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???

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

It's been a busy time, speaking as a cultural consumer. First we watched (as a netflix dvd) the Aussie movie Praise. It's set in Brisbane, about an aimless slacker guy who gets involved with an extraordinarily energetic and demanding (most of all sexually) good time girl, Cynthia, who ends up by completely exhausting him before he manages to extricate himself. Sacha Horler who plays Cynthia gives an amazing performance of a kind of Aussie femininity which is both deeply familiar and unfamiliar: no babe, no bourgeois subject; unaffected and unselfconscious, without an ounce of introspection; she's utterly direct, into pleasure and at home with her body and appetites and yet for all that not quite at ease in the world. She's crippled most of all because she can't actually a form a relationship with the man whom she's dependent on: she doesn't have enough deliberation and reflection for that. At one level the movie's another representation of the Aussie grotesque (the grotesque is a Australian film genre all of its own whose brightest light is probably Jane Campion's Sweetie) but at another level it really does have something to say about a particular generation and class (the lower middle class who haven't gone into tertiary education) and their particular form of what would once have been called their social 'lostness' in the gap between school and 'settling down'.
And then we watched Lars von Trier's Dogville, about which more later.

Some books that ought to be published:
a history of british reception of american jazz 1920-1970
a history of 'the shakespeare really was x' craze
a history of sports clothing
a biography of elizabeth smart
a work in praise of 'assimilation' focussing on german jewish assimilation

Trying to use blogthis: some new labour saving device...apparently. Not sure if it is working. After a hard day reading Keats's Letters I'm feeling about as practical as a princess.

Six months later. Summer in Baltimore, steamy, dull, undemanding, trying to write two papers, one on charlatanism and 18th C literature, another on cultural studies as a discipline. The first is not going well: I dont feel I kinow enough to do it properly (though I am getting into Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart) and the second I haven't started. But at least I sent off a manuscript for my cs textbook, which in th end I was less unhappy with than looked likely earlier on. It will be interesting to see how it will do: it is out of genre. But this note is just a taste, to get me back into the whole blogging thing. If I knew why I blog maybe I'd write more. I have been on my own which strangely makes me less likely to write, now Lisa's back I feel more communicative, have a a more concrete sense of the strange, empty blogging public: attractive because it doesnt exist except as possibility.

On Wednesday I have to get on the plane to Brisbane and before then?....finish up the 'interesting' article for CI and, if possible, the one on Milton's illustrations for the visual culture conference website...sending both off....the Milton one is basically not capable of being made presentable, but I dont want to do the work it would require for it really to work....so fuck it...and then I need to prepare for the theory orals on Tuesday: this seems as hard on me as on the students since I haven't read most of this stuff for what must it be? 15 yrs?...and in most cases my sympathy for it has long since gone gone gone...Paul de Man?...there's a grotesque discrepancy between the ambition of his arguments and his capacity to make his case stick...there are occasional glimmers I guess but for the most part the essays I am reading are embarrassing: the famous essay on the 'rhetoric of temporality' finally rests on a piece of (someone else's) influence scholarship which declares that Julie's garden in La Nouvelle Heloise is a version of an allegorised medieval garden ...what??...and Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka arent much better: this isnt Kafka, its an exemplification of where D&G had got to theoretically circa 1980 or whenever they wrote it, though I have more sympathy for them politically than for de Man...whose real enemy over and over again is Rousseau as it has been for counter-revolutionary thinkers since about 1792....I really dont know why we ask students to read this stuff; at best it's symptomatic of its historical moment;

that's work: at home, pay the xmas bonuses to the doormen, not as easy as it sounds since there are nine or so of them, and I have to hand each his envelope (doorwomen dont seem to exist, not in this building anyway); get dad's autobiographical ms copied to take back to my mother and the girls; figure out if and what to pay Lisa's dentist, since we're in dispute with him; print out the ms of cultural studies book so I can work at it over Xmas; begin to figure out a paper to give in Dunedin (I have forgotten about that one, and its urgentest of all I guess); get John organised so he can stay here and cat sit...etc, etc...

reading: late at night (ie. about 10 pm) instead of watching tv, which I can no longer do (really: have never been able to do, it's too boring): Joe La Sueur on Frank O'Hara...a form of literary criticism I really like: these poems spark off these memories in me (i.e. Joe La Sueur) of the times they were written, this against the backdrop of my (ie Joe's) going to live with O'Hara and then being kicked out....it seems a very open and unegotistical book, with only a few moments of (rather self-conscious) bitchiness....you get to think the reason Frank liked Joe so much was not because he was so fucking gorgeous which he so obviously was (and which of course he knows and lets us know) but because he was so nice... not stupid either...if that's not the case, Joe's an exceedingly clever self-publicist....Frank's particular presence in the world doesnt really come out in the book though: it's clear by the end that in his social circle he's a kind of star, but is that because of his work (and his fame) or because of his personal charm?...about this, the photos are ambiguous: they look like photos of a charismatic person, but not necessarily so...there's an element of feyness or something there which hints at something else...and then the poems themselves dont seem written by a real social presence: they're too inward and self-involved for that...for all their bright exteriority...
reading other than that: issues of the Believer which I really like...an new idea for a periodical (and new ideas in that world are rare), which mightnt wear well but while it's fresh it's great...it's a new kind of middlebrown literary magazine, or rather here the middlebrow has become another specialised market, taste-culture niche....I will have to settle into some more solid reading soon, when I get a moment...but when?...not over xmas I think...but I am looking forward to the sun, and to Melbourne coffee shops, and my old haunts...readings, joe's pizza shop, smith st, even the university campus, site of dread and failure though it basically is....and to Otago and its great pinots..and what I imagine to be beautiful open spaces

A long time since I did this, mainly because I have been crazy busy but also I guess because I dont much like the writing I do as a blogger...it reminds me of the diary I wrote years ago (whatever happened to it?) when I was in prison....I couldnt believe that this priggish, self-conscious person had anything to do with me, but even so could never change the tone...it's funny I dont do this with emailing or even I think with letters (not that I ever write any anymore)...then I know who I'm talking to, now I am mainly talking to myself which is silly because it's unnecessary and affected and so I lose touch with myself....but really I am writing to a future self who might be interested in what I was doing in the past but that doesnt seem to help me with these problems of address unfortunately...T.S. Eliot said of writing if you only you get the tone right then everything else follows...
Reading: Stefan Collini's English Pasts (nicely written, I like his resistance to populisms, but why doesnt he get it at all about what drives cultural studies which he thinks is all down to a bunch of louche individuals' 'dissatisfaction'.
Also (for my paper in Otago) Thomas Arnold's Letters, which I'm getting into.

Logging on from the Starbucks opposite the British Library again...taking time out from an orgy of newspaper reading (and from the library itself, where I am trying to figure out a line on illustrations of Milton during the eighteenth century, not going anywere at the moment sadly)...whenever I'm in Britain I find myself immersed in the dailies, this time the Guardian and the Independent...the press here creates a whole world of its own....mainly it's a soap-opera created by beat-up after beat-up (at the moment the Dr Kelly versus Alistair Campbell versus BBC embroglio)...but there's also a sense in which the culture is being created in continual commentary on itself, a process doesnt exist quite in this way anywhere else...much of the commentary is forced and silly (the demands of continual journalist production are unmeetable)...but none the less it adds up to something: a thereness (a phantasmal thereness) which doesnt exist in Australia or the States....there are good material reasons for this of course...the press here is national and manically competitive, a majority of the population adheres to more or less traditional British identities, and and the middle-class at least need constant reinforcement of their class difference....
The Guardian has gone off though...like all the papers it carves out its own audience, partly a real one partly one that it imagines for itself and conjures up rhetorically....but it's become complacent...it addresses its readers as a bunch of liberal consumers...intelligent, hip, socially concerned, affluent...in a word, self-satisfied...and the real heart of modern culture is lost...its self-loathing, its longing for something else...which you wouldnt expect to catch sight in a newspaper, except this one takes itself so fucking seriously....
Another thing: why isnt the criticism of the politicans who led us into the Iraq war going anywhere in Australia?...it as if the political culture there has a double-layer of cynicism...nobody cares because everyone knows the Howard government is a US lapdog (cynicism layer one), and nobody cares because nobody believes what the Bush administration say anyway, their real motives aren't expressible in the public sphere (cynicism layer two)...so shameful (and I guess in some places, ashamed) silence...