not as good as pro wrestling

From Stanley Fish's ridiculous, broad-brush dismissal of biographical writing (1999):

My criticism of biography does not hold for autobiography. It makes none of the claims made for biography and is therefore not subject to any of the criticisms. You cannot fault the author of an autobiography for failing to be objective, or for substituting his story for the story of his subject.

He is his subject, and his performance, complete with the quirks and blindnesses of his personality, is not a distraction or deviation from the story of his life but an extension of it. Autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say, however mendacious, is the truth about themselves, whether they know it or not. Autobiographers are authentic necessarily and without effort.

Biographers, on the other hand, can only be inauthentic, can only get it wrong, can only lie, can only substitute their own story for the story of their announced subject. (Biographers are all autobiographers, although the pretensions of their enterprise won't allow them to admit it or even see it.)

Biography, in short, is a bad game, and the wonder is that so many are playing it and that so many others are watching it and spending time that might be better spent on more edifying spectacles like politics and professional wrestling.

the look of a shaven Chassid

The pithy above-described figuration did not refer to the man at right; the phrase was uttered by him.

I was pleased to read Dan Chiasson's positive review of Mark Scroggins's biography of Louis Zukofsky in the New York Times this past Sunday. It mentions Scroggins's work only briefly - but glowingly. That's good in itself. Better, it's a very good one-page summary of why Zukofsky should be read. One dear to me - a smart wide-ranging reader who loves modern art, the modern novel, modern design but keep a little distance from modern poetry - read Chiasson and pronounced herself excited by Zukofsky's project. What more could a review accomplish? If you know Zukofsky well, you might not have the same response, but give it a try.

Along the way we learn that Zukofsky admired Henry James - which both makes sense and doesn't. Here's Chiasson, drawing off information he found in Scroggins: "A poet needs a myth of origin: Zukofsky, born among James’s 'great swarming,' located his at the moment when Henry James stood on Rutgers Street with 'the look of a shaven Chassid.'"

four cheers for literary history

Blogroll please: Mark Scroggins' "Culture Industry". Mark has recently published his long-awaited critical biography of Louis Zukofsky. MORE...

Up with literary history!

A while back, Mark wrote this: "Maybe I’m just expressing my hankering for informative literary history that is able to synthesize large amounts of data, and to draw the sorts of connections that one doesn’t get merely from reading the poets’ books and the poets’ biographies – Alan Filreis’s book on Stevens in the 1930s, for instance, which not merely changes one’s view of WS, but rewrites the entire landscape of 1930s American poetry. There has been no even half-way decent overview of post-war American innovative poetry that can compare with the various histories of modernism out there."

And here's a paragraph from Mark's paper, "Blood to the Ghosts: Biography and the New Modernist Studies" - delivered at Cornell in October 2002. Thank you, Mark!

The ideological bases of "high" modernist poetics, poetics which for so long were taken as self-evidently heroic ruptures with fin-de-siècle stasis, have been examined in unprecedented detail and sometimes subjected to withering critique, as in Gilbert and Gubar's No-Man's Land, Peter Nicholls's Modernisms: A Literary Guide, and Raymond Williams's posthumous The Politics of Modernism. And the writings and ideological commitments of the canonical modernist poets have finally begun to receive adequate historical contextualization. Literary scholars have rarely written about "The Waste Land", The Pisan Cantos, or Auden's "Spain, 1939," without at least nodding towards historical context, but those nods were often exceedingly perfunctory. Far more detailed, careful, and revelatory are Alan Filreis's work on Wallace Stevens, for instance, or Lawrence Rainey's on Ezra Pound. Filreis's two books, which examine Stevens's career during the 1950s and the 1930s, have demolished once and for all the image of that poet as an ideologically detached contemplator of reality and the imagination. Rainey's Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture has demonstrated not only the idiosyncratic, ad hoc, and ideologically motivated routes and methods of Pound's appropriations of Italian Renaissance culture, but how Pound criticism has in its turn largely overlooked or ignored those idiosyncracies and ideological motivations, implying instead that Pound simply drew upon some monumental, homogeneous archive of "true" history. MORE...