At T's request (T being male) invited the "feminist deconstructors" to house. Made corn bread, chili, rice. T (silent), J (left early), L (interesting, older), X (reader responser), Y (declares she is in graduate school "to be a colleague of her teachers). Announced themselves as vegetarians--scorned chili, picked at rice (which was less attractive because they were so late). Three wanted to smoke at the table.
I talked to them of what I do--so at least they have some sense of my passion for research--& some sense that nowhere near enough has been done--that there's so much to do, that just as Steve Mailloux combined me with Stan Fish they are free to do real work by taking off from my kinds of evidence of how real readers are known to have responded (as in reviews) and by bringing Derrida into relation with real deconstructions of the text. It's their choice.
2018: They all disappeared, all without degrees, I think. How contemptuous they were! I did not allow smoking at the table.
This was the year I wrote much of the Historical Note for MOBY-DICK from previously unused family letters, the year the Northwestern-Newberry MOBY-DICK was published. Alma and Hayford lived and worked in the third floor for extended periods and never complained about the food I served them. Mark Niemeyer was there many days, into many nights. How we worked in 1988!
Saturday, May 5, 2018
What I am proudest of writing--answer when exhausted and caught off guard
Last night at 10 I was stumbling from fatigue after hours of standing here finding line numbers for names I needed to annotate for CLAREL.
Kindly someone at bedtime asked what I was most proud of writing. I answered instantly, MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (dated 2012 but out January 2013). Then I said, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (out 1984). Then I said "The James article, "Deconstructing The Art of the Novel and Liberating James's Prefaces" (out in Fall 1993, the Henry James Review). Then I said the Mailer article in Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (dated Winter 1981, out in February 1983)--"Norman Mailer's Revision of the Esquire Version of An American Dream and the Aesthetic Problem of 'Built-in Intentionality.'"
I did not instantly say the Pulitzer finalist volume one of the biography or the two volumes of the biography, each of which received the highest award from the Association of American Publishers. I did not say the third Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2017). But I was genuinely exhausted.
P.S. I did not say the Mailer chapter in FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS because the earlier article had illustrations. For several months I had at home two of Mailer's notebooks from which I took photographs for the journal version, showing Mailer's deliberate removal of passages which show Rojack's equality with other men. Reading the Dial book version literary critics make weirdly varying lists of important characters. It's not that they are stupid. It's that the evidence is no longer there in the text they are reading.
Kindly someone at bedtime asked what I was most proud of writing. I answered instantly, MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (dated 2012 but out January 2013). Then I said, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (out 1984). Then I said "The James article, "Deconstructing The Art of the Novel and Liberating James's Prefaces" (out in Fall 1993, the Henry James Review). Then I said the Mailer article in Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (dated Winter 1981, out in February 1983)--"Norman Mailer's Revision of the Esquire Version of An American Dream and the Aesthetic Problem of 'Built-in Intentionality.'"
I did not instantly say the Pulitzer finalist volume one of the biography or the two volumes of the biography, each of which received the highest award from the Association of American Publishers. I did not say the third Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2017). But I was genuinely exhausted.
P.S. I did not say the Mailer chapter in FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS because the earlier article had illustrations. For several months I had at home two of Mailer's notebooks from which I took photographs for the journal version, showing Mailer's deliberate removal of passages which show Rojack's equality with other men. Reading the Dial book version literary critics make weirdly varying lists of important characters. It's not that they are stupid. It's that the evidence is no longer there in the text they are reading.
Friday, May 4, 2018
Oh my aching back
Better position, standing. Going from marked things to annotate in Walt's edition of CLAREL to part-canto and line numbers in NN and putting the NN numbers in ink in printout from Walt. Could not keep working at the computer, but this will be faster, and easier on the back. The lectern normally holds the 1906 UNABRIDGED. Now the lectern is sitting on my 8 foot leaf held up by sliding supports and piano hinges. It folds down and blocks the next lower shelf, but it is good for holding many things so it stays up. Want to proofread MOBY-DICK, there's the place.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Global warming has brought wind chill factor of 9 Farenheit to the Central Coast
The only reason for exposing oneself to this high wind off the Pacific is if you are so old that you will die if you don't exercise every day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)