Saturday commute xxxi: summer reading

Saddle Meadows

face

     off

         limits

summer reader

do you

live with words.

.. those dark bay steeds are still extant; not in themselves or in their issue; but of the two descendants of stallions of their own breed. For on the lands of Saddle Meadows, man and horse are both hereditary; and this bright morning Pierre Glendenning, grandson of the grand old Pierre, now drives forth with Lucy Tartan, seated where his own ancestor had sat, and reining steeds, whose great-great-great-grandfathers grand old Pierre had reined before.

How proud felt Pierre: In fancy's eye, he saw the horse-ghosts a-tandem in the van; 'These are but wheelers' - cried young Pierre - ' the leaders are the generations'.

But Love has more to do with his own possible and probable posterities, than with the once living but now impossible ancestries in the past. So Pierre's glow of family pride quickly gave place to a deeper hue, when Lucy bade love's banner blush out from his cheek.

'Why, Pierre, thou art transfigured; thou now lookest as one who - why, Pierre?'

'As one who had just peeped in at paradise, Lucy; and - '

'Again wandering in thy mind, Pierre; no more - Come, you must leave me, now. I am quite rested again. Quick, call my aunt, and leave me. Stay, this evening we are to look over the book of plates from the city, you know. Be early; - go now, Pierre'.

'Well, good-bye, till evening, thou height of all delight'.

Herman Melville

Pierre or

  The Ambiguities

1852

Volume Seven, The Writings
  of Herman Melville
Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker
  and G. Thomas Tanselle, editors
Northwestern University Press and
  The Newberry Press, 1971©

Weaving spiders, come not here ii

The figure occupies a well-worn shirt, bespeaking a familiar, easy comfort he cherishes; a hue, assigned, he absorbs without objection. But his features mark him out for mis-adventure, unexpected: his glance belies a wish he hasn't seen fulfilled, an oversight he thinks should not go on. This is a studio pose by an expensively paid professional, which makes us easy in our protest for his sake. Yet we own an agitation against a falsity that arrests him. This is pretty nervy picturewriting. Guests, escaping trades and guilds whose following frames the mind, may take heart in the sensible motto of the Bohemian Club, and visit as often as they like. 

There's something very Melvillian in a man's resort to a club, which the founders of Bohemia understood very well. Sometimes more honoured in the breach than not, the motto is a sound one for our Ishmael. Immune from care on steep old Taylor Street, his lyric for that gathering, speaks of a true place no proud man ever knew.

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when at last .. what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.

For 170 years, weaving spiders of taxonomy have been confounded by an implacable masterpiece that everyone under-stands. The fault of the disturbance is not in its imagery, but in showing that the marking of a man will simply never hold. We accept this as the inheritance of all persons ever born; and we have seen, that while it is only with their diverse demand that we are entitled to approach it, it is also the only way to understand it. 










Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, or
  The Whale, Chapter 11
Volume Six, The Writings
  of Herman Melville
Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker
  and G. Thomas Tanselle, editors
Northwestern University Press and
  The Newberry Press, 1988©


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(1950-2009)
Between Men
  English Literature and
  Male Homosocial Desire
  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and
  Columbia University Press, 1985©
Epistemology of the Closet
  University of California Press, 
  A Centennial Book, 1990©


i  Jan Siegmund

Weaving spiders, come not here iii

What was so funny about Still-man's movie about disco, was its sublime obliviousness to what disco was about. You can't do disco on the predicate that it fills a kind of gap in a student-centered experience of life. It has to be done as in Tannhaüser, with sex as quite marvelous spectacle, for all who are willing to endure proximity to a great deal of talent for it. Stillman's entire cast would lampoon our hero as some refugee from breeding. Yet we own an agitation against a falsity that arrests him. This is pretty nervy picturewriting. Guests, escaping trades and guilds whose following frames the mind, may take heart in the sensible motto of the Bohemian Club, and visit as often as they like. 

There's something very Melvillian in a man's resort to a club, which the founders of Bohemia understood very well. Sometimes more honoured in the breach than not, the motto is a sound one for our Ishmael. Immune from care on steep old Taylor Street, his lyric for that gathering, speaks of a true place no proud man ever knew.

Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one .. the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship .. hoard from view their interiors till the last moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; .. a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave.

In weaving spiders we have favoured liberty, and then equality. Yet rights are but ships for obligation. Melville was not oblique for discretion's sake, he was oblique for distinction's sake, for definition. He wrote from obligation, not effrontery, of the texture of the sensibility he possessed. How like the shadowy tableau, disco was, in its emergence and in its borrowing of time; but what does he say? Any effect of enchantment is inevitable where a sea would be zoned; a spider's filigree to be brushed aside.








Herman Melville
Benito Cereno
  The Piazza Tales
1856
Doubleday, 1961©

We had our A7 chip

When all one can do is, read,

the rapport with texts resem-

bles a kind of cold war of mu-

tually assured destruction in

unstable equilibrium, the rap-

port never having been intend-

ed for polarity so nakedly un-

enriched. 

          I remember favoring

Sea Island cotton, but with a

tennis collar. It was then, I

happened to discover slavery,

from its genealogy in luxury.
(Who knew it were bilateral)?

Horace looming. Oak ostensib-

ly opaque, taking one by one.

Inside, within that grasp was

Ishmael, Melville's wondering

seaman, his balsam harvester.

These were guys who knew how
to end a book. So much easi-
er than slavery. I got email
from Apple, about their one-
day sale on luxury. Suppose,
as they say, it were Friday.
One could read Benito Cereno
in a glossy pleasure-screen.

Timing is everything. I met
this text by curricular co-
incidence, in the year that
Styron's Confessions of Nat
Turner came out. A ferment,
in the planet, percolating,
in the pulse, made personal
the feeling for a language,
rising. Timing, come again.

Herman Melville
Billy Budd and
  The Piazza Tales
Doubleday & Company
Dolphin Books, 1961©

What is keeping

It is rare when I find a portrait

of anyone which suits me, as op-

posed to a blogger's requisites.

This approximate contemporary of

Laurent probably floated up from

the well of Flickr™ into one or

another of those strata where I

search for characterisation of a

phrase in this pursuit. And now

it comes to the page to address 

a timely purpose.

Novembr' au revoir.

I heard from a literature student

that he had never read any gay fic-

tion. He is of a generation - the

one we indelicately call, the pres-

ent one - which will never discover

gay fiction as mine did, and by

whose experience whatever is writ-

ten today will be shaped materially.

A number of us, one could almost go

so far as to say, discovered fiction

through gay fiction. That is, we dis-

covered the close reading of imagin-

ative texts through the application,

at an early age, of incentives which

the present generation finds being

met in non-literary terms, all about

it. We didn't know anything, at 11,

19, 27. Surely, there was Classicism.

But that was not about us, we knew.

Harmful as my ignorance was, I still

value the surprises it sequestered.

Somehow, in the same correspondence,

the subject of one's first kiss was

raised. This is why that portrait is

valid to me in ways which nothing I

have read - from Melville to Cunning-

ham - has captured; and this, I know,

is a test that many people apply to

red mug, blue linen. I am grateful.

The single most formative experience

in my college life was not that first

kiss, which did happen there, between

terms. It was another, which happened

the previous Spring. A professor of

history called my bluff on reading the

founding masterpiece of biographical

psychology, in his course in the High

Renaissance, furiously chewing me out

for negligence with - it rings in my

ears to this day - a labour of love.

I was earning grades with him in the

revoltingly prosperous range which is

enough for a Princetonian to acquit

himself without breaking a real sweat.

For my final paper, I raked my way

through his own benchmark work on Ital-

ian rhetoricians; turning, in effect,

straight upon him. His comment was, 

"you have a fine sensitivity to texts."

This was my introduction to the kiss,

which is to say, the thing of oneself.

We do some rough and tumble here with-

out much citing of its predicate, and

I owe this youth an answer for his in-

terest. This portrait shows an exer-

cise of consciousness by someone made 

intimate to us by the act. We have a 

nature which assimilates an articula-

tion of caring as a caring for us.

We know this is the basis of a can-

ard, rooted in unease, that we are 

sensitive. It is, rather, that we 

are aware we have a bond with that 

being, which none of us needs to 

hear explained. We know we can watch 

the day go down; and we know what is

when we do. Many people do. We are 

the ones who are fond of each other 

for it.

What is gay fiction?

  

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick

op. cit.

Michael Cunningham

Flesh and Blood

  pp. 130-131 et passim

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995©

Erik Erikson

Young Man Luther

  A Study in Psychoanalysis

  and History

Norton, 1958©

Jerrold E. Seigel

Rhetoric and Philosophy

  in Renaissance Humanism:

  From Petrarch to Valla

Princeton University Press, 1968©

Loomings ii

I offer this posting with regard

for a direct inquiry I received.

Most of us who blog, I'd wager, 

have our private correspondents,

who trade ideas and feelings out-

side of the repartée of the pub-

lic page. And I interpret the

character of the private corres-

pondent also to include the lit-

erary resource and the diaries

which interact with us in per-

mission and resiliency, uninter-

rupted by postal vicissitudes -

dynamic waveforms of memory, by

content less infused than style,

crystalline, sensuous, resurfac-

ing resources of our passage. 

Have you ever been asked, what

need there is for a masterpiece? 

Of course, one is always delighted

to find another person who under-

stands, say, that the right against

self-incrimination is the absolute

core of human rights; but one can

get along pretty well, simply to

allow it to shape one's judgment 

of pretty new suggestions, such as

enhanced interrogation.

Those who know their Peter Grimes

will know what I mean, when they

call to mind Britten's sea inter-

ludes, which I warmly believe un-

derstand Melville as well as Crabbe,

the naïve as well as the mad, and

speak to us undyingly of their

quest for reconciliation. The sea

interludes are suspiciously akin

to acoustic production design, 

but work as internal soliloquy.

Politics in America cast us back 

on that sea, to which we are not 

called by any inner voice or na-

tural, Parliamentary timing, but 

by a Constitutional calendar com-

manding us to stamp government's 

ticket of legitimacy. The artifi-

ciality of the occasion undoubt-

edly lends that quality to its

enactment - inducing, it seems

very likely to me - a chronic

and distracting resort to reli-

gion, where the ingredients for 

a spirited secular dispute were

not mature enough in their clar-

ity to generate the savagery of

partisan vituperation. This is 

the natural space of the naïve 

as well as the mad. 

Now we are at it, again - as

the chorus has it in Britten,

Grimes is at his business -

and tomorrow night, the two

principal parties will put

forth their arguments to hold

the Executive sinecure in our

government - the submerged, 

regulation-writing, fate-dic-

tating borough of that showy

surface of name-calling tirade

which passes for an election in

this country. As in most such

diversions in the past, we are

to be fed a religious quarrel -

who detests Marxism more, who

apologises for slavery less -

to drive us toward a monument-

al financial consequence, of

often mortal dimensions.

Who knew, Ishmael? This year, the

great whale looms frenetically, as

the question of white, male rule,

by a thousand harpoons maddened in

its grazings out of sight, the on-

ly explanation for the morbidity,

hysteria, and birther refusal to

navigate the current with us all.

At the same time, the threadbare

Manichaean Heresy of revanchist

reasoning in our politics has

gained personification in a cham-

pion of absolute greed, a vocal

idolator of the Great Bear and 

Pleiades of money - only money,

mated by a minstrel of Palin-

esque depth and conscience. It's

almost an afterthought, to dismiss

everyone else as ugly, but with 

sublime, unwitting modesty. He is

right, of course. 

We're not his job to worry about.

    Well, then, however the old sea-

    captains may order me about - 

    however they may thump and punch

    me about, I have the satisfaction

    of knowing that it is all right;

    that everybody else is one way or

    other served in much the same way

    - either in a physical or metaphy-

    sical point of view, that is; and

    so the universal thump is passed

    round, and all hands should rub

    each other's shoulder-blades, and

    be content..

    And, doubtless, my going on this

    whaling voyage, formed part of the

    grand programme of Providence that

    was drawn up a long time ago. It

    came in as a sort of brief interlude

    and solo between more extensive per-

    formances. I take it that this part

    of the bill must have run something

    like this:

Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.

    The pale usher - he loved to dust his

    old grammars, it somehow mildly remind-

    ed him of his mortality.

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick

  or The Whale

  i  Chapter I: Loomings

  ii Etymology

op. cit.