Tyger and Becoming-Artifical

Hi.  I'm Tharmas, but I listed my username as Roger Whitson.  I've been fascinated by this film short from Brazilian filmmakers Guilherme Marcondes and Andrezza Valentin for almost a year without knowing precisely what to do with it:

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Stephen Burt in n+1, Number 4

Excerpted from the symposium on "American Writing Today:"

Whom should more poets follow, or at least contemplate? Again, in poetry: George Herbert, Christopher Smart, pre-1937 W.H. Auden, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, James K. Baxter, post-1964 Robert Lowell. Among living writers, maybe Thylias Mass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Laura Kasischke, Liz Waldner. In poetry criticism: William Empson, Donald Davie.

What current modes clog the pipeline and tire me out? (1) Quasi-automatic writing and a kind of comic quasi-surrealism, especially when the author wants to be winning, funny, "entertaining," and shocking at the same time. (2) Slack free-verse autobiography; chatty anecdote without interesting form. (3) Endless zeroxes of '50s formalist poems, copies of Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. (4) "Spirituality," which, pursued as a primary goal, tends to make poems sound like bad translations.

Most poets today are writing either for a coterie of readers they know personally, who want to participate in the social circulation of new work (rather than in the rereading of old work), or else (in part) for an academic market in which the more you publish (as long as it's in semiprestigious venues), the more your chances for tenure and promotion.

Both paradigns encourage overproduction. Younger poets, in particular, seem to rush things, to make public ten pounds of cookie dough when, had they waited, they might have had five pounds of tasty cookies. I don't know what any of us can do about that, and for certain poets whose work is supposed to sound "raw" (such as Kasischke and Waldner) that may not even amount to a disadvantage.

Anything you can do 100 times in 100 poems without learning a new trick isn't worth doing more than twice. Sense is harder than nonesense; order is harder than disorder. But, as Stevens said, "A great disorder is an order"; as Dickenson said, "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye."

Something by Caleb Crain, somewhat less memorable, followed.

Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held

(Yet another shameless cross-posting from I Cite)

In a critique of Scott Eric Kaufman's draft paper on the history of theory in literary studies (which I haven't read; I recommend, though, the terrific discussion over at Rough Theory)  Eileen Joy rightly draws attention to Stephen White's discussion of weak ontology. Indeed, to my mind, Scott's emphasis (as channeled by N. Pepperell) on "an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held" is more akin to William Connolly's ethos of pluralization and commitment to the cultivation of an ethos of generosity (White discusses Connolly's work in detail in Sustaining Affirmation; White's notion of weak ontology in fact draws heavily from Connolly and attempts to mediate between Connolly's Deleuze-indebted 'immanent naturalism' and the work of other political theorists--in particular, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and George Kateb).

Is this interesting primarily as a matter of academic pedantry or turf warfare (along the lines of "gee, political theorists have already been talking about this for quite a while")? Perhaps. But there could be more at stake. Differently put, that Connolly has worked out these notions in several books that have been the subject of sustained discussion among political theorists for the last decade might shed light on potential ramifications of an "aggressive commitment to strong beliefs weakly held" (it is also likely that the disciplinary difference here is significant--Scott says that literary theorists are more interested in imagined worlds; political theorists, for all our engagement with ideals, remain imbricated in this one, for better or worse). Here are a few possibilities:

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the worst book you ever read

Here's material for a meme, no doubt: what was the worst book you ever read, and why?

A quick search around the web, however, turns up several lists of notoriously bad films (e.g. Wikipedia's "Films considered the worst ever"), and indeed there's an annual award for bad films, the Razzies, but I can't immediately find anything similar for fiction.

There is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award; and also the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest, "wretched writers welcome." But nothing for entire books, so far as I can see.

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rewriting the Introduction to Theory's Empire

The "Introduction" to Theory's Empire fails to confront its object. It is a mishmash; an intellectual muddle. It is not the best effort conceivable by a long shot. I could write a much better Introduction than they did, and I think their whole point sucks. And then some of the articles that follow!

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theory's empire: the intro

Our book does not propose a return to an ideal past (nonexistent, in any case) of literary studies. Nor do we support a retrogressive or exclusivist view of a canon, classics, traditions, or conventions (the predictable charges hurled against critics of Theory). p. 7

Soon after the above, the introduction's authors provide a brief history leading to the development of Literary Theory.

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dualism in phlosophy

Everyone is familiar, even if they haven't come across this particular quotation from Rorty, with the comment that Western metaphysics is grounded in 'dualisms.'

'Platonism'...refers to a set of philosophical distinctions (appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, sensible-intellectual, etc.): what Dewey called a 'brood and nest of dualisms.'These dualisms dominate the history of Western philosophy, and can be traced back to one or another passage in Plato's writings. Dewey thought, as I do, that the vocabulary which centers around these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes. (Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii)

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In need of heroic readers (more than heroes)

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

Some readers may have already seen Benjamin Kunkel's essay in the Sunday Book Review (bugmenot), in which he writes, among other things:

What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health.  His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.  Thoreau isn't against self-esteem (he admires a friend who has learned to "treat himself with ever increasing respect"); but his main task is to lose his esteem for society in which "trade curses everything it handles" and the singular natural resource of time is wasted in barren productivity.  Maybe he had vices out there in the woods, but that's not his concern, or ours.  The overwhelming impression is of his philosophical ardor, which he tries to fuse with his practical ardor.  There's not a note in the book of self-pity, or nostalgia.  And why did he quit his cabin in the end?  "It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live."   This accent of futurity is missing among contemporary memoirists.  They sigh over their past woes; sigh with relief now that they're better; or sigh the long sighs of nostalgia. 
(emphasis added)

Indeed, and not just among contemporary memoirists, but also American Presidents.

Anyway, I would like to concur with Marco Roth (another editor of n+1), that in the current marketplace of literature's ongoing infantilization, the legacy of the "heroic reader" may be one thing we can not afford to let alone. 

The paradox of the heroic reader is that she must actively distance herself from the sick world.  She must submerge herself, one might say, in the very limitless task, in the important and arresting and non-trivial stakes of reading, with all the terror–indeed, potential madness–this implies, but significantly in order to then re-enter society with both sincerity and sympathy, and with an attention–dare we call it philosophical–to living (zoe!) as opposed to mere endurance of the "safe" thrills of organized spectacle or pre-packaged experience.

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so as not to ruin

But Benjamin wrote for quotation, his style is geared to it, and it rose to method for him as aphorism had for Nietzsche...'What mattered to him above all was to avoid anything that might be reminiscent of empathy, as though a given subject of investigation had a message in readiness which easily communicated itself, or could be communicated, to the reader or spectator:   "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener"'      (The Task of the Translator)

-Stochastic Bookmark, on Walter Benjamin (by way of Lindsay Waters and CI).

The Value of "Theory"

The issue of the theoretical enterprise in the social sciences and the humanities has been both central and marginal to the discussion thus far.  Central insofar as all the contributions and comments have oriented themselves towards the question of "Theory" -- that is, what is the use of "Theory" and how should one make sense of "Theory" texts?  The problem of rendering sense to a strange text about value, complete with pictures and references to ostensibly long-dead debates, has pre-occupied nearly everyone.  I say "pre-occupied" in a literal: we haven't yet gotten on to the real occupation of the symposium.  Or have we?  And this is the sense of marginal.  While "Theory" has been central, it has only had a shadowy, rhetorical existence.  People on one side characterize the other side as being "anti-Theory" and the "anti-Theory-ists" return accusations in which the ostensibly supporters of "Theory" are unable to recognize themselves.  Put another way, those who propose a critique of "Theory" cannot ever hit their targets because those who defend "Theory" do not recognize themselves in the critique because their alliance is elsewhere: to "Continental philosophy" or some such.

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Geertz and interpretation

I first read Clifford Geertz's "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," itself published in 1973, in an interpretation seminar in the 90s. I benefitted a lot from this rereading, and here are a few points from it that struck me.

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'interpretation'

I would like to bounce off of Matt's heads-up about Bérubé, titled "Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)" below. Bérubé, for those who don't know, has written a critical, though certainly not 'trashing', review of Theory's Empire, the recently published anthology that wears its hostility to Theory, aka postmodernism, etc., on its sleeve. The discussion in the comments section to that post is interesting, and I urge everyone to take a look if inclined.

The question that discussion raises for me reminds me of an intellectual test that can be performed when thinking about the criticisms that 'postmodernism' and 'theory' tends to attract.

To apply this test, I chose a highly favorable review of Theory's Empire by Michael Potemra, National Review, July 4, 2005.

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Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)

Michael Bérubé has published his review [PDF] of Theory's Empire, for those who may be interested.  It is blessedly short, lucid, responsible and well-aimed, including (but hardly limited to) the jibes at Baudrillard, IMHO.  It is to be compared, if you like, with that of the conservative Peter Berkowitz, who seems to spend most of his time bloviating rather mundanely, and proving––at least to himself or to some imagined choir––and beyond any reasonable shred of doubt, that he has neither a sense of humor about Nietzsche nor any familiarity with Derrida's oeuvre.  In any event, an occasion to update that Theory's Empire page yet again, I suppose.  [Hello, that's odd.  The page--and that page only--seems to have been lined-out, at least under Firefox and Netscape, though it's still clear in IE.  I wonder why that is...any ideas anyone?]

Dropped out of the calendar

From Walter Benjamin, section ten of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (Illuminations):

It is–if one follows Bergson–the actualization of the durée which rids man's soul of obsession with time.  Proust shared this belief, and from it he developed the lifelong exercises in which he strove to bring to light past things saturated with all the reminiscenses that had worked their way into his pores during his sojourn in the unconscious.  Proust was an incomparable reader of Fleurs du mal, for he sensed that it contained kindred elements.  Familiarity with Baudelaire must include Proust's experience with him.  Proust writes:  "Time is peculiarly chopped up in Baudelaire; only a very few days open up, they are significant ones.  Thus it is understandable why turns of phrases like 'one evening' occur frequently in his works."  These significant days are days of recollection, not marked by any experience.  They are not connected with the other days, but stand out from time.  As for their substance, Baudelaire has defined it in the notion of the correspondances, a concept that in Baudelaire stands side by side and unconnected with the notion of "modern beauty."

Disregarding the scholarly literature on the correspondances (the common property of the mystics; Baudelaire encountered them in Fourier's writings), Proust no longer fusses about the artistic variations on the situation which are supplied by synaesthesia.  The important thing is that the correspondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements.  Only by appropriating these elements was Baudelaire able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing.  Only in this way was he able to recognize in it the challenge meant for him alone, a challenge which he incorporated in the Fleurs du mal.

[...]

The correspondances are the data of remembrance–not historical data, but data of prehistory.  What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life.  Baudelaire recorded this in a sonnet entitled "La Vie antérieure." The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and waves which are evoked at the beginning of this second sonnet rise from the warm vapor of tears, tears of homesickness.  "The wanderer looks into the tear-veiled distance, and hysterical tears well up in his eyes," writes Baudelaire in his review of the poems of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.  There are no simultaneous correspondences, such as were cultivated by the symbolists later.  The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life:

Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux,
Mêlaient d'une façon solennelle et mystique
Aux couleurs du couchant refléte par mes yeux.

C'est là que j'ai vécu...

The breakers, rolling the images of the sky,
Mixed, in a mystical and solemn way,
The powerful chords of their rich music
With the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes.

There did I live...

[...] "Recueillement" traces the allegories of the old years against the deep sky:

...Vois se pencher les défuntes Années
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées

...See the dead departed Years in antiquated
Dress leaning over heaven's balconies.

In these verses Baudelaire resigns himself to paying homage to times out of mind that escaped him in the guise of the outdated.

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Latest Salvos

Lindsay Waters strikes again, four years ago (there's also a nice article on Perec).   I say, if you cannot beat 'em, join 'em.   The shame-faced and guilty decades-long Theory-pusher makes amends at last.   And why not?

(Update:  It's been brought to my attention that these two posts may be riding a little hard on Lindsay Waters, so for something a bit less snarky-popular and more philosophical perhaps, why not read this review by Steven Shaviro, from May of 2004.)

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Dumm on Melville: Call me Pip

Over at I cite I have a link to an important article by friend Tom Dumm that appeared in the Massachusetts Review 46, 3 (Fall 2005). I'll blow the ending: he argues that Ishmael is Pip. Tom reads Moby Dick in part out of his interest in loneliness. He writes: "To be lonely in America   is to be black, and brilliant, constantly in danger of being bought and sold,   rooted in the deepest genealogy of power and loss, and secret witness to a catastrophe   that only deepens over time."

Here are a few excerpts from Dumm's article:

... C.L.R. James has made it the quintessential artistic   representation of the impossible politics of American racialism. It has been   made into film, into opera, and into a major Laurie Anderson performance piece.   It has been borrowed by all forms of popular culture so ubiquitously that its   characters are a shorthand for specific forms of madness, a fit echoing of Melville’s   own use of master Shakespeare’s characters. The conflation of Melville   the author with the narrator of the story—call him Ishmael (for now)—inevitably   has encouraged psychoanalytic studies of him, perhaps most prominently Michael   Rogin’s densely layered argument concerning the family fortune of the   Melville clan and the political economy of a country on the brink and in the   aftermath of civil war. The influence of the book on one of Melville’s   own descendents has been so pronounced that he has named himself Moby, and has   created ambient music reminiscent of the ocean. It is, in other words, a great   temptation, a book to be reckoned with by anyone who wants to think about American   experience.
...
but for me, above all, the loneliness of the person, whoever he is,   who says, “Call me Ishmael.” Who is Ishmael? For me, this is the   most important question to ask if we are to think about the lonely self, this   strange self that is beyond itself. The “who” of this question centers   our thinking about the ends of loneliness—is there a “who”   to whom we may repair, an identity that is able to settle us, a place for our   placelessness, a home in the world for the lonely?
...

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Warning: This Sort of Thing May Actively Bore You

Two items: the first comes via the indispensable good taste of Political Theory Daily Review, whom you should all vote for, by the way. It is a review of Stanley Cavell.
The second may bore you. Then again, it may not. If not, perhaps you could venture to give your reasons in the coments box provided directly below.

Today, in 2005, it looks as if Sontag was dead wrong, her words a painful reminder of how foolish we all sounded back then when we wore our bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts. Interpretation has established its dominion over American literary scholarship. In so doing, it is threatening to wipe out 30 years of postmodernism that emerged out of the intellectual ferment of the 1960s. Can we break its hold?

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Literary Darwinism

D. T. Max's article in yesterday's magazine was the first I'd heard of literary darwinism. Generally, I've been nothing but hostile to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, finding them to rely on specific social and gendered assumptions that they then project back into the past and across onto all cultures. These sorts of explanations also seem to me to be hostile to political interventions and projects of social solidarity (it's pretty hard to get to social solidarity if our selfish little genes are just trying to have their way). But, maybe it works in literature.

So, here is a list of possible dissertation topics for graduate students in English seeking to make their way as literary darwinists.

1.  Crime and punishment: what's the big deal? she was past breeding years.
2.  Lolita: an aging man's last effort to send his genes into the world.
3.  Beloved: so, you lost your own best thing. Not to worry! You've got other kids!
4.  The Magic Mountain: protecting the healthy from the degenerating effects of sickly genes.

Try it! It's easy. And, a way to write a disseration really, really fast! Be sure to check the second link above for the list of the seven behavioral systems at the foundation of human life.

A Bit of James Wood

Whatever else he may be, he gets this sort of thing mostly right:

At present, contemporary novelists are increasingly eager to "tell us about the culture," to fill their books with the latest report on "how we live now."  Information is the new character; we are constantly being told that we should be impressed by how much writers know.  What they should know, and how they came to know it, seems less important, alas, than that they simply know it.  The idea that what one knows might – to use Nietzsche's phrase – "come out of one's own burning" rather than free and flameless from Google, seems at present alien.  The danger is that the American fondness for realism combines with this will-to-information to produce a hyperliteralism of the novel:  you can see this in Tom Wolfe....

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The Neoliberal Imagination in Prep School Novels

Well we don't exactly claim to be on the cusp of anything here, when we get around to claiming anything at all, but in this our (well, let's be honest:  my) quest to be the n+1 groupie par excellence, Crooked Pins has lately been providing ample competition.  In the spirit of generosity, and because I concur with the general sentiment that the article in question is yet another "must-read," particularly for parents and students about to embark on the country club experience that is Ivy League college, I recommend you take a look.  In the spirit of cyber-communism, I'll even provide another exclusive excerpt, available only to subscribers (you really ought to be one) below the fold.  But you could also start with the abbreviated version here (may require bugmenot.com).

And really, their comments thread over there is a bit tired (debating the conservative right's moral authority on race issues by bringing up senator Byrd and the KKK has got to be the most over-used talking-point-that-refuses-to-die EVER, and I suspect we can do better.  The real issue is class warfare, for fuck's sake.)

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An Open Letter to Lydia Davis

Innumerable things, but in particular this post (courtesy of Long Sunday enthusiast Ray Davis), have led me to something like this.

Dear Lydia Davis,

What are you thinking? 

Respectfully,

Matt

ps.  Some background on the mysterious case of the kitten who posed as an uncle, and amongst other mistaken nephews, for those who might be interested:

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Theory, Having Just Begun

Actually I've been enjoying the quality of discussion at both the Holbo and Bérubé empires this week very much, even if the premise and primary target (which is to say the target of the Theory's Empire book––something in its conception at least not entirely unmarked by genre, perhaps, and let's just note again here how the words "French Theory" (or indeed just "theory") were always something of a uniquely Anglo invention*)...even if the general target of this book (the "anthology of dissent" currently receiving so much attention) may never have been in much dispute.  Most literature professors (at least at the undergrad level, and perhaps beyond) who "do theory" exclusively in the Anglo world, do so poorly.  Sure, I guess.  (But are they really an "empire" now? How innocent is this irony really?)  While the ones who do it well, well...they do it without you even knowing what they're up to!

Let's face it, anybody blindly championing "theory" at this stage as a panacea be-all and end-all, pat diagnostic device, pathway to tenure, carte blanche license to avoid the text entirely, or name-drop and cite without the slightest concern for context, logic, or verifiability, seemingly overwhelmed by TEOTOB...this anybody really knows very little about theory, truth be told.  Indeed, this anybody might be living in a cave, oblivious to the current trends of the academic job market, for that matter, or the semi(barely)-covert assault on all things "PC" and "liberal" in cultural studies, literature departments, and so on, as the corporatization (and scientification) of our beloved universities progresses daily.

Anyone else have any thoughts?  We're supposed to be the resent-nik Zizekians, remember!

What do you think, is "doing theory" not one of those faux pas right up there with proclaiming oneself to be "postmodern" (as in, it's just not, you know, something one does, if one wishes also to be taken seriously)?  I put it to the world.

Update:  There's an interesting post up at Savage Minds about this whole book "event" thing, by the by. Update: And quite a bit more...

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Moretti's maps: the world is flat

Franco Moretti's theory in Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 is that quantitative methods applied to the study of literature will disclose previously undiscovered facts about i.) the content of literature and its relation to the world it purports to describe or reflect and ii.) the dissemination of literature in a culture and the power relations and material conditions that make it possible and shape it in ways invisible to non-quantitative analysis.

The first two chapters of Moretti's book pursue the former issue; Moretti literally maps aspects of the fiction under his consideration—we see where Jane Austen's novels begin and end, what the typical journey in colonial adventures looks like and the areas in London where Dickens's middle-class characters live. These maps are experiments that allow us to test the hypotheses offered by qualitative criticism: Jane Austen's fiction consolidates the nation-state? Let's see what the map says. Indeed, the map shows that her novels begin in the county where the heroine (old local gentry) lives and end in the county where her eventual husband (new national elite) lives, these counties being located in a southern, rural England that excludes the Celtic fringe and the industrial north, though the plot complication do occur in the cities where mobile, shiftless seducers try to move in on this marriage market. So Austen's England, Moretti argues, is an “invention,” a technology for communicating and naturalizing the often (in real life) frightening marriage of the old elite and the new, which, for the classes affected, was not often motivated by the desire typical of Austen's heroines but rather through fear and desperation of ending up in one of her plot-device cities where seducers swarm. So Moretti's map experiment has tested and seemingly proved the hypothesis we're all familiar with about the political meaning of Austen's novels. This is literary criticism as science.

In pursuing the latter claim of his thesis, Moretti's third chapter, more provocatively, gives us literary history as science.

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On a Mission!

Well Michael Bérubé sure gets this right:

But the truly astonishing thing is not that we continue to study the literature and culture of the British Isles; outside of Shakespeare, who remains extremely popular on campus and off, most undergraduates aren’t doing too much reading in British literature before 1800. Rather, the astonishing thing is that we devote so little time and energy to the study of contemporary world literatures in English.  I say this not out of self-interest—I know far too little about the field, so little that if I had the capacity for shame I would be ashamed of myself—but simply out of the recognition that while we “English” professors are sitting around squabbling about theory here and rhetoric there and tweaking the undergraduate curriculum just so, the English-language writers of Asia, Africa, and Australia have been coming up with all kinds of stuff. I hear there’s even another English-speaking country on this very continent, but I don’t remember its name.

A question of priorities then, indeed.  In addition to which, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Bérubé––as someone who has actually taken the time to understand Derrida––is here defending close reading per se or as traditionally understood.  It may be politically propitious to turn the rhetorical tables with the slogan that, well, "Derrida was really the closest of close readers, you know."  But the post-structuralist take-down of the New Critics, in the broadest sense, is still as relevant as ever.  That is, the best close readings, as any good deconstructionist knows, also take place at a crucial, if also non-essential distance.  Or rather, as if at a distance from themselves, with a fierce concern for the ways in which they are always, inevitably, re-inscribing distance, or for that matter, proximity.  Recognizing maybe, that true proximity only ever comes from distance.  As in carressing sands, not sledgehammering wood.  Ok, I'll stop.  Just thought I'd throw that out there.  Kuddos to anyone who deigns to comment on such a trite post.  The last thing we need around here is some kind of "mission."

Update:  Just in case you didn't follow that first link in Bérubé's post, I'll go ahead and kindly encourage you to do so here.  It even references an REM lyric––you can probably guess which one.

Criticism's cruelty

Our own Jodi Dean has produced some fascinating ruminations on cruelty, to which I only want to add a brief speculative note. So far, Jodi has described cruelty as a displacement onto others of the vulnerability one feels in oneself; i.e., I am strong, I am pure; but the [blacks-Jews-terrorists-Arabs-poor-ad infinitum] are weak and dirty and deserve to be scourged. I agree with this definition, and wonder how it accommodates the oft-noted connection between aestheticism and cruelty, a frequent subject both of literature and of literary criticism that purports to be moral (and that generally, with varying degrees of subtlety, occupies a political space at the convergence of traditional liberal ethics and neoliberal or neoconservative ideology).

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RearGuardz: Fragments of epic memory

I went to the Carnegie library yesterday to read in the humanities stacks, and to see if I’d run into John, for I had grown accustomed to meeting him during my sessions there. I knew that John would be at work that afternoon, so my chances of meeting him were good—he always finds a way to slip off either to the library or to Flagstaff Hill, from the top of which one can see all of Oakland, as well as points beyond.

I was flipping through a volume of Henry James’s letters I had found on a shelf across from my desk, for I happened to have several letters to write, and I was curious to see what phrases he would use to bid his correspondents farewell and to assure them of his good will.

I looked up as I heard someone walking down the aisle, and as I had hoped, it was John. He had apparently already found his book, for he was holding open a handsome hardcover volume—a collection of essays by Derek Walcott.

I asked him how he was, and what he was up to that afternoon.

“I had a dream last night,” John said, “in which I was crossing a white, snow-covered lawn toward a station wagon. Harold Bloom, ensconced in a heavy coat and the J. Crew scarf you can see in his book-jacket photos, was getting into the car but, on seeing me approach, beckoned me to come close. I didn’t dare refuse. He whispered in my ear: Of the wintry cities of words we strong poets dwell in, little is known to the southerner.”

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