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Where would old literature professors be without energetic postgraduates? A recent human acquisition, working on the literary sociology of pulp science fiction, has introduced me to the intellectual equivalent of catnip: Google Ngrams. Anyone reading this blog must be tech-savvy by definition; you probably contrive Ngrams over your muesli. But for a woefully challenged person like myself they are the easiest way to waste an entire morning since God invented snooker.

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The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

…

The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item… I could be connected to the outer world by reason, if I chose, or I could yield to what amounted to a narrative fiction[.]

- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood*

I am an introvert, but don’t worry. I’m not about to launch into one of those self-fascinated pieces about how I am special and misunderstood. It’s just that I do have a very interior life, full of reflections and broodings and spun narratives. I imagine most writers are like that (perhaps not all), but I was struck by this passage and how it crystallizes a constant struggle of mine to do an objective assessment of my reality and spring it free of fancy, to know know what I actually know, and what I’ve constructed.

Writers tend to fancy that every bird symbolizes their own hope, and it’s easy to forget that the bird is minding its own business. This is why I opined recently that I wished I had majored in some “hard science,” where enough information surrounds an object that you can understand it on its own terms: the bird striking across the sky becomes a kestrel, and you know a thing or two about its behavior and habits, so it is no longer a stark image but a living thing. It is not there to inspire you; it is chasing a wren.

This bears on a work in progress and an essential scene — essential to character, not to plot — and I now know what I was trying to accomplish with that scene, though I don’t think I actually need to change anything.

*I may post more about this remarkable book, which recounts a cognitive and perceptual awakening by a child with astounding detail. I do not think Ms. Dillard has ever written a book for children, but her ability to recall the experience of being a child is like nothing I have ever read.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: childhood, dillard, interiority, shelley

By Christopher Page

I am struck by the way the recent issue of Early Music devoted to the early romantic guitar provides a timely reminder of how little is known about even the recent history of what is to day today the most popular musical instrument in existence. With millions of devotees worldwide, the guitar eclipses the considerably more expensive piano and allows a beginner to achieve passable results much sooner than the violin. In England, the foundations for this ascendancy were laid in the age of the great Romantic poets. It was during the lifetimes of Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, extending from 1772 to 1834, that the guitar rose from a relatively subsidiary position in Georgian musical life to a place of such fashionable eminence that it rivalled the pianoforte and harp as the chosen instrument of many amateur musicians.

What makes this rise so fascinating is that it was not just a musical matter; the vogue for the guitar in England after 1800 owed much to a new imaginative landscape for the guitar owing much to Romanticism. John Keats, in one of his letters, tellingly associates the guitar with popular novels and serialized romances that were shaped by the interests of a predominantly female readership and were romantic in several senses of the word with their stories of hyperbolized emotion in exotic settings. For Byron, a poet with a wider horizon than Keats, the guitar was a potent image of the Spanish temper as the English commonly imagined it during the Napoleonic wars and long after: passionate and yet melancholic, lyrical and yet bellicose in the defence of political liberty, it gave full play to the Romantic fascination with extremes of sentiment. For Shelley in his Poem “With a Guitar,” the gentle sound of the instrument distilled the voices of Nature who had given the materials of her wooded hillsides to make it, but it also evoked something beyond Nature: the enchantment of Prospero’s isle and a reverie reaching beyond the limitations of sense to “such stuff as dreams are made on.” As the compilers of the Giulianiad, England’s first niche magazine for guitarists, asked in 1833: “What instrument so completely allows us to live, for a time, in a world of our own imagination?”

Given the wealth of material for a social history of the guitar in Regency England, and for its engagement with the romantic imagination, it is surprising that so little has been written about the instrument. It does say something about why England is widely regarded as the poor relation in the family of guitar-playing nations. The fortunes of the guitar in the early nineteenth century are commonly understood in a continental context established especially by contemporary developments in Italy, Spain, and France. To some extent, this is an understandable mistake, for Georgian England received rather more from the European mainland in the matter of guitar playing than she gave, but it is contrary to all indications. But we may discover, in the coming years, that the history of the guitar in England contains much that accords with that nation’s position as the most powerful country, and the most industrially advanced, of Western Europe at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.

There is so much material to consider: references to the guitar and guitarists in newspapers, advertisements, novels, short stories, poems and manuals of deportment, the majority of them published in the metropolis of London. The pictorial sources encompass a great many images of guitars and guitarists in a wealth of prints, mezzotints, lithographs, and paintings. The surviving music comprise a great many compositions for guitar, both in printed versions and in manuscript together with tutors that are themselves important social documents. Electronic resources, though fallible, permit a depth of coverage previously unattainable. Never have the words of John Thomson in the first issue of Early Music been more relevant: we set out on an intriguing journey.

Christopher Page is a long-standing contributor to Early Music. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is Professor of Medieval Music and Literature in the University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Music elect at Gresham College in London. In 1981 he founded the professional vocal ensemble Gothic voices, now with twenty-five CDs in the catalogue, from which he retired in 2000 to write his most recent book, The Christian West and its Singers: The first Thousand Years (Yale University Press, 2010).

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Image: Courtesy of Christopher Page. Do not use without permission.

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If you write fiction, should you write light copy or dark? Is the choice like that of light or dark turkey at Thanksgiving? Does your preference reflect your inner workings or your reading preference? And does it matter?

Authors like Stephen King write both. A reader doesn’t normally think of the author of “Carrie,” and “The Green Mile,” as writing “Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season.” In case you’re wondering, he also wrote another book on baseball, too.

Poets explore both paths to find explanations and impressions of the world’s workings and their own. Finding the humanity in dark literature isn’t new. It has a long tradition.

Mary Shelley created Frankenstein as more than a dark novel. The story roams through the reader’s mind as a look into a sinner’s guilt and requisite redemption, a romance set within the framework of a nightmare, and a glimpse of the terror-ridden existence of a life that should never have arisen. Like King, Shelley rolled human fears and motivations into a neat bundle and served it up as dark meat for the reader.

But Shelley was hardly the first to venture into the realm of shadows, sin, and the seamier side of life. The ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides gave the world dark tragedy with attitude. Their plays, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, certainly weren’t meant for the faint of heart.

These stage ventures also contained romance, sin and redemption themes, Gods—vengeful and otherwise–and human frailty. These ancient writers set more than the Greek stage. They put civilization on the road of writing works that drew the viewer into another’s tragedy, or comedy, and sent the mind spinning off into realms of distraction from the viewer’s everyday experience.

Comedy such as the wildly satirical work of Aristophanes allowed the audience to laugh instead of cry at the doings of man. The playwright used the play’s chorus to deliver scathing humor at the expense of the drama.  This playwright, 2000 years later, continues to rank as a master of dark comedy with a twist.

Today’s writers strive for the same effect. Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series follows Shelley’s trademark theme. Vampires, too, seem to be created by others with agendas to keep.

Writers have a choice of how they present their ideas about the world and the players in it. Romance makes way for tragedy, while comedy lands on its feet next to the potential absurdity of fantasy, as that genre tries to remake history with personal ideals and mythical creat

Today, some lines by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the opening lines of which seemed terribly appropriate given that we've just had another Nor'easter come through, and it's a snow day for the kids. Since the final two stanzas seem to refer to a dead person, I figured I should make clear they do not apply.

The cold earth slept below;
  Above the cold sky shone;
    And all around,
    With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
    Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black;
  The green grass was not seen;
    The birds did rest
    On the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
    Which the frost had made between.

Thine eyes glowed in the glare
  Of the moon’s dying light;
    As a fen-fire’s beam
    On a sluggish stream
Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there,
And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair,
  That shook in the wind of night.

The moon made thy lips pale, belovèd;
  The wind made thy bosom chill;
    The night did shed
    On thy dear head
Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie
Where the bitter breath of the naked sky
    Might visit thee at will.

Each of the stanzas follows the rhyme scheme ABCCAAB, and mostly uses iambs (two-syllable poetic feet consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one - taDUM), although some of the lines incorporate anapests as well (ta-da-DUM). I like the rhythm of the poem, the way it trips along, the clever line scheme, and the varying line lengths.

Yesterday's poem, "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats, is a hard act to follow – so many great lines, yet some of them are so great that one can't really top them. Trying to think where to go from here, I found myself coming back time and again to the image of the sphinx "somewhere in the sands of the desert, . . . a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun", and I thought of Ozymandias. I confess to having travelled a somewhat musical route to get there, because what came to my mind was not immediately the line of "Ozymandias" that usually turns up, but because on thinking of the face in the sand, I thought of a song by Sting. More on that in the discussion.

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


Shelley wrote this poem in December of 1817 as part of a writing contest with his friend, Horace Smith. Having read an account of the discovery of a fractured statue of Ozymandias (another name for Rameses II), with an inscription that translates as "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works", both men wrote sonnets on the topic; both men addressed the idea of hubris. For those of you interested, you can read Smith's poem and compare the two. (It's interesting to see how two poets writing literally simultaneously on the same subject and with the same theme can end up with different results, and I think it also demonstrates that Shelley was the superior poet.)

The poem is, as I mentioned earlier, a sonnet, but it does not fit the Shakespearian or Petrarchan form. It is, instead a "nonce" form, in which Shelley muddies the waters between the opening octave and closing sestet. Written in iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme is ABAB'ACDCEDE'FE'F. The little "prime" marks are to indicate where Shelley opted for slant rhyme rather than exact rhyme. The shifting and gradual replacement of rhymes within the poem is similar to the shifting of desert sands over time as they erased most of the "works" of which Ozymandias was so proud. This poem is actually atypical for Shelley both because of its unusual form and because of its subject matter, yet it may be the most widely anthologized of his works.

As in the other poems I've selected thus far, this one has a memorable line coupled with memorable imagery. For me, it's the line "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!", juxtaposed with the empty, level sands stretching to the horizon as far as the eye can see.

As I said at the start of this post, I got to "Ozymandias" through a Sting song. The song, "Mad About You", has always been inextricably linked for me with the Shelley poem because of this verse:

They say a city in the desert lies
The vanity of an ancient king
But the city lies in broken pieces
Where the wind howls and the vultures sing
These are the works of man
This is the sum of our ambition . . .