John Keats: A New Life by Nicholas Roe

Notes Toward a Review

John Keats

By Nicholas Roe

I thought Really? Another Keats biography? I'd just finished Stanley Plumley's Posthumous Keats, and Daisy Hay's Young Romantics, and what with Jane Campion's "Bright Star" (Apparition LLC 2010), I felt the moss'd cottage trees bent with apples, the gourds all swollen, and hazel shells plumped, if you take my meaning. I liked all these, mind you (though Plumley's less after I saw him read from it without force or elaboration as part of the Seattle Arts and Lectures program). Plus, I've written a chapter about Keats in this book, and recently published another article about him here. When I heard about Nicholas Roe's new Keats bio, I thought I would safely pass. 

But then I mentioned it to my friend Frederick Burwick, who claimed it on the spot "required reading." "No negotiating," he continued, "it's just stunning." And he was right--now that I've got my hands on it (thanks, SPU library for my pre-move copy, and Douglas County Libraries for my post-) I see just what he meant. 

I don't much appreciate the phrase "tour-de-force," since it is used indiscriminately to describe everything from blockbuster films to meals, but this book really is a tour of forcefulness: one never settles in, grows comfortable in the intellectual pressure. Three hundred pages in, it's still startling. There are also aspects of the Keats story that I never quite understood that this biography marks and lights.

To name just a few:

Twittery Politico

Keats is an aesthete: perhaps he is the aesthete (pre-Wilde, obviously). But Roe brings out just how political the work is, and was taken, in the poet's life, to be. He's no Shelley, but the choices of his friend group, his places of first publication, his identification with Leigh Hunt, even his grammar school marks him as a liberal, if not quite a radical. 

Incision

Everyone knows that Keats was a trained surgeon, but I hadn't processed fully a) how far along he was, and b) how much mileage he got out of medical vocabulary. No mere student of anatomy, according to Roe, Keats would've seen patients, removed limbs, dissected rotting corpses. The thought of that makes him less a wilting flower than he is often cast as. Moreover, his poetry becomes, as Roe shows, markedly more muscular (more sanguine, especially) during the period of his apprenticeship. 

Hunting

Leigh Hunt is a giant. Now, he's an easy sort to make fun of: less talented than everyone around him, treated less well by history, and fawning. But during Keats' life, he was huge. As a cultural figure, and emblem of resistance, and a taste-maker, and especially as an idol for a young poet like Keats. Hunt published Keats' first poem, introduced him to others who would be seminal for his life and aesthetic, and guided his early work toward the epic and historical.  We have much for which to thank Leigh Hunt, if not for his own work, then for much of Keats'.  

I'm not writing a full review, since I'm doing so much else just now, but for anyone who reads Romanticism, this is a second to Burwick's claim: Roe's book is required reading. 

Why I'm Leaving Seattle pt. 2

I posted a partial list of reasons why I'm leaving Seattle, my long heart's home over here, and then I thought of another one. This is just one more reason: not because the gym matters so much, though I've gone there (albeit not a frequently as I ought to have done) since the first week I moved here, but because it's indicative of the type of changes--all for the worse, it seems to me--that businesses in the city keep making on both large and small scales. 

My Gym Lost its Soul

For ten years, I've been a member of Rain Fitness. It's the most beautiful gym I've ever seen, though, it should be noted, I'm no connoisseur thereof.  There are 3/4 length windows looking out over Elliott Bay, past a stand of aspens on a little rounded hilltop that might have been arranged by the Olmsteads. When treading the mill, the weary animal gets a view at least: ferry traffic, seagulls, the play of light on water. Moreover, the machines are fitted with brown leather that accents the gorgeous 100-year old wood floors. I loved it. In the last few years though, they've made a number of changes, all for the worse. To wit:

They bolted the windows shut

I don't know from what sick impulse this decision springs, but it likely has to do with saving a few cents in heating costs (which they have to make up for in electricity costs since now the fans are always on). Remember the sea view I was talking about? That means we used to get sea breezes. There is a reason every health spa used to be built on the ocean: the very air itself is restorative. A tinge of salt, the smell of salmon running, brought a feeling of freshness to a place that might otherwise smell like a gym sock. One day, every opening window in the place was bolted shut. Now we have canned air (there never seems to be enough) and constantly-rotating ceiling fans, that make the place feel dry and irritating to glistening skin. 

They got rid of the tanning bed

Some might cheer this decision, since overuse of tanning beds is linked in some specious studies to skin cancer in the leathered elderly, but after a few months of a Seattle winter, 10 minutes in a warm place and a little light therapy went a long way toward spiking the serotonin levels and creating a sense of well-being. One day, it was gone and the space turned into a windowless office, which seems an odd exchange. 

They reduced the space by half

I understand about economic downturns and all that, but in a rent-saving move, the gym cut-off an entire room downstairs full of equipment, which was, incidentally, the stuff I used most. Gone the stretching area; gone the chin-up station. Meanwhile, they also dropped the number of classes by about 40%. Now there is one evening class most nights, rather than the bounty we once had.

They built a second location

This would be fine by itself, but they didn't invite us. Isn't the main benefit of having a chain that customers can visit several links thereof? I was thrilled when I heard they were opening another Rain Fitness in South Lake Union, closer to my house, until I heard--had I heard that right?--that members couldn't go to whichever was most convenient, couldn't mix-it-up once in awhile for the sake of variety, but had to attend the gym they signed up in.  Surely for a fee? I questioned. Oh yes, but not a small one, like the $5.00 a month it should have been, but for effectively twice the rate, which rather defeats the purpose. 

They re-branded

Importantly, most of these awful changes occurred under the original management structure, who deserves the blame, but just last week, as a kind of icing on the putrid cake, they "brought in some investment partners" who have stricken the cool and sensible "Rain Fitness" (we are in Seattle, after all) and dubbed the place "Soul Fitness." What does that even mean? Is it a temple now? Are there lectures in ethics? Gyms are exactly the opposite of "soul." They could have just gone with "Body Fitness," which, if unoriginal, would at least have described the function of the place. 

Anyway, it's stupid: the bellicosity of their financial policies, the way the desk people never know whether to greet people coming in or not, the fact that they don't give or rent out towels for people who have to go to work following their session and don't want a wet towel in the car all day.

And it's one of the reasons I'm getting out of here. 

Why I'm Leaving Seattle

My wife wrote a much more moving elegy about our time in Seattle here, but we deal with loss differently, and my mode has a touch of the grape fox.

I've never loved a city the way I love Seattle. I read books about it, most of them excellent, like those below (to name just a very few). I buy her music; I read her poets, I patronize her theaters and I tell everyone I know how great she is. And she is. But I'm leaving. Here's why:

My friends left

Not all of them, mind you, but ones I liked having around. Weirdly,

• Nancy
• Matt
• Brian
• Amber
• Jeff
• Nhadira, and
• Devorah

all left within a year of one another. There are some super people still here, obviously, but this exodus really took something out of my social circle.

We had the best bookstore in the world and now we don't

The closure of the Elliot Bay Book Company ripped the heart right out of the city for me. Sure, it moved to Capitol Hill, and has spearheaded a revival of that already-flourishing area, but not only is the new location not the same, it's not as good. Gone are the meandering paths, the human-scaled rooms. Gone the sense of discovery. It is still a very well-curated bookstore, but the building isn't half so winsome, the neighborhood not so fun to walk around, the used book section removed, the reading room louder, and on and on, ad nauseum.

Sure, we still have Wessel and Lieberman (now the best bookstore in the city, for my money) but it too has shrunk from it's original light-filled space on First Avenue to the hind quarters of same. And we'll always have the Magus, headquarters of the surly, dismissive help, and even little places I love like Mercer Street Books, but the Mecca, the flagship, the anchor of civic literary culture dried up all but completely.

My favorite coffee shops changed hands

Muse. There and not.

I used to know the owner of the place I frequented most (in walking distance to my house), the Muse Coffee Co. He was friendly and cool and made great coffee. It was a neighborhood joint, and one of my de facto offices. About two years ago, he sold it to a guy who had never worked in coffee before. I was there when the previous owner showed the new owner how to make an espresso for the first time. He's probably a good guy, but he doesn't seem to like people much. It's a depressing place to be anymore: nearly always empty, and always glum. The coffee isn't anywhere near as good and neither is the atmosphere.

One year later, the same thing happened at my second-most-frequented place: Cafe Zingaro. The previous owner, who was a joy to be around and who made everyone feel at home, left. With her, half the patrons left too, who don't appreciate shouted from the till a corporate, overly-theatrical "How can I help you?" upon entry.

And now my bet for Best Coffee in the City, Bauhaus is closing and re-opening somehwere else. Whatever.

The record store in my neighborhood became a Chase bank

R.I.P. Easy Street Records. You were one of my favorite places in the world.

The city cancelled my bus route

It now seriously takes me one hour door-to-door to traverse the 5.5 miles to the University of Washington on the newly created route #31. That is insane, especially given that an express (the #45), which only ran three times in the morning and therefore couldn't have cost the city much, used to make the trip in 15 minutes flat.

My church exploded

This I won't say much about, because I disapprove of many people's new favorite pasttime: Hating on Churches, but I used to belong to an edgy church that met in a warehouse and had great music. Now it is a multi-site conglomerate of 15 campuses across 5 states, that runs on video simulcasts, which I think is terrible aesthetically, but also socially, since there are so many people ready and willing to serve as leaders of those churches instead.

That's all for now, not because I'm out of reasons, but because I'm tired of typing. Also because I have to pack. I'm sailing on.

Sons of the Profits: There's No Business Like Grow Business. The Seattle Story, 1851-1901

By William C. Speidel

Reading Seattle: The City in Prose

By Peter Donahue, John Trombold

Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: From Boom to Bust in the Number One City of the Future

By Fred Moody

Year in Music 2013

This was a pretty great year for music, as all serious critics seem to agree. Last year, I couldn't find anything to listen to apart from the heartbreaking Perfume Genius record and "Bloom" by Beach House, which I practically played out.

By contrast, this year I had a full list of favorites by halfway through. Some make appearances on many critics' year-end lists; others aren't mentioned anywhere, from what I can see. When I look back at 2013, from any vantage of later years, I'll remember it as the time I was listening to and loving these records:

Hummingbird

By Local Natives

Muchacho

By Phosphorescent

Modern Vampires of the City

By Vampire Weekend

Remedies Ahead

Very Fine Records

At least as much as any of these records, I loved a little release by an Icelandic band called Hynmalaya. They have no distribution deal in America, and haven't even bothered to set-up an Amazon page with a few of their CD's, but they're giving away the whole record (MP3) free on their website. It's quiet and beautiful music, with full string and horn sections that seem to know their place, as so few such sections do. And lyrically, it reminds me of the best book I read this year, which you should also seek out. 

Wakin On A Pretty Daze

By Kurt Vile

Runners-up

• Junip Self-Titled

• The Love Language Ruby Red

• Veronica Falls Waiting for Something to Happen

• Foxygen We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

A Christmas Movie Clash-ic

I actually love “Love, Actually” (dir. Richard Curtis 2003). Generally, I don’t care much for films, and only manage to see three or four per year, most of those being disappointments if they were made past 1955 or were not directed by auteurs such as Tarkovsky or Malick. This film though, unexpectedly, cut me to the quick. I wept for joy in the parking lot where I first saw it, and have watched it every other year or so since, at Christmas. So I’m delighted to hear that many others have done the same, and that there’s such a fun, dynamic conversation this week about a silly romantic comedy from ten years ago, that is being called #LoveActuallyWars, engaging writers from the MSNBC, Huffington Post and many others. 

The best round in the fight (and perhaps the final) is from the consistently-intelligent Christopher Orr (@OrrChris) over at The Atlantic. His piece, “Love Actually is the Least Romantic Film of All Time,” is notable not only for its wit and charmingly incredulous tone, but because, though he’s ostensibly picking nit about a decade-old film that in no way aspires to high-art status, he’s actually talking about some pretty important concepts. I want to commend those concepts, and offer a corrective to Orr’s reading. 

    First, I think it’s wonderful that Orr challenges the film’s message. Viewers of any art should put their fists up a bit, and for the most part, American movie-goers (still more music fans) stand about with their gloves at their sides, taking anything that comes on the proverbial chin.  Orr writes that “Love, Actually” preaches

the elevation of physical attraction over any of the other factors typically associated with romantic compatibility: similar likes and dislikes, overlapping senses of humor, shared values, what have you. 

And he goes on to illustrate how this is true for each of the 9 couples in the film.  There are disturbing implications here, and Orr’s right, it’s tough to see them because what: 

1. the actors are so pretty?
2. the music so winning?
3. the cuts are so fast? 

However it is, the film “somehow manages to present the idea,” not only that it’s acceptable, but “that it’s romantic to go behind a friend’s back to ostentatiously declare your everlasting love for his wife,” which is pretty screwed up. Meanwhile, Orr argues (correctly) that love takes work, that relationships and even attractions are built at least as much on conversation as on physicality and neuro-chemicals, which I also appreciate. 

Second—though, again, this particular example doesn’t matter in any real sense— I appreciate that this whole discussion tries to put the brakes on a rapid expansion of the canon. We’re talking about the canon of Classic Holiday Movies, and Orr is fighting to keep “Love, Actually” out. It happens that I include it among my favorite holiday films, and I think that Orr overstates a point or two, but I appreciate that he thinks it matters how we bandy about the term “classic,” and that he treats the idea of a canon as a helpful limitation rather than an oppressive limitation of “voice” (ugh!) on behalf of an elite. One can only watch so many films after all, an Orr wants only the best included, which, as someone who works in historical literature, I appreciate. Again, it happens that the poets I most admire are not in said canon, but I think the idea is still helpful and the work of limiting it, noble. 

About that point or two: I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that "Love, Actually" is a British film. It is a very British film, actually, featuring an all but entirely British cast (which accounts for some of their uniform excellence) and it takes great pains to be located: it opens and closes on Heathrow airport, features side characters in cameos like Mr. Bean, is shot all over London, and climaxes (one of several) on a patriotic speech about the greatness of British culture. All of these I appreciate, being an Anglophile. Reading the film as not about “Love” and how it comes about in our day, but as being about the difficulty of expression of feelings in modern Britain changes it for me.

Though it requires leaning heavily on stereotypes (which are, in my own experience, true) about British people generally, such a reading explains a few of Orr’s complaints. For example, Orr charges that, in the film, “the principal barrier to consummating a relationship is mustering the nerve to say 'I love you,'” which he calls “disturbing.” In America, he’s right. We have no problem talking about our feelings, and make the private public with flippancy. In Britain, this is less so. A “relationship” will often ignite, and smolder for ages before anything “gets said” about it. Witness Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, (whose film version also features Emma Thomson). One can’t say the characters didn’t have an intellectual romance just because they never really spoke on a direct emotional level. Or Romeo and Juliet, who look like a case of love at first sight until we notice that Juliet finishes Romeo’s poem, at their first verbal exchange, which means that though he’s known her for all of five minutes, she’s the one he’s been waiting for; an intellectual companion who

1. cares about poetry like he does
2. knows him well enough to pick up on the innuendo of his language game
3. is playful and risky enough to smack to linguistic missile back over the net

She may also be hot, but she isn’t only hot.  Other examples abound, but it isn’t true, as Orr claims, that the characters in "Love, Actually" love each other without knowing anything about one another. Finding the words to discuss one’s feelings through British reticence is rather a barrier, and makes up some of the “work” that Orr finds lacking in these relationships. Hence the title: “Love, Actually,” is a verbal stumble, a pause meant to signal a person’s gathering herself up to make the grand gesture that such an admission actually, sometimes is. 

The Best Music Criticism on the Web

I've just discovered this website and I find it astonishing. It's ostensible aim is to have musicians reviewing the work of their fellow musicians, but what it is notable for in fact is the odd pairings--there are rarely, if ever, two artists even from the same genre-- and the honesty of the writing. A little heavy on snark maybe, but what do you expect from the kinds of musicians who also write essays? Here's a selection of a piece by a fellow named Rick Moody (whom I don't know, but who has nothing, I was disappointed to learn, to do with The Moody Blues, which would have been awesome). He's writing a note to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (or maybe Tool, who are, I think, arms of the same marketing department/ band). Anyway, it's great. 

My suggestion is: why not tell the truth? Why not tell the truth about a reasonably rewarding and gratifying middle age with a wife who presumably loves you, and in which you are not fucking yourself up so completely? Why not sing about the excellently named Lazarus and Balthazar? Why are these things so fearsome that one might rather write some more miserably dissatisfied songs about disaffiliation and anomie than face the idea that one is, well, successful and accomplished, sort of a genius, and that the world is very responsive to that genius? Why not make some songs in which you start to see the world as it is, as a rather precious place with a lot of people trying to make some good from it, despite the horror of the times, doing their best to do good work and love the people around them, which is what your highly successful career ratifies — this very notion of the world. Or why not a song about a nice night at home with the lovely wife and the two sons, in which you pull some vegetables out of the garden, watch the sunset, all while, e.g., the President mulls what to do about the nerve agents in a desert land far away? That is the truth, after all, the truth of power and of our brief term here. And that truth is more complex and compelling than the dissatisfactions of the self.

Read the rest of the essay here. 

Sonnet 73 Animation

This collaboration with Dave Richardson was recently chosen for inclusion on Moving Poems which showcases "the best poetry videos on the web." Check out the website, and see more of Dave's work here. 

Sonnet 73

William Shakespeare

Read by Mischa Willett

Animated by Dave Richardson Design

Year in Poetry 2012

Most best-of lists come out in December, I know, but since my birthday happens in January, I’ve always done the requisite reflecting on l'anee passe a few weeks late. Here then is what mattered most in the poetic year, offered for those of you who don’t live near a superlative reading series, or great bookstores.  

Personal

On a personal level, this year was important as I was living in Germany at last birthday  and gave my first European poetry reading in the Zimmer Theater in Tuebingen.  Moreover, I finished at long last a series of poems I’ve been working on for a couple of years called The Elegy Beta, a series of responses to Rilke which I hope you will hear much more about the future and conceived as a collaboration with the Argentine photographer David Wittig.  I also began a partnership with musician Jake Armerding trying out new ways of distributing poetry to the people. You really should check this last link out; big things are happening.

Runners-up

In the broader world though, first: B.K. Fisher’s Mutiny Gallery was published: a book about the poet’s travelling with her daughter which reads more like a novel than a book of poems since their are consistent characters to whom things happen, but which tries several formal devices to convey those happenings, making it an engaging read start to finish which, needless to say, not all poetry books are.

The second runner-up for most important happening in poetry this year is pages 8-11 in the December issue of Poetry Magazine (reprinted in full here). Richard Kenny’s three new poems in that volume are acute pieces of thinking, and beautiful besides, but the interview printed afterward–his attempts to explain those poems–condense a monograph’s worth of poetic theory into a few humble but muscular pages. Required reading.

To this entry I should also append the news, announced only a few days afterward, of Christian Wiman’s leaving the editorship of Poetry Magazine. Wiman took the magazine into the stratosphere, changing the design, the headquarters, and the structure of the magazine, while tripling its readership. Surely, his is one of the most productive editorships that have ever been, and his acumen made itself felt across all quarters of the establishment, such as it is. 

Big News

Matthew Dickman’s new book Mayakovsky’s Revolver came out and he has switched presses: he is now on Norton who produced a beautiful black book for him rather than the paperbacks he had been stuck with for his previous. Dickman also produced a book called 50 American Plays with his brother Michael Dickman which I’ll be teaching from in the spring, and which is terrifically smart.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s new book Our Andromeda also came out this year, which I was looking very forward to as her last two were just exceptional. This new book is too long by half, which is to say that some poems are just outstanding and the other half probably could have used a stronger editorial hand, but is still important because Brenda Shaughnessy is a star, and those poems that do work work marvelously.

But the single most important thing to happen in poetry this year (as it might be measured in 20 years’ time) is the death of Jack Gilbert and the publication of his Collected Poems. This volume is significant because most people don’t know any books from Gilbert apart from Refusing Heaven, and because it’s a gorgeous copy absolutely essential reading of a poet that seems more important every time I return to him.

C. M-H R.I.P.

This week, I resumed my reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, from a new copy I picked up at Elliot Bay Book Company, having left behind the Tübingen Library's copy in Germany, at...the...Tübingen Library.  For a bookmark, I am using a postcard from the Linda Hodges Gallery here in Seattle that was an advert for a painting show by Christopher Martin Hoff.  

View fullsize

Every day this week, when I picked up the book to start reading, I glanced at the reproduction and said to my wife, "we really have to buy this painting; this guy is amazing." Yesterday, I found out that the artist died this year, quite young, but apparently of natural causes.  It was sad to hear not only because he'd been, weirdly, on my mind all week, but because his work was so good, and because he was apparently a thoroughly decent human being. The city was better for his being here. 

Teaching Digital Humanities

This is my tenth year of teaching at the university level, and while I usually have students make some kind of project in addition to writing essays, the projects for the class I've just finished were exceptional, for the clarity of thought that went into them, and the sheer import of the undertakings. 

The class was called Texting: Writing about Digital Humanities, and the idea was to introduce students at an early stage in their academic careers (this was my first time teaching Freshmen in quite a while) to the plethora of tools available to them during this explosion of all things digital, but also to the problems surrounding the humanities generally, and the digital ones specifically. Not least: what are they?

If nothing else, I wanted to gain, over the course of the class, an answer to that question, and so we set out, week by week, confronting the memes and websites, databases, archives, and articles that make up the debates surrounding

• Digital Music
• Digital Scholarship
• Digital Poetics
• The New Aesthetic
• News Aggregators
• Centers, Symposia, Initiatives
• DH Resources particular to UW

One student, in a farewell blog post, summed up our project particularly well:

After taking English classes for more than 7 years, I expected to re-learn about things I have already been taught. How wrong I was. My English 111 class's focus was digital humanities; something I've never even heard of. We learned to navigate our way of information, data, history, poems, research, and so much more through the future of the digital age. We live in this digital age and it only grows from here, so I thought that learning about it now will only allow us to strive for greater success later. It doesn't end here. We would take digital works of course, such as articles, blogs, poems and really learn to dig deep into them and read. Read for context, read for analytical purpose, but we also read for style. Like what apprentices do, we learned from people who were better than us, who had mastered what we desired.

The class explicitly aimed at education's not being theoretical. I didn't just want them to know what I could tell them during our ten weeks together, but how to learn/make/do whatever it is they are individually in to better ever afterward. Again, a student summed it up better than I can:

I remember in our first day of class, our teacher told us something that stuck with me. He said, "You can do, what you can do." He put great emphasis on how much impact one person can make if they really wanted to. Throughout the whole quarter, we learned about many great organizations and devices that became successful just because one person had a crazy idea.  Due to English 111, I have learned "One person is all it takes", is overused for a reason; because it's true.

You can read more of the students' weekly responses here.

Projects

This is the really exciting part.  The students completed two large projects for the class in groups; one of them, called "The New Aesthetic Project," I'll have to tell you about later; the other was a Free Project of their own choice and devise. The prompt said simply find something that could be better and make it that way using the tools we've discussed. Here's a sample of what they outlined and built:

• A Facebook page--The Husky Food Project--featuring photos and reviews of every restaurant, eatery, or coffee stand on campus
• A book (pdf preview here), yes, that you can buy in hardback, softcover, or pdf from here, which is a guide to all the public art on University of Washington's campus, featuring pictures, history, and a short description of each.
• A Comprehensive Digital Map of UW building interiors (for finding your class on the first day of school, bathrooms, etc) whose pitch is just a model of professionalism and urgency.
• An e-book about 100 Changes Due to Tech.
• A website listing all the free products available to students at UW

The point is, I was impressed. These students, for many of whom this was their first college class ever, conceived of, argued for the importance of, and executed significant projects they designed, while writing papers, doing readings, and keeping up with the other, rather large project we were working on as a class.  Hats off!

PAMLA: Coleridge and the Prison Bower of Meaning

This year's Annual Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association was hosted by Seattle University and held October 19-21 - 110th.  I contributed a paper on Coleridge to the session "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream."

Abstract: 

 In Coleridge’s Dream Theory and the Dual Imagination, Kathryn Kimball puts forward the poet’s outline of sense impressions that “arrive constantly,” “whether asleep or awake,” which “the night-working imagination transmutes into dream images,” arguing that, while the poet can be said to have a purposeful theory of dreams, the main reason he was so concerned was that “dreams are an escape from a difficult life.”  

Using Kimball’s assemblage, and a section of the Biographia Literaria called "Nihil Negativuum Irrepresentabile," I argue that the arrest of such “transmutations” becomes for Coleridge an aesthetic technique wherein the Imagination is staged as a mediator who is intentionally exhausted by the difficult (or impossible) task it is set.  He explains the difficulty of his project: to produce “a body at one and the same time in motion and not in motion,” and his method: to erect “...a motory force of a body in one direction and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction,” which he argues “is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable.” The interjection of the man from Porlock, for example, during the composition of Kubla Kahn,  like the overvaluation of albatross-hunting, is that second “motory force” which demands that the imagination mediate between the two opposites in an effort to achieve a place of retirement. 

This paper reads Coleridge’s failures of thought and willful obfuscations in the Biographia Literaria as Deluzean attempts to construct a kind of black hole in which meaning is itself imprisoned, with the intention of defining the imagination’s mediative role between states:real and unreal, sleep and waking. 

It was a lively conference in which to participate, and much larger than the usula discipline-specific conferences I attend.  The best part was connecting with people outside my particular area of specialization and hearing the fine papers by my co-panelists (see full program here):

• Patrick Randolph: "

  Who Are You?" Queerly Destabilizing Identity in Wonderland

• Rebecca McCann: 

  “The Scientific Possibilities of Mesmerism”: Dreaming of Utopia in The Diothas

• Kristine Miller: 

  The 'Fever Dream' of the Post-9/11 Cop: Trauma, Personal Testimony, and Jess Walter's The Zero

Special thanks to our panel chair, Lauren Bond (La Sierra University), to the conference organizers from Seattle University, and to the Renaissance Hotel for having us.  

Punk Prayer →

Pussy Riot are unbelievably articulate and intentional about their work.  This defense should be posted in lieu of an Artist Statement in any galleries that can’t better explain their raison d’être. Churches too.