PHL

 

Intentions and All

I’d planned to update the blog regularly. My excuse? Everything speeds up after mid-term. Currently I juggle packing, arranging movers, proctoring exams, meeting with students, grading papers, and . . . . ah. I haven’t felt panic like this since grad school. Even so, all is good.

 

Fearing Decay

Revving up to dig into something that has fascinated me for a while:

To be honest, I’m not precisely sure where I’ll go with it just yet, but chances are it will involve something like this:

FYI:

Here is a Time Magazine article (from 1991) on the Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937  and Nazi censorship of avant-garde art.

Here is a Der Speigel article (in English) on the 2010 discovery of eleven works from the exhibit. They were thought to be lost forever.

While browsing the web . . . .

I came across something startling: my dissertation is for sale at Barnes and Noble. While B & N might sell dissertations as a matter of course, I was unaware of it. I’m a bit surprised to learn that people will pay for dissertations when they are increasingly available for reading online at no cost.

If you are interested in reading “The Gender of Belief: Women and Christianity in T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes,” you could purchase it from B & N. Or you can go to the University of Oregon’s Scholar’s Bank and view it for free.

Spring ’11

The “Madonna” of Wilmington

My earlier post on traipsing about the Sussex Downs triggered thoughts on one of my favorite places in East Sussex, the church of St Mary and St Peter in Wilmington. You can find this village nestled between the A27 and the Downs. Its most famous feature is the hill drawing, the Long Man of Wilmington, but the church is fascinating.

St. Mary and St. Peter was founded in 1,000 AD and was associated with a Benedictine Priory. In the churchyard looms an ancient yew tree, girded by chains Jacob Marley would envy (or not), which is reputed to be at least 1,000 years old. It’s a big tree.

The church feature that I’m most drawn to is a small carved figure in the chancel wall above an arched window. There’s no clear means of knowing who it represents, but, according to a church note,  some believe it to be an early Norman representation of the Virgin Mary. I find the carving, in its placement and in its simplicity, touching.

Normally, I resist taking photos inside of churches. I decided on this rule while I was in St Peter’s Basilica one day. I was hovering near a side chapel where a priest was saying Mass, and I noticed a fellow tourist snapping pics of the priest and his flock. Despite my own enthusiasm about the scene, that action struck me as intrusive. However, I do own up to taking photos in two churches–St Mary and St Peter, Wilmington and Temple Church, London (the latter prior to Da Vinci Code hysteria. There. Now I can play smug) because there’s something about these two buildings I find extraordinarily compelling. And I like to be reminded of that once in a while.

“To Spring”

O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro’ the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

The hills tell each other, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turned
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth,
And let thy holy feet visit our clime.

Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee.

O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languished head,
Whose modest tresses were bound up for thee.

I lived in the south of England for some time in the 1990s, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it sometimes. Blake’s poem evokes, for me, gloomy, wet, windy winters developing into mild, breezy, sunlit springs. I have some nostalgia for walking on the South Downs in spring, smelling the soil, seeing the white blossom, the bluebells, the lambs. . . . bliss.

Djuna Barnes and 1468

While researching Djuna Barnes’s sources for Nightwood‘s description of Guido Volkbein’s “racial memory” of abuse, I kept running into problems with one of Barnes’s historical details. She refers to the “ordinance of 1468 issued by one Pietro Barbo, demanding that, with a rope about its neck, Guido’s race should run in the Corso for the amusement of the Christian populace . . . .” (Barnes 4). We do know that Pope Paul II issued a similar edict in 1466, forcing Roman Jews to race for Christian observers, but was this the same ordinance? Did Barnes misread her history, and does it even matter?

1) I am fairly certain that Barnes is refering to the 1466 ordinance. Several publications that Barnes might have been acquainted with, specifically a text by W. B. Story, states 1468 as the year of the Pope’s edict.

2) I think it matters because it strengthens suggestions that Barnes actively researched the treatment of European Jews in preparation for a work on a proposed work of historical fiction,  specifically, “for a book in progress whose chief figure is an Austrian Jew” (qtd. in Trubowitz 311). In other words, Barnes did not invent the date, nor did she misread it.

In 1887, Story published a text presenting a portrait of Rome that includes a significant amount of historical detail. Enough similarities exist between Story’s and Barnes’s descriptions of the Corso races to suggest that Barnes used Story as a source.

I found Story’s work by accident. As noted above, I’d been researching the races, and I was getting nowhere. One day, I just sat down on a stepstool in the stacks in front of the “Roman history” section and started going through books. I’d been there a while before I pulled Story’s small volume off of the shelf and began to go through its pages. As much as I enjoy and appreciate digital research, digging in at the library has its payoffs.

You can see additional details on the Barnes/Story links from a work in progress here.

A long, long, while . . . .

I’ve been working and sorting, and it’s left me little time. Consequently, my little blog project has fallen to the wayside. But I’m back! Let the celebrating commence.

Is the Apocalypse Nigh?

Keith Richard has gone on the wagon–and at 66. Bless him.

In related aging-rocker news, today’s All Things Considered featured a story titled “Iggy Pop: The Voice as Weapon.” A curious tidbit: the young Iggy’s inspiration came from Frank Sinatra.