Have been idly reading the Penguin edition of Coleridge's Complete Poems edited by Bill Keach. It's been something of a relevation. Coleridge wrote all kinds of verse on all kinds of occasions (a translation of a 'Hebrew Dirge' as 'chaunted' at London's Great Synagogue on the day of Princess Charlotte's funeral (1817), for example, or a translation from a print on the Virgin found during his walking tour of Germany) as well as many, many short unfinished lines in his notebook. The thing is that they are all compulsively readable, even if they don’t always quite rise to poetry in the most sanctified sense of the word.
I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans, & wake me?
Part of the interest of this is its being more a diary entry than a poem, or something in between. Its very unpoeticness (compared to say Keats) is part of its effectiveness.
Or:
As some vast tropic Tree, itself a Wood
That crests its Head with clouds, beneath the flood
Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank
Of its wide Base controlls the fronting bank,
(By the slant current's pressure scoop'd away
The fronting Bank becoms a foam-piled Bay)
High in its Fork the uncouth Idol knits
His channel'd Brows: low murmurs stir by fits:
And dark below the horrid Faquir sits;
An Horror from its broad Head's branching Wreath
Broods o'er the rude Idolatry beneath.
Admittedly this is creepy not just because it’s trying to be but because it represents Coleridge’s complete failure to get the point of cultural relativism, or religious toleration but it is also fascinatingly weird (why does he need that longish description of the ‘flood’ to make his point, why is the tree on a river bank in other words?) and also, in context, Coleridege’s xenophobia seems an expression of the kind of depression and anxiety expressed in the first lines cited. It’s these kinds of connections that make the book so good.

Back from NZ somewhat the worse for wear. Seeing my mother becoming frailer was very depressing: her mind is pretty much what it ever was but her body is beginning to go, and dragging her capacity (and her will?) to enjoy life with it. And of course it's so hard to be close to this not just because you begin to share mum's suffering but because that suffering carries with it the message: this is likely to happen to you too.
It's nice to be back in Baltimore: I found Auckland restricted, it is stunningly beautiful and the day I spent at the Gow's sculpture park on Waiheke Island was glorious, but the place is culturally and socially so bland: the opportunities to catch complex social self-reflections and commentary in the public sphere at least (and truth to say in the private sphere too) are so rare, and everyday encounters with a range of different peoples and values barely happen, even if Maori and the new migrant communities are very present too. Maybe what I am really trying to say is that the country's imagination of itself is trapped in self-satisfaction.
But for all that I totally understand why a certain kind of American dreams of migrating there.

It turns out that mum is on broadband (though she hardly uses it). So here I am.
Auckland doesn't change. Or rather my Auckland doesn't change. My first response, getting off the plane about 6.30 in the morning, jet lagged but not crippinglingly, was how dazzling it is: literarily (the sunlight on the blue sea is blinding) and metaphorically.
Despite the fact that house prices have gone through the roof, that people endlessly complain about traffic jams, overpopulation, despoilation of the natural environment and so on (which may all be fair enough) it still feels raffish, incomplete, relaxed and charming to me. Yesterday I walked down to Cockle Beach about ten minutes down the hill to the north from my mother's house. There must have been about 200 Cook Islanders there, almost no Maori or Pakeha. Some wore tiaras of flowers around their head (I am sure there is a technical name for these but I dont know it); young men strummed guitars; families were collecting shell fish; old people asleep under blankets; small children everywhere and only they spoke English. It was a scene from Gauguin, even if they were clearly all from a very intact Christian denomination since there was no drink anywhere. And its that mix of the rather proper white suburbia with various alternatives (islander, maori, diasporic chinese) set into this extraordinarily benign natural setting which characterises the place.
The flipside is that Auckland is more langorous than any other city I know. The air is seeded with boredom and indifference: it possesses a thickness that keeps all intensities at bay.
Auckland in summer: dazzling langour.
In spite of that I have to work: my book proposal and a revision of my essay on Milton.

Am off to Auckland New Zealand for ten days or so to visit my mother, who is thinking of selling up her house and moving into some kind of retirement village. So I won't be blogging for a couple of weeks. In fact I'll be off line completely, which comes as a kind of relief.
My feelings about the trip are mixed: once baby comes I wont have a chance to spend time alone with my mother and in my old Auckland hangouts, so this visit is kind of valedictory, or feels like that. And it will be summer in Auckland, and I am looking to walking down to the Howick beaches for swims. My mother's garden will be glorious: it is large, private and on the cliffface directly fronting the Harbour. It is a pity that the child-to-come will be unlikely ever to enjoy it. On the other hand I have so much work here, and the trip itself is so uncomfortable, expecially given that now United don't fly the LAX-Auckland route I can't upgrade to business class. And I will miss being around Lisa whose pregnancy I am enjoying: it's a process of discovery.
Yesterday two emails from colleague-friends about my impending fatherhood. One from a man who has himself had a baby in a second marriage at roughly my age. Here it is: "CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! It is a fantastic gift from the gods, these creatures, early or late in one's life." And the other, from a friend who has also recently married a younger woman but whose son in his first marriage turned out to be schizophrenic (this became clear in the boy's adolescence) saying, painfully, that he couldn't face parenthood again. A very sad message, which cast a gloom over the day.
Watched the second installment of the PBS doco 'Country Boys' last night. It's about a couple of young men approaching their high-school graduation, who live in Appalachian East Kentucky, not far from where Lisa and I visited a couple of months ago. (They live near Prestonburg, we visited just north of Harlan and south of Boonesville). Mixed feelings about this: at one level, these kids and their families and society are being presented as freaks to the liberal bourgeois audience who mainly watch PBS. And the show's narrative mode: reality-TV presentation of everyday life, coupled with retrospective voice-over by the boys and some of those close to them creates weird frictions and gaps: it is clear that we are not getting the whole story—which becomes very clear, for instance, when one of the boys (Chris) is almost expelled from school for supposedly supplying a girl with speed, an incident to whose background we are given no access at all. It comes as a shock, or did to me. This means that in the end we don't actually know the boy's characters, what they are really like, for all the hours that they're on screen. Yet the program does present the material and social setting of the boys' lives with real vividness and force, and in such a way that may remind us viewers that poverty curtails opportunity at all kinds of levels, a message which has political charge, hopefully.

After midnight on Sunday morning, several bursts of what sounded like loud fireworks amidst laughter by a crowd of people on the street and square that our apartment overlooks. The next morning some friends who were staying over and sleeping in the front room (on the square) wondered whether what they'd heard was gunfire. I had to go out early to check the car and there was a posse of cops hanging out on the square. And then on Sunday night a heavy presence of police helicopters overhead. Welcome to inner city life: Baltimore USA. (And not only Baltimore) The friend staying over said she'd heard similar sounds in NYC some years back, assumed it was firecrackers....but it turned out to be gunfire then too. Lisa had gotten up to see what was going on and had begun to peer out of the windows to check the street out, and then figured that mightn't be such a great idea.

One of my tasks before teaching starts is to get through the pile of TLS's that have grown under my study coffee table over the past year or so. So as I read reviews or notions sparked by reviews that might be useful someday, I will list them here as a kind of memorandum.
1. Pierre Rosanvallon. Apparently in the school of François Furet and at one time linked to the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) a left-Catholic group. Any his argument is that an effective civil society has not been established in France because all sides (Liberals, Communists and even the Right) have, since the Jacobin moment, agreed on an ideology of universalism and a strong state as its bearer which have crowded out the kind of civil society that developed in Anglophone nation-states. This has meant that the official French discourses of republicanism: democratic and egalatarian have actually been supported by an autoritarian and anti-pluralist state.
(This came home to me today: the New York Times reports that the French government (Chirac) is thinking of rescinding a quite recent decree that made it illegal to teach negative views of the French colonialist legacy!)
Anyway according to the reviewer, Sudhir Hazaareesingh (TLS Sept 24 2004), Rosanvallon's best books are Le sacred du citoyen, Le Peuple introuvable and La Démocratie inachevée as well as his new one (in 2004!) Le modèle politique français.
This is interesting to me since I am thinking about the displacements involved in the translation of 'theory' from France to Britain and the US, and this background makes some sense of the specificity of figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Foucault who just dont have the kind of framework of thick liberal civil institutions to mediate between the state and the individual in their thinking.
The difficulty is: I really don't like the kind of revisionism that Furet in particular stood for. The French Revolution needs our support: at least from afar.

Recently I have been thinking fairly often about Babar the Elephant. What with a child on its way and what with the 'Book People' project (more on this one day: it's the next serious project I intend to do about the history of the 'literary world'), I guess it's natural enough that my own favorite books when I was very young often come to mind. I have acquired a few early Babar editions over the years, including my favorite, a first French edition of Le voyage de Babar published by Conde Nast (under the wonderfully named 'Le Jardin des modes' imprint) in folio size in 1932. It's a marvel of style: a combination of cutting edge chic, popular visual modernism and just faintly ironic narrative aimed at children of about five I guess. The first Babar book appeared in 1931, two years after the crash and just before the World Depression really took hold but there's no trace here of anything like slump realism or leftism. Not a sliver. And what's really marvellous is the combination of text and print: the print is in some font that imitates handwriting (I remember finding it difficult to read as a kid) and is usually but not always placed at the bottom of the page in chunks of about 3 or 4 lines. But sometimes the print floats above the illustrations, offering a kind of rhythm to the reading sequence. The images themselves owe something to Matisse I think and the school of illustration he helped establish: they are strikingly pleasurable: simple, not carefully perspectivilised, not aimed at the kind of sentimental, detail-packed 'beauty' of much current art-children's-book-illustration, instead mainly relying on line, but occasionally, especially in images of night's darkness that most of the books, including this one, contain, turning to a sophisticated form of cross-hatching.
But of course from a political and maybe moral point of view there are problems. The representations of Africans belong to the conventionalism racism of the time, there's little doubt about that. And Babar himself is the kind of native colonial ruler that metropolitan colonial powers dream of: more interested in shopping for designer clothes in Paris and having fun than in independence and resistance. Is this a barrier, when it comes to reading Babar to children? To what extent, and how, does it damage the glamour and beauty of these books? I want to write about this one day, in an essay in which I will describe the rather different American and British Babars (the books were translated by different folk in each place) and the fate of the luxury children's book in general as well as the relation between reading as a child and reading as a parent to a child and, probably, after Walter Benjamin, on collecting children's books in more general terms. There's already stuff on at least some of this, a good essay by Alison Lurie published in the New York Review of Books a few years back when some kind of Babar exhibition toured the States (I think), and a book I haven't seen dedicated to praising Jean de Brunhoff, his son Laurent (who continued the franchise) and Babar too.

US on the way down

At the gym on the stepper the guy next to me gave a 20 minute long hate speech against the neo-cons and George W. Nothing much to disagree with there.
But it came to me that the real difficulty the US now faces is that the institutions and ideology that were developed here after the successful 1776 Revolution (which was really not a revolution but an irredentist struggle) and which basically have served it very well during two centuries and more of continually increasing power and wealth are not going to serve it so well over the next two centuries as its power and wealth decline, at least comparatively.
What worked on the way up needn't work on the way down.
It's not just that 'founding' institutions and ideology did not emphasise efficiency or community support: they emphasised 'freedom,' constitutionalism and individualism. It's that the US has never really be able to affirm the role of the state as the administrative expression of society. In times when all social resources have to managed tightly both because the market cant achieve largescale improvements in individual lives and because other nations are gaining power and influence and, presumably, because natural resources are becoming more expensive, then a wholly legitimated state becomes crucial
Yet I suspect that these are not values that help most when there's a need to confront serious limits and competition in relation to growth. This is a scary thought, since, if accepted, it would lead to a stronger state here, and while a stronger state could certainly implement more egalitarianism and more environmental sanity, for instance, it could also reduce the kind of chaos that means that America can't actually win wars like those against Vietnam and Iraq. And America, like most continental nations, does not really have much experience in building an effective and responsive strong state.

Back from the MLA at DC. A nice old (indeed historical) hotel, the Wardman Park Marriott. We stayed a day after the conference actually ended since the doorman here had warned us about a noisy party down on the third floor (we're on 5) this Friday (Dec 30). It turned out the party was actually on New Year's Eve (of course) and turned out to be pretty quiet....the conference itself was fine: I gave a paper and attended some (the one I got most out of was on Byron and Byronism) but most of the time was spent meeting up with Australian friends and colleagues, and with publishers. I went to the party in honour of Hillis Miller and it was good to be able to catch up briefly with him and congratulate him on his award. I was devestated to hear that Routledge had sacked Bill Germano: that kind of news is really shaking. Bill has been important to academic publishing for the past 15 years or so. And then of course Routledge forgot to bring copies of Cultural Studies: a critical introduction to their stand! God only knows what that outfit think they are doing.
It looks as though my proposal for a book on the literary world is at long last taking shape since both the publishers I talked to are interested in giving me a contract. For some weird reason I'd like a contract rather than just writing it and sending it out when done which is what most people at my stage in their careers do, I think. Having a contract in hand just gives me a sense of more security and urgency too, although I know that the contract doesnt mean a great deal, since it doesnt compel publishers to actually publish the book.
And so now the work is really piling up. And what with baby coming late April (I dont think the blog officially knows: but we are expecting a little girl circa April 24) I'm not sure how I am going to get everything done.
A to do list:
1. a short essay for a catalogue to a young Australian and New Zealand art exhibition which will tour Eastern Europe. I have a week to write this, which is being done strictly for the money.
2. a revision to my essay on Milton and visual culture which is already late for the proposed volume by Brewer and McCalman.
3. tidying up my paper on colonialism and irreligion (which I gave at the MLA) so that it at least looks like a draft for a chapter or journal essay.
4. more work on my ASECS paper on 18thc literary institutions. Part of this paper will probably have to be used for the 'belief' talk I am to give at Rutgers next year too.
5. in theory more urgent than anything: the ms etc for the 3rd ed of The Cultural Studies Reader. I havent even decided what essays to include: since Rebecca left Routledge, my heart isnt really in it, though it does make money.
6. Reworking actually what I want my book of my own essays contracted with Routledge to look like. This problem hasn't yet been solved. I now have way too many unpublished papers/essays.
7. Getting on with the big book, and, quite urgently, preparing the materials to allow my putative publishers to go to their boards for a contract. (And then I will have to decide which publisher actually to go with once that's all done.)
8. (And all this doesnt deal with various lectures I have to give this year most of which hopefully can be versions of material in place.)
And there's probably more I have forgotten about.
So you can see I am kind of petrified about all this: I have a big teaching semester coming up, we will be in Florence for Fall semester 2006 and once baby comes what will happen???