Such are the courts of God

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])

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?

Miltonista recognizes the deadly capabilities of this product.

Long choosing, and beginning late

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

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.