Another long hiatus with this blogging thing, even though I am on leave and back in Baltimore. I've got to get my act together.
Instead of blogging, I've been spending my time reading for a paper on William Beckford and another, further down the road, on something I am calling to myself the "the 18thc literary institution' and which involves reading through John Nichols 14 vol Literary Anecdotesand trying to figure out relations between the various authors and figures mentioned there. (Basically the Nichols work is a record of books that the Bowyer firm of printers printed from the end of the 17thc to the end of the 18thc.)
And then I have gotten into Library Thing, with the idea of having a list of my books available for insurance purposes (except that, as it turns out, it looks as if it will be too expensive to insure them properly). Listing your books on this site takes a long time, and is, for someone like me, addictive.
Just today too, I signed up for Fox Soccer with Comcast which means that watching the English Premier League will be taking up a fair bit of time. (Caught a great game between Tottenham and Arsenal this morning.)
I also think the whole Australian cultural studies fracas that happened just as I was leaving Canberra didnt endear me to the blogging world. (The short version: I stupidly (and no doubt reductively) criticised australian cultural studies for being too tied to the cultural industries approach and marginalising critique and theory, which sparked off really personal attacks on me, basically I think out of some weird kind of envy, a let's-fuck-over-the tall-poppy-thing). And when I got back here from Australia and New Zealand I was really busy writing an application for a Fed Fellowship. My chances for that aren't good I suspect.
Tomorrow I go for a couple of days to New Haven: to read some comments that William Beckford made in his copy of Cowper's Memoirs which is held at the Beinecke, and, more to the point, to see Nick at Wesleyan who's just got his driving licence.
Been buying tons of books. Most recently: Derlugian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Causcasus and an old book on English scholars circa 1700 for my 18thc lit institution thing.

Kauderstuff
Well it's nice to be back blogging, in my rather lackadaisical fashion. In fact I'm in Australia now: at the HRC in Canberra on a Fellowship. And since leaving Baltimore we (Lisa and I) were in China, first at a conference on the canons at Beijing and then holidaying in Shanghai. The China trip was amazing as usual. I'd vowed not to go back there since my previous academic trips had been so frustrating and weird, but I gave in this time partly so that Lisa who had never visited the PRC could see it. The difficulties in China are twofold: first barely anyone speaks English well enough for us to sustain a useful or at least satisfying academic conversation and then, second, the rules and conventions there are so different from those in the West, and can involve simple and obvious repression and censorship, that again real dialogue and exchange becomes impossible and, more than that, one can feel implicated in oppression, expecially when some of these events are organised by Chinese academics who are cynically and opportunistically using them for their own career advancement. This kind of response, of course, doesn't allow for the usefulness of encounters with Westerners for at least some Chinese. And this time that was more apparent. To begin with: the conference was organised by Tao Dongfeng, for whom I have a great deal of respect, and then the usual kind of events happened: we were drawn aside by Chinese participants who wanted to make sure that we were aware of the limits, injustices and censorships under which they worked. These meetings are, for me, the real point of the trip and I think this time we met and talked to people for whom our conversations mattered—I certainly learnt a lot. And there were real indications that the scene is opening up: there was a feminist protest at the conferences domination by men, which was not only absolutely justified but was also paid attention to by Tao, and then there was a real debate about the political charge of disrepectful popular culture within the repressive State, even if Tao had finally, at least formally and rhetorically, to concede. The politics of this are difficult since, Tao was arguing that youth culture, which mocks the civilisational canons, is the sign of a resistance which cant take stronger, more political forms and this argument was closed down upon by the man he called his 'boss' (that is, his mentor and teacher) on grounds that could have been simply culturally traditionalist. For him, this kind of popular culture does not deserve serious academic attention, since that in itself ratifies it. Is this a political line (in the sense of being an expression of the Party's point of view), or rather simply a kind of Chinese Arnoldianism? I dont know.
And the other thing that made this conference worthwhile was where it was. We were taken to a resort East of Beijing, beyond the city limits, owned by Capital Normal and Beijing Normal Universities jointly. It was perched above a hydro-lake, miles from the nearest shops or town. A few peasants fished the lake or looked after chickens there, that was it. The landscape had some of the classical features of Taoist landscape, if not so dramatically as the landscapes around Guilin for instance. But still: the very essence of peace.

Nick's rugby team: Wesleyan April 23 2005

IMG_0034
Originally uploaded by Kauders.

Note the rain drop on the lens. Atmospheric uh? Not exactly rugby as I knew it in New Zealand circa 1960...far far more fun...

The whole blogging world seems to have been transformed since I last posted. Now the blog is in the culture; not an intriguing new thing, mainly of interest to geeks and sub-cultures and specialised political niches, but central to the communications machine, which it has transformed. We have a new form of social communication. Amazing. It's happened so quickly. What impact will it have?
For blogging itself, this involves a loss I think. As blogging moves into the centre, it becomes organized, professionalised, written for knowable readerships, taken over by the big money or those who can give it real time and energy. Amateurish pages loose their edge and interest. It's harder to strike that odd note between public and private, between the report and the diary, the trivial and the engaging that used to belong just to it and was so striking and fresh.
Me. If I am a blogger (and really I'm not), I'm old school.
Anyways.....just back from New Haven, where we went for the weekend to watch Nicholas play rugby at Wesleyan. In the pouring rain as it turned out, but fun. Not rugby as I knew it in NZ as a kid, a norm, a national obsession, but marginal, a kind of mild resistance to college liberalism.
And the New Haven I knew in 1976 has pretty much disappeared, at least down town, as I found out my last couple of times there. It's been bourgeoisified....bookshop cafes, gleaming restaurants, boutiques, the lot.
Even the Yale Centre for British Art seems to have joined the new exhibition world: not one but two shops, busy with gift-buyers. For all that its shows are wonderful: the Hodges show (the over exoticised images from Cook's voyages are less compelling than the Indian images, more sober, more tied to governmentality) and for me a more interesting one still on the British eighteenth-century landscape painter Richard Wilson. He, it turns out, combined 'historical' and topographical painting, to create a new genre which was badly received by the art establishment (mainly Reynolds) but pointed the way to the British romantic treatment of landscape in artists like Turner. What's interesting is that they display an unimaginable England; a cosmpolitan landscape that England never became.
Books bought
William Gardner Smith The Stone Face which I first read about in Kirsten Ross's imformative book on Paris 1968. Smith was an African American in Paris and the novel contains an account of the almost forgotten massacre of Algerian immigrants by the police there apparantly.
Auden's The Prolific and the Devourer, a document on his Christian-conservative turn which I hope will be instructive.
CD bought
John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith and Susie Ibarra Live

Sent this email to Labyrinth Books in response to a request from them to itemise some books of the year. Why I do this, I don't know

A list of favorite books, 2004.
1. Alan Hollingworth's A Sense of Beauty. In the great tradition of the British novel of manners with oodles of sex thrown in. What I liked in particular: it's carefully and beautifully written; it doesnt rush to judgment, and with one exception (let's pass over it in silence) it doesn't peddle obvious stereotypes.
2. Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire. Hope this counts as a 2004 book. A historical novel mainly set in mid nineteenth-century Afghanstan, as the British scheme to take the place over. Another beautifully crafted work which isn't going to help you shore up your prejudices.
3. Christine Gerrard's Aaron Hill. A specialist's choice admittedly. But few books take one further into the emergence of modern British culture than this scholarly biography of an early eighteenth century entrepreneur, man of letters, patron, philanthropist, eccentric.
4. William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Detailed account of readerships and the book trade in Britain circa 1800. Necessary reading for anyone interested in the emergence of the British literary sensibility.
5. C;A. Bailey, The Birth of the Modern World. The latest 'global history' school comes of an age in this volume. Accessible, formidably learned, and understands that the West isnt the centre of the world, though it could go still further in this direction. For instance, the cover is dominated by a portrait of Toussaint L'Overture, but his slave-revolution, a world-historical event if there ever was one, is covered in all of two sentences.
6. Daniel Tanguay. Leo Strauss, une biographie intellectuelle. Know your enemy: a lucid account of Strauss's intellectual contribution and can be rewardingly read alongside Anne Norton's rather sensationalist Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. It's a pity Tanguay doesnt historicise Strauss, but that wouldnt be a Straussian thing to do, would it?
7. Gilles Kepel The War for Muslim Minds. Kepel's probably the West's best commentator on the US's stupid war against Sunni extremists. There wasn't a book out by Tariq Ali this year, otherwise I'd probably have added that too.
8. W.H. Auden's The sea and the mirror. In these bad times I have found myself reading more poetry than usual. And strangely enough, few books of poems with more pleasure and admiration than this new edition of Auden's long and hybrid work which riffes off The Tempest.
9. Alexander Kluge, The Devil's Blind Spot. Great to have an excellent translation of a selection of Kluge's groundbreaking fictions.
10. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévi, Capital Resurgent. Arguably the best book of marxist economics of the past few years. It's analysis of US neo-liberalism, which prefers to think of history as continuous than as marked by breaks and transformations, is sobering.
11. Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics. This was not a good year for books in cultural and literary studies and theory, unless I missed something (which is more than possible). But I liked this book on the virtues of bilingualism a great deal, as I did the somewhat similar book: Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien's Weird English.

A couple of books I haven't read but am looking forward to:
Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbeme, Johannesburg: the elusive metropolis
Ron Padgett, Remembering Joe Brainard