

2008-12-05T14:18:00.005-05:00

As promised, a post featuring not one but a series of half-baked ideas.

I'm intrigued by literary passages that have created a legacy of misreadings--misreadings so pervasive that they seem to be foundational rather than incidental. One of my favorite examples is a famous crux in Antigone:

The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born: but, father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again.

My knowledge of the body of discourse surrounding Antigone is rather slim, but as far as I can tell, everybody from Hegel to Kelly Oliver to, more recently, Joan Copjec willfully misreads what Antigone is saying, turning her declaration into some sort of generalizable statement about the sibling relationship as opposed to a parent-child relationship. Take, for example, Copjec's remarks in Imagine There's No Woman:

Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety [sic] . . . . Lacan summarizes her stance this way: "Antigone invokes no other right than that one ['this brother is something unique'], a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is ['my brother is my brother'] . . . ."

This all sounds nice and good, but doesn't such a reading ignore the simplicity of what Antigone says? Brothers are not necessarily unique or irreplaceable--it's just that, in her case, her parents happen to be dead. Declarations about the universality of Antigone's claim need to take into account the obvious fact that her situation is marked by a rather banal contingency: perhaps if her parents had been alive, she merely would've asked them to reproduce again rather than burying her brother. The question of what it means that her parents happen to have been Oedipus and Jocasta--as well as the more general question of what the relationship between contingency and universality means in this case--I'll leave to those who are better qualified.

* * *

I wonder if Eve's narration of her first experience at the reflecting pool (what, according to William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, "may be the most reflective, even philosophical account of courtship in all of Renaissance literature") includes another such moment that has produced a rich legacy of misreading:

As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming.

The problematic moment here is the line, "What there thou seest fair creature is thyself." At a conference I recently attended, a Miltonist responded to a talk about queer studies and Narcissus by inquiring about this line. He suggested, sensibly, that there's something peculiarly incorrect about the disembodied voice's lesson: after all, what Eve sees is her reflection, not herself.

What I want to think through here is the possibility of taking the voice's lesson seriously--to say, as literally as possible, that what Eve sees in that pool is her very self. Shouldn't it be quite easy to say that this passage labors to transform Eve into a visual Echo rather than Narcissus, thereby enabling Adam to take his rightful role as the reflected rather than reflection? In this case, the lesson is quite apt: what Eve should learn is that she is a second-order reflection (what she sees in that pool is the essence of herself), and she needs to turn to her original source, Adam, where "no shadow stays / Thy coming."

But I wonder if reading the passage in this way causes a surprising amount of friction, rubbing the wrong way against a pattern of thinking about Narcissus that is for us still inextricably dominated by psychoanalytic thought. I suppose a quick-and-dirty (or, perhaps, half-assed) reading of Eve's mirror stage would run as follows: the Eve-infant, not being yet in the symbolic order, has no clear boundaries between self and other. The disembodied voice effects the necessary misrecognition that is needed to give Eve a clear sense of herself as a discrete ego as well as her need to enter the symbolic order. And part of the force of Milton's bourgeois version of the Narcissus story is how deftly he combines the story of entry into language with that of entry into marriage. Once the Eve-infant has been compelled to grow out of her primary narcissism, her only choice lies in reverting back to narcissism or in going along with the wholesome bond of marriage.

The gravitational tug of this account feels awfully strong, but I think this reading suits, say, Ovid's version of the Narcissus story far better than Milton's. In Ovid, the poetic speaker berates and mocks Narcissus for loving his shadow, in which nothing of himself truly inheres; Narcissus chooses to love his own reflection anyways. I wonder if Mary Nyquist turns Milton's Eve too much into Ovid's Narcissus when she remarks--in an essay that ranks as among the handful of texts that have really taught me how to read Milton--that Eve’s “desire for an other self . . . is clearly and unambiguously constituted by illusion, both in the sense of specular illusion and in the sense of error." In a state of complete innocence, isn't it at least possible that Eve simply cannot fall into intellectual or moral error? What Eve attempts to explain here is her prelinguistic experience, when she has not yet experienced the split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. With eloquent concision, Eve's account reveals this split to be a temporal one. Before language, Eve can experience complete, seamless spontaneity: “I started back, / It started back”; “I soon returned, / Pleased it returned as soon.” Yet these line breaks emphasize how Eve’s narration undermines itself. Once stuck in language (which is also to be stuck in marriage), the image that is Eve’s self is doomed to be belated, its action delayed. As the voice rightly posits, Eve will be caught between the past-tense "came" and the present-tense "goes."

But before language--which is to say, before any concrete sense of herself versus another--how could Eve be incorrect? Before language--which is to say, before any temporal divide comes between herself and her image (or, should we say, learning the lesson of the disembodied voice, between herself and herself)--how could Eve possibly fall prey to an illusion? In the untimebound perfection before language, there may be absolutely no difference between loving another and loving yourself.

This might be the true shock of Milton's version of Narcissus. By virtue of not having a clear sense of self, pre-linguistic, premarital Eve might be more capable of loving another than she will ever be afterwards. This is not, then, the story of narcissism thwarted, but the story of narcissism instilled (and then only partly deflected). Once the voice teaches Eve that what she sees is herself, she will never have access to the undifferentiated perfection of loving another without even realizing that the other is the self--the golden rule embodied as it never could be again. For after this scene, Eve will be split twice, once by the order of language, and again by the economy of marriage, which will cast her in the role of second-order reflection. The point of Milton's story is not that the Eve-infant needs to learn a discrete sense of self and then to turn away from her innate narcissism in order to love another; rather, the realization that she has a discrete self shatters the Eve-infant's ability to love perfectly. Instead of loving another who is herself (the condition of which love qua love being her not having a sense of self), Eve will be forced to know herself through the order of language and to love another in the economy of marriage. As she rightly intuits, these are rather poor consolation prizes; as she is forced to learn, she has no other recourse.

"In me is no delay," Eve declares optimistically at the end of the epic, but her first waking experience suggests otherwise. Or, at least, it suggests that the place where no shadow stays her coming cannot be her union with Adam, but with unmediated access to God--but that's a matter for another entry.

Another way to explain the deftness of the reflecting-pool scene: neither Eve nor the disembodied voice are incorrect even though both seem wrong, and the reader is left to split the difference. Like Eve, the reader is stuck in language, and should simply side with the voice; yet the scene is powerful enough to give us a sense of what might have been on the other side.

Milton, gutbuster

2008-12-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

I'm an inveterate Google stalker. And shameless, too--I'll often stun people by rattling off stuff I know about them through the internet. In one of my creepy e-stalking sessions, I ran across a random tidbit from Aaron Kunin (who plays the genius angle as convincingly as anyone in their thirties possibly could; almost disappointingly, he seems like a really nice, sincere person to boot). Kunin declares that Milton is a rare case of someone whose loss of humor can be dated rather precisely--to 1659.

Kunin seems to be one of those people with whom I'd be sincerely nervous to disagree--rather than prove him wrong, my disagreement would most likely reveal how my brain waves operate a couple of registers below his. And surely the claim that jolly young Milton (you know, the one who found the death of Cambridge's carrier pretty funny shit) turned into a dour old man seems pretty unobjectionable. Just take a look at what occasions Milton's God to yuck it up in Paradise Lost: the astronomical quandaries created by his perspective-bending solar system; linguistic and political confusion after the fall of Babel. Grim.

A tiny bit funnier but no less grim is the joke Milton's letter to Peter Heimbach in 1666: "One of those Virtues has not so pleasantly repaid to me the charity of hospitality, however, for the one you call Policy (and which I would prefer you call Patriotism), after having allured me by her lovely name, has almost expatriated me, as it were." Get it? Patriotism? Almost expatriated him? Sigh. Well, if you were blind, had been briefly imprisoned, and had had to hide for a while when you weren't sure you'd be hanged or not, maybe this'd be the level of etymological humor you'd be able to muster.

Still, there are some funny moments in Milton's later writings. I particularly enjoy the joke with the long setup in Book IV of PL, which goes on and on about how carefully and strategically Eden has been situated with defense in mind. And then Satan with "one slight bound high over leaped all bound." Hey, Milton's no Eddie Izzard, but this joke shows some real attention to comedic timing. My current favorite late Milton joke is in Paradise Regained. In Book II, Satan solicits suggestions regarding how to tempt Jesus. Belial chimes in with his advice: "Set women in his eye." Satan quickly dismisses this ("Belial, in much uneven scale thou weigh'st / All others by thyself; because of old / Thou thyself dot'st on womankind") and declares the need for "manlier objects" to tempt Jesus. A couple hundred lines later, we learn what Satan really had in mind: the ensuing temptation features "Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue / Than Ganymede or Hylas" in addition to some really hot (if chaste and forbidding) babes. In retrospect, we learn what Satan was really saying to Belial: "Listen, fratboy, not everyone's a breeder jock like you."

Come to think of it, there was a discussion on the Milton-L listserv about Miltonic humor. But I unsubscribed a while ago--that list wasn't funny anymore.

The argument

2008-12-04T21:08:00.000-05:00

The idea for this blog sprung from my head a few days ago, and I type it into existence with my digital word less than a week before Milton's four-hundredth birthday. If I uphold my original plan, every entry here will relate to Milton in some way. Sadly, my lack of talent (to say nothing of the cold, damp climate I inhabit) prevents me from taking up my friend's suggestion that I model this blog on Geoffrey Chaucer's by writing in Milton's voice. What readership I find will have to be content with musings about Milton's writings; Milton jokes and crudely photoshopped images; and attempts to think through contemporary events through a Miltonic lens. If all else fails, I'll become the Perez Hilton of the Milton community, airing as much tawdry Miltonist gossip as I can find.

To the obvious question of why, I give first a personal answer. This blog is my way of publicly admitting that my mind has taken a deep, perhaps indelible impression from Milton's writings. Faced with new knowledge, I frequently find myself appealing not only to the encyclopedic scope of Milton's thought, but also to the structure of questions and questioning that it provides. Call this blog, then, the confessions of a young Miltonist.

This self-serving project does, however, have some slightly bigger aims. Milton studies currently seems gripped by the rather peculiar fear of proving the author relevant, of rescuing him from an obsolescence that may or may not loom ominously. To the question of why Milton matters, I have no real answer--aside from the obvious: that literary history matters; that history matters; that the intersection of artistic, literary, and political history matters; that Milton certainly mattered to others who might still matter, including Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Thomas Jefferson, Phyllis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, C. S. Lewis, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Pullman, and any number of death metal bands who seem to think "Paradise Lost" is a nifty title--except to say that Milton matters to me. If I can explain why this is so in the unrarified, cacophonous hubbub of cyberspace, then perhaps I'll have made my small contribution to the task of saving Milton from pretend oblivion.

And, finally, I do want this blog to be a place for giving voice to embryonic ideas, glimmers, suspicions, and hunches without too much fear of error or lack of rigor. The title of this blog is my attempt to yoke Miltonic thought with a decidedly unmiltonic air of sprezzatura. Like all sprezzatura, of course, mine will be artificial, papering over my deep-seated fear of being mistaken or misunderstood. Still, I'll post quirky, half-baked ideas (and maybe even some of the idiosyncratic insights I've been hoarding desperately as my own) as often as my fortitude allows.