On Edgar Huntly

Hi all,

 Here's a link to a plot summary of Edgar Huntly on Wikipedia as names and story-line can get somewhat confusing amidst the barrage of gothic sensibility, sleep-walking, and dastardly deeds.


best,
NP

Elizabeth Bishop & Multisensory Imagery

At the Fishhouses

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Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water's edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop

useful databases

Hi all,

In class, I mentioned three databases of interest for those wanting to hunt down historical source material: 1) Metaphors of Mind; 2) Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO); and 3) Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Metaphors of Mind: http://metaphors.lib.virginia.edu/

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) & Early English Books Online (EEBO):
http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/content.php?pid=94439&sid=705980. 

If this link won't work, go to MSU libraries and search for ECCO in the "search website" box. You'll reach a website that will link you to both ECCO and EEBO.

best,
NP     

Poems on Reading | Detached Thoughts on the Love (and Pleasures) of Books

She Collected Dictionaries

She Collected Dictionaries

as other women take up men

and shelve them:

manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself

German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh,

like a passion for clothes that would hang

unworn in the dark,

for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls

in a shut case, nouns declined.

Each unknown word shone with delicious fire

and the alien phrases silked her skin

with their genders and connotations.

She might have been the end house

on the waterfront of Macau

welcoming every sailor in.

But the longing for many tongues

to part her lips – si, igen, ja,

ah oui, yes, yes –

was departure’s smile,

a leaning to the wind

that sweeps a glitter of light

across the sea and sets a silvery chill

at the neck. Quick, to those books

guarding the mantelpiece,

ISBNs snug as a span of days;

to bread and fruit and sparkling wine.

She had been given a cyclamen with scent,

some new trick that married violet and rose,

as if a flower should yearn to sing

and the pink timbre tremble

into quietest words.

She touched her flesh and knew

that it would fade as speech did

and did not.

And yet it was not language that she sought,

nor the music of any meaning.

An old allegiance drew her on

beyond the first ground of thought

and the idea even of silence

to the fifth season which must at last return

with its weather of recognition

and its lost ends.

from Jan Owen, "The Return"

In the Reading Room

By David Ferry                                                           
                                        

Alone in the library room, even when others

Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves:

There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room

Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables,

Looking as if they're reading, looking as if

They're studying the text, and understanding,

Shedding light on what the words are saying;

But under their steady imbecile gaze the page

Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank.

The page is blank until the mind that reads

Crosses the black river, seeking the Queen

Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits

By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna,

Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter;

She is clothed in the beautiful garment of our thousand

Misunderstandings of the sacred text.

               
           
                                               

reading

By joanne burns                                 
                             
                             
             there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while. they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance. gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.

           if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey. every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read 

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

By John Keats
 

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

   Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

   That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

   When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

   He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

ffMRI density | a tough read with an (optional) answer

Hi all--

   A quick note on the fMRI readings. The Dehaene readings are far more accessible; pages 1-15 of the fMRI readings are fairly good. However, that last section of fMRI reading for this week on experiment design was unusually dense and obscure. (Perhaps we can talk about the challenges of designing embedded summaries within textbooks for both first-round readers and those who've made it through the previous eight chapters).

If you're interested in literary experiment design and fMRI down the road for your group--or would just like a bit more introduction (at the cost of only 5-6 pages), I'd recommend the opening six pages of that same .pdf on ANGEL: pp. 293-298.

Hopefully between Tristram Shandy and fMRI voxels you haven't given up either your love of reading, or of the mind--and can still think of both without having them "recur" as Edgeworth puts it, "to your recollection with indistinct feelings of pain." :)  If so, however, perhaps a rescue is still possible. Shall we begin to design a mock-experiment to model the "neural experience of dread" when facing such difficult texts, set opposite Lamb's more delightful experience of reading as "losing [oneself] in other men's minds?" Or write a poem about it? 

best,
NP     

The Brain--is wider than the Sky

"The Brain--is wider than the Sky"

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

--Emily Dickinson