Hugh Nicoll’s Weblog

Robin Tremblay-McGaw has a great little review of Aífe Murray’s Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language (2010). The review includes a generous selection of extended quotes from Murray’s text, giving readers a good sense of the pleasures in Ms. Murray’s prose. Murray has made the working poor of nineteenth century Amherst visible, showing the ways in which their contributions to the Dickinson household economy not only enabled ED’s artistic independence but created the linguistic and social bases from which Ms. Dickinson’s poetic experiments grew. A must read, which gives a critical reading to the conventional notion of the artist as isolated genius:

That ‘social text,’ that fleshy real world was inhabited by maids, laundry workers, seamstresses, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, basket weavers, laborers, stablemen–all of whom Emily knew by name. The poet may have traded on stereotypes (what Folsom and Price call vortex words) that telegraphed charged images to her readers. What’s to be made of Emily’s relationships to the people behind these stereotypes? This was the social context of her art-making, the whole roster of people who make the work possible and ‘fuel the fantasy of independence. Ironically, it is this very support that allows the practice of art making to appear as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

To learn more about Aífe Murray’s work, see her web site.

Murray, Aífe. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010.

On March 6, Bill Moyers’s Journal celebrated poetry. The elegy for the Dodge Poetry Festival, cancelled for 2010, was excerpted from Fooling With Words produced in 2000. The segment features readings shorter and longer, including Kurtis Lamkin, Sharon Olds, W.S. Merwin and Coleman Barks. Lamkin performs with the kora, while Barks’s concluding reading features a hauntingly beautiful piano, cello, percussion and oboe accompaniment. The Oregon Literature Review site hosts another online video of Kurtis Lamkin; Coleman Barks’s home page has a shop section, offering a number of titles in a variety of formats.

I’ve been reading Simon Schama’s The American Future: A History over the last few weeks in preparation for re-thinking my Introduction to American Studies course for this year. Schama uses the lens of the Obama campaign to look forward and back at American history in ways that make the USA refreshingly familiar and simultaneously brand new.

I have just finished reading Steve Rothman’s account of the publication of Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which I also finished reading today. I have two copies of Hersey’s text in my library, the version published in the 1988 reprint of Here to Stay, a collection of Hersey pieces originally published in The New Yorker and in Life, and the digitized version available on the DVD version of The New Yorker. The print version has all the practical versions of the codex book, easy to read in bed, etc. to pick up and put down as the practical necessities of life take precedence over reading time, while the digitized version gives one a copy of the full text of the 31 August 1946 issue of the magazine. The New Yorker issue of 31 August 1946 was devoted in its entirety — with the notable exception of the columns and pages given over to advertisements — to Hersey’s piece. Hersey’s much praised tone — objective, understated, and sober — is luminous and pure, and stands in ironic contrast to celebrations of wealth and taste in the ads, which would appeal to the The New Yorker’s upper-crust readership: the educated and well-heeled readers who have the leisure to think carefully about the morality of government policy and to shop at Lord & Taylor’s, Tiffanys, and and Bergdorf-Goodman.

“The Publication of “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker,” was written as a term paper for a graduate course on science and society at Harvard in 1997, and contains a very useful overview of the publication and reception of the original version. There are a number of links to related pieces on Rothman’s home page, including one to Terrorism, War, and the Press, a 2003 collection edited by Rothman’s wife, clearly of immediate interest as the war in Iraq drags on, and politicians continue to beat the drums of war. Consider, for example, McCain’s latest pontifications on democracy and so-called U. S. interests in relation to the current crisis in Georgia.

The main questions, as always, reverberate: What must be done? When will we ever learn?

The end of the term provokes reflection. What have I done well with my classes? Where did I go wrong? In what ways do I need to change my approach to the teaching of writing, design of assignments, construction of more useful learning environments for my students? Toward those ends, I began to take a look at resources available online, and am very pleased to see what’s happened at The WAC Clearinghouse.

The site now hosts several online journals, most usefully, Across the Disciplines, and a collection of digitized books discussing the teaching of writing, writing across the curriculum pedagogies, and reference guides to rhetoric and composition studies.

In addressing the needs of my students here in Miyazaki, I need to find a similar resource in Japanese addressing academic skills and the development of expertise as a writer in the L1.

In Hurrah for Euphony!, Mark Scroggins shares his delight upon taking delivery of Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, just published by the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, ME. Scroggins describes the volume as containing 700 plus pages of critical cool. Hope I can steal some time for it later this summer.

Jacket 36, the late 2008 issue, is taking form. It includes a discussion between Rachel Blau DuPlessis and William Watkin on “Draft 33: Deixis” and Watkin’s essay “Though we keep company with cats and dogs”: Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben. I am not familiar with W. Watkin’s work, but am inspired by his perspectives on contemporary literature and literary criticism. Watkins is co-coordinator of Archive of the Now, a wondrously rich collection of contemporary writers’ works: confirmation if any is still needed of what an important role the web now plays in making poetics and poetry resources available, no matter our geographic location.

My American Studies seminar students finished their graduation thesis presentations yesterday. I am very proud of what they achieved. Their topics included Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison – Sula and Beloved, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Langston Hughes – The Ways of White Folks and Not Without Laughter, Truman Capote’s life and works, Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Ann Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Amateur Marriage, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Katsuki Yasuno (vocals and euphonium) and Onishi Yosuke (piano) played at LifeTime last night with special guests.

Attended a live performance by RobStar Lobster tonight. “Donny,” (Kotaro-kun) the second vocalist in the group is the son of one of my oldest friends in Miyazaki, Yano Yasuhiro. RobStar Lobster is an acapella group performing polished and moving covers of Stevie Wonder, Beatles, Carole King songs along with Japanese pop standards and a few originals. My preferences for jazz are pretty strong, but this group of young singers put on a great show, and did a great job of highlighting the wonders of the human voice. I especially liked their mic-less version of “What a Wonderful World” they performed as an encore.

Many of the audience are folks I’ve known almost my entire stay in Miyazaki, so lots of hisashiburi (Haven’t seen you in a long time!) sociability, and the strange mix of wonder and familiarity that seeing your friends’ children growing up and finding themselves as adults provokes.

Two pieces on Dead Certain. Read ‘em ‘n’ weep . . . .

Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times.

Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.

In the spring of 1969 when I was about to graduate from high school, Dr. King had been gone for a year, black power was in its ascendency (and in the FBI’s sights as we would learn all too well in December of that year. To remember it as a time of many troubles sounds/feels trite now, but important texts were being re-published, including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. My first real exposure to Hurston was attending the performance of TEWWG by a small black theater company in D. C., and I’ve been reading and re-reading the novel ever since, teaching it, and recommending it to my American Studies students as a senior research topic. For Japanese undergraduates the dialect is a challenge, but the writing is so good in so many ways it’s worth the challenge, for them and for me.
In this weekend’s Books section of The Guardian Zadie Smith has one of the most moving and thoughtful essays on the book I’ve read: “What does soulful mean?”.

Jonathan Derbyshire’s review of Mark Edmundson’s new book on Freud, and Paul Laity’s interview with Eric Hobsbawm good, too.

“Seeds of Change,” a Grace Lee Boggs piece on the Bill Moyers Journal site asks a host of What must be done? questions for our time. She quotes Margaret Wheatley on the necessity of cultivating a new way of thinking about how we should participate in our troubled societies:

“From a Newtonian perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change. But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.
Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, Changes in small places affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.”

Her 1998 autobiograpy, Living for Change: An Autobiography is a longer testament to the ways courage, committment, and good humor can help us keep working.

Boggs is featured this week on the Journal, along with Robert Bly.

The front page of yesterday’s Guardian featured a story, The Boardroom Bonanza on the 98 to 1 gap between executive and employee pay. I have no doubt that mention of the “R” word would carry little weight in policy discussions, but I also wonder what it will take for the people at the top to recognize that in the long run these disparities are not in their best interests. Or, am I merely naive? George Monbiot’s column puts things in perspective.

Reading Jerome McGann on Clark Coolidge : wandering Copenhagen, journeying to Manchester via Frankfurt…

The twinned experiences of reading and thinking about poetry and poetics within the multilingual flow of heard languages in travel has got me thinking about language, language use, and language learning and teaching in new ways. It also has me wondering about the difficulty of learning and teaching other (“foreign”) languages — and wondering why we seem so insistent as students and teachers about this notion of difficulty. All around me, inside me too, the ubiquity of code-switching in the multilingual flow is primary. Inner life, in own words, English and Japanese. Copenhagen’ dominant background is Danish, bilingual (Danish/English) signage, and code-switching on demand, with English loan words sprinkled through everyone’s speech no matter their origins, mother tongue(s), and multi-lingual competencies. This seems — at least in over-heard casual conversation and public interactions — the same for everyone: Americans to British to Danes to Germans and Swedes, Africans, Thai, Turkish, …. all. In global business and travel this seems merely necessary and normal. We need to communicate with each other for instrumental purposes and so without worrying about the finer points of how to develop our language learning strategies, reading skills, improve our vocabulary learning techniques, etc. we just get on with language life, step by everyday step.

If a finer (more discriminatory) understanding of difficulty in language/language use is to be encountered and embraced, won’t this happen in the domains of the arts and sciences? For example, say, in poetics, philosophy, or computer programming? If there is a point to my meditation it is not to attack the anxieties and concerns of language learners and teachers, but to seek a better understanding of our real responsibilities through a more rigorous analysis of how we handicap ourselves in our educational institutions.

Note: McGann, Jerome. The Point Is To Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present, University of Alabama Press, 2007.

One of the unexpected benefits of my short stay in Copenhagen is having discovered the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, a Finnish video artist and photographer, awarded the Artes Mundi prize in 2006. Ahtila describes herself as a slow worker, and shows new works at longish intervals. Her current exhibition at Copenhagen’s GL Strand, runs through October 21, and includes her prized installation from the 2005 Venice Biennial, The Hour of Prayer and a new work, Fishermen which makes its debut with this show. In the interview with Anne Kielgast published in the exhibition catalog Ahtila notes how she is drawn to telling stories in in her works, but that she aims “at breaking the usual chronology of events and try(s) to structure things in a new way.”

One of the way she does this is using multiple screens. In The Hour of Prayer, for example, she uses four screens, sometimes showing different scenes, sometimes show the same scene, and at other times showing in two or more screens panoramic views. The Hour of Prayer is scripted in English and the narration done by an actor, the text and images complementing each other, but the text and the image sequences do not lead viewers to closure, rather requiring us to construct our own readings of the narrative. She concludes the catalog interview by saying,

I don’t think my works are especially painterly – no. What probably comes from the art side is that I trust the audience’s ability to see, hear, and think.

More than anything, Ahtila’s installations have become poetic mysteries for me. I knew after my first visit yesterday that I would have to return, and would return again and again, just as I re-read my favorite poems. Made my second visit today, but will be moving on the UK tomorrow, so have to mediate on the stored up images, and on the catalog stills from here on out.
I’ve made a small effort to learn more about Ahtila’s work on the web. There are a few good things out there:

1. an Adrian Searle article from The Guardian (2002);
2. a BBC Wales piece reporting on The Hour of Prayer and the Artes Mundi award; and,
3. most impressive of all, her collected Cinematic Works on DVD, and a study of her works by Taru Elfving, et. al. – both from Crystal Eye, Ltd. – are available from Amazon.

Our first semester exams finished 1 August, but I was busy with marking, reading through student portfolios, writing up reports, committee work, etc. through 17 August. I failed, yet again, to make much progress cleaning my office, but I left Miyazaki on Monday the twentieth, and am now enjoying a working holiday. I have research reading & writing to do, but out of the office and out of the classroom for a solid five weeks makes this a real release. In Copenhagen until tomorrow morning, then will stay in the UK for three weeks, with stops in Maine and NYC before I return to Japan on the 25th of September.

My sister Jessica and her partner Barry Oreck are performing at the Boulder Fringe Festival. They’ve got three more shows this coming weekend, Friday – Sunday. For more info, check out their page on the festival site.

Yet another reason to be grateful for Pierre Joris’s return to more active blogging. Inspired by Pierre’s account of Dagtekin’s reading in Paris, I googled the poet, was was pleased to find his page at the French publisher site, Le Printemps des Poetes. I have no French, but very much enjoyed the excerpt from LE VERSANT OBSCUR DES CORBEAUX, and the accompanying sound file.

Over at the TPM Cafe, Ari Berman discusses the ties between big capital and politics-as-usual, a response to notices of his recent piece in The Nation, “Hilary, Inc.” Nails it.