In many ways, I find Book One's diagnosis of the problem far more fascinating than Book Two's prescription for it. In the various ills outlined in Raphael Hythloday's perhaps exaggerated (but then again perhaps not exaggerated?) screed on England's ills, one can find many parallels with contemporary America--and even not-so-contemporary America.
For instance, Hythloday's extended speech on England's thievery procedures links up uncannily with America's current drug trade problems. Hythloday describes a people without much to live for, newly-minted vagabonds for whom the two options are stealing or starving. It brings to mind the conventional picture of inner-city and low-income America: filled with people forced to deal drugs on the corner in order to support their families (or even just themselves).
England's penalty for theft, according to Hythloday's account, was execution. To Hythloday this is a prime example of the punishment being far greater than the crime; he suggests turning thieves into easily identifiable forced laborers (part of their ear gets cut off, and they are required to wear a certain garment). And while no one in their right mind would suggest that convicted drug dealers should become, essentially, slaves, many have argued that the current penalties for drug trafficking are excessively harsh--think of all the prisons out there populated just as much by drug dealers as by rapists, murderers, etc. These people, past and present, are forced into their present circumstances as a result of dire poverty and the prospect of starvation, and then punished for taking what can seem like the only way out.
More's suggestion to Hythloday--that he perhaps lower his outrage meter, accept that certain things are inevitable, and try in his own small way to make the world a better place--sounds, in this context, both surprisingly modern and a lot like the way our best politicians go about introducing their ideas. (All this is enough to make me want to learn about political philosophy, which I've never really had an interest in.)
Hythloday's description of the vagabonds kicked off their land and forced to fend for themselves without any useful skills also brings to mind the condition of post-Civil War, Reconstruction-era slaves. Obviously these are different scenarios, in that the emancipation of slaves was an objectively good thing, but there are still parallels: suddenly large swaths of unskilled laborers are without their homes, wandering in search of some sort of steady income. That Utopia goes on to address these problems, and provide (maybe a bit too radical for my if-I'm-being-totally-honest politically disengaged/unconscious self but nonetheless) SOLUTIONS and examples re: these problems, is just one of many reasons (the other being the parchment thing Prof. Calhoun discussed in his lecture) that this text has survived as long as it has.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Hariot as Poor Reporter
Insofar as one could actually exist, the ideal reporter might be described as: objective, unbiased, and without agenda (and, you know, smart and good at writing). In the blog-era, though--when your news outlet of choice can be as partisan (and as poorly edited) as you'd like--this kind of reporting is increasingly rare, often relegated to the wasteland of the "literary essay." (I'm going to go ahead and be your typical college kid by saying: David Foster Wallace does this best, for me.)
Don't let the polemical blogophobes mislead you, though--this habit of skewing the facts is far from unique to this Internet Age. Look not further than this week's reading for some prime examples. "Hariot's Report on Virginia" paints an almost comically subjective portrait of the natives, one that island-bound Englishmen (and women) were heartily digesting as truth. Hariot does his best to de-fang the natives, describing them as hopelessly child-like and fractured, without even the capability to unite and fight potential colonizers. (Rather, they're endlessly impressed by and receptive to European visitors.) He gives a long, highly condescending description of their religion, noting that "it be far from the truth." (940) (Imagine reading that in the New Yorker.)
What the actual "truth" is is hard to suss out; the objective, factual tone of the piece reads like an excerpt from Gulliver's Travels (which, if I'm not mistaken, is a parody of this kind of "Truthful" travel writing). The Norton Anthology provides a valuable lens to view the piece through: they say the account was "intended to promote colonization" (939)--not, in other words, to provide a fair and balanced view of a new world. Whatever downsides there may be (and I'm not an expert in this field, but based on the "Wider World" intro I can at least posit death at sea and foreign diseases) to colonization are entirely downplayed.
It brings to mind the photography of Thomas Eakins, who in the late 19th century used his camera to show Easterners what Yosemite Valley in California was like. By artfully blocking and manipulating his images, he created in the public mind an image of Yosemite that was barren, pristine, and devoid of any natives. By omitting certain details and amplifying certain others, he motivated people to colonize the West, the same way that Hariot motivates people to colonize Virgina.
Hariot's view of the natives--as emotion-and-spirit-nourished primitives--contributed to the popular notion of the Native American, one that would persist well into the early 20th century (see: early Cubist painting, which looked to get in touch with the un-rational world that Hariot describes here). Eerily enough, he expresses no serious remorse about the disease his people wrought on the natives,
treating it as yet another piece of ethnology. One wishes they had the natives side of the story.
Don't let the polemical blogophobes mislead you, though--this habit of skewing the facts is far from unique to this Internet Age. Look not further than this week's reading for some prime examples. "Hariot's Report on Virginia" paints an almost comically subjective portrait of the natives, one that island-bound Englishmen (and women) were heartily digesting as truth. Hariot does his best to de-fang the natives, describing them as hopelessly child-like and fractured, without even the capability to unite and fight potential colonizers. (Rather, they're endlessly impressed by and receptive to European visitors.) He gives a long, highly condescending description of their religion, noting that "it be far from the truth." (940) (Imagine reading that in the New Yorker.)
What the actual "truth" is is hard to suss out; the objective, factual tone of the piece reads like an excerpt from Gulliver's Travels (which, if I'm not mistaken, is a parody of this kind of "Truthful" travel writing). The Norton Anthology provides a valuable lens to view the piece through: they say the account was "intended to promote colonization" (939)--not, in other words, to provide a fair and balanced view of a new world. Whatever downsides there may be (and I'm not an expert in this field, but based on the "Wider World" intro I can at least posit death at sea and foreign diseases) to colonization are entirely downplayed.
It brings to mind the photography of Thomas Eakins, who in the late 19th century used his camera to show Easterners what Yosemite Valley in California was like. By artfully blocking and manipulating his images, he created in the public mind an image of Yosemite that was barren, pristine, and devoid of any natives. By omitting certain details and amplifying certain others, he motivated people to colonize the West, the same way that Hariot motivates people to colonize Virgina.
Hariot's view of the natives--as emotion-and-spirit-nourished primitives--contributed to the popular notion of the Native American, one that would persist well into the early 20th century (see: early Cubist painting, which looked to get in touch with the un-rational world that Hariot describes here). Eerily enough, he expresses no serious remorse about the disease his people wrought on the natives,
treating it as yet another piece of ethnology. One wishes they had the natives side of the story.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Donne v. God
"I am a little world" John Donne tells us in one of his sonnets, and by that point in the Norton Anthology he's made a convincing case for just that. In his poems, Donne uses his grasp of the English language to bend the very universe to his will.
In "The Flea," for example, Donne uses his quick wit for the purposes of convincing his chaste lover to have sex with him. (When you get right down to it, a lot of these poems are just Donne using gorgeous prose to tell girls to get naked. "Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee" sounds like something an eloquent seventeen year old might proclaim on prom night.) His argument is that, if their "two bloods mingled be" inside a flea, then why not inside their bed? Here, Donne is using metaphor (or, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "conceit") to get this woman to do what he wants. It's a recurring theme in these poems: Donne (and, occasionally, his lover) are their own solar systems, capable of absolutely anything.
In "The Sun Rising," he uses language to put himself in a position of power over the sun. The sun is a "busy old fool," the sun is a "saucy pedantic wretch," and the sun should just leave Donne and his lover alone, because in his bed (and subsequently, in Donne's charmingly solipsistic worldview, the universe) they are all of the kings and continents of the universe. Once again, Donne uses language to bend the world to his will, except this time he does it literally: "This bed, thy center is" Donne tells the sun. He literally makes the sun revolve around him!
The Norton Anthology notes that in Expostulation 19, Donne imagines God as "a conceit-maker like himself." Which one would have to think would be the height of sacrilegiousness in 17th century England: he's comparing himself to God! Yet Donne somehow never comes off as less than humble; in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," he shows that he has an understanding of mortality. He's just trying to live life as fully as he can, to learn as much as possible (these poems are littered with references to science, law, and classical texts). No, the only thing Donne perceives as sacrilegious is not having sex with him. In "The Flea," he tells his lover that murdering the flea that mingled their bloods would be "sacrilege"--in that it would kill the animal, their respective bloods, and the product of that blood-mingling. Even the tiniest things and moments have endless significance to Donne; it's why he can weave them all so skillfully in to his all-encompassing universe.
In "The Flea," for example, Donne uses his quick wit for the purposes of convincing his chaste lover to have sex with him. (When you get right down to it, a lot of these poems are just Donne using gorgeous prose to tell girls to get naked. "Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee" sounds like something an eloquent seventeen year old might proclaim on prom night.) His argument is that, if their "two bloods mingled be" inside a flea, then why not inside their bed? Here, Donne is using metaphor (or, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "conceit") to get this woman to do what he wants. It's a recurring theme in these poems: Donne (and, occasionally, his lover) are their own solar systems, capable of absolutely anything.
In "The Sun Rising," he uses language to put himself in a position of power over the sun. The sun is a "busy old fool," the sun is a "saucy pedantic wretch," and the sun should just leave Donne and his lover alone, because in his bed (and subsequently, in Donne's charmingly solipsistic worldview, the universe) they are all of the kings and continents of the universe. Once again, Donne uses language to bend the world to his will, except this time he does it literally: "This bed, thy center is" Donne tells the sun. He literally makes the sun revolve around him!
The Norton Anthology notes that in Expostulation 19, Donne imagines God as "a conceit-maker like himself." Which one would have to think would be the height of sacrilegiousness in 17th century England: he's comparing himself to God! Yet Donne somehow never comes off as less than humble; in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," he shows that he has an understanding of mortality. He's just trying to live life as fully as he can, to learn as much as possible (these poems are littered with references to science, law, and classical texts). No, the only thing Donne perceives as sacrilegious is not having sex with him. In "The Flea," he tells his lover that murdering the flea that mingled their bloods would be "sacrilege"--in that it would kill the animal, their respective bloods, and the product of that blood-mingling. Even the tiniest things and moments have endless significance to Donne; it's why he can weave them all so skillfully in to his all-encompassing universe.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Pen, For Good and Evil
There's a real thrill in reading a line like "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme" (1066): Shakespeare, writing four hundred years ago, was right. Through four centuries of war and disease and genocide and destruction, Shakespeare's sonnets have lived on unaltered, along with the sweet memory of his cherished friend. In the sonnets provided in the Norton Anthology, Shakespeare dedicates a lot of space to his "ingrafting," his ability to, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "renew by grafting, implant beauty again by [his] verse." (1063) Shakespeare, here, is operating just like this century's most popular poets (i.e. rappers): he's bragging about his artistic abilities within the context of his art. Except the gorgeous prose that surrounds these "brags"--and the fact that he was right about his art's longevity--turns these little interjections into something else entirely.*
Because in the sonnets provided, it would seem that everything, to Shakespeare, invokes art or the act of creation. He thematically links childbirth and the act of writing in those first few sonnets. His foolhardy, beautiful friend seems entirely averse to the idea of having a child, which in Shakespeare's eyes is tantamount to giving into Time: how will one's legacy live on otherwise? And so Shakespeare takes it upon himself to keep his beloved alive through his prose. "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see," he says, "So long lives this [poem], and gives live to thee."
But Time itself is also a creator, in Shakespeare's eyes. In sonnet 19, Shakespeare pleads with Time: "O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow/Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen" (1064). Notice his choice of instrument: Time and Shakespeare are wielding the same tools here--although for entirely different ends. (Shakespeare is trying to preserve his friend in all of his glory; unfeeling Time is trying to kill him.) Yet once again, the sonnet's last two lines invoke a triumphant defiance of Time's ravages: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong/My love shall in my verse ever live young."
So for all his boasting, does Shakespeare keep his beloved friend alive through his prose? Are Shakespeare's words, four hundred years after the fact, convincingly recreating the memory of this man long since physically lost to Time? It would seem so. Shakespeare loves this man, but he does not idealize him. Take, for example, sonnet 35, a gorgeous treatise on human imperfection. Roses and silver fountains, the moon and the sun: nothing is perfect, Shakespeare is saying, and his subject's base "imperfection" is in fact what renders him so life-like in the mind of the reader.
*Here's my own interjection that I couldn't really fit into the text above: that a) every freestyle rapper I've even seen has spent at least 30% of their performance talking about how good they are at freestyle rapping, that b) I thought this might have been a recent trend and that c) no, of course not, nothing is new under the sun, not only was Shakespeare doing this four hundred years ago but, as the always resourceful Norton Anthology footnotes point out, "The boast of immortality for one's verse was a convention going back to the Greek and Roman classics."
Because in the sonnets provided, it would seem that everything, to Shakespeare, invokes art or the act of creation. He thematically links childbirth and the act of writing in those first few sonnets. His foolhardy, beautiful friend seems entirely averse to the idea of having a child, which in Shakespeare's eyes is tantamount to giving into Time: how will one's legacy live on otherwise? And so Shakespeare takes it upon himself to keep his beloved alive through his prose. "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see," he says, "So long lives this [poem], and gives live to thee."
But Time itself is also a creator, in Shakespeare's eyes. In sonnet 19, Shakespeare pleads with Time: "O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow/Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen" (1064). Notice his choice of instrument: Time and Shakespeare are wielding the same tools here--although for entirely different ends. (Shakespeare is trying to preserve his friend in all of his glory; unfeeling Time is trying to kill him.) Yet once again, the sonnet's last two lines invoke a triumphant defiance of Time's ravages: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong/My love shall in my verse ever live young."
So for all his boasting, does Shakespeare keep his beloved friend alive through his prose? Are Shakespeare's words, four hundred years after the fact, convincingly recreating the memory of this man long since physically lost to Time? It would seem so. Shakespeare loves this man, but he does not idealize him. Take, for example, sonnet 35, a gorgeous treatise on human imperfection. Roses and silver fountains, the moon and the sun: nothing is perfect, Shakespeare is saying, and his subject's base "imperfection" is in fact what renders him so life-like in the mind of the reader.
*Here's my own interjection that I couldn't really fit into the text above: that a) every freestyle rapper I've even seen has spent at least 30% of their performance talking about how good they are at freestyle rapping, that b) I thought this might have been a recent trend and that c) no, of course not, nothing is new under the sun, not only was Shakespeare doing this four hundred years ago but, as the always resourceful Norton Anthology footnotes point out, "The boast of immortality for one's verse was a convention going back to the Greek and Roman classics."
Thursday, March 3, 2011
"Romance is Boring" by Los Campesinos
The lyrics on Los Campesinos' third album, when read together and without the band's frenzied instrumentation, would seem to describe one (young, confused) man's tortured relationship with love. "Romance is boring!" he declare's on the album's title track, before spending the next half hour filling his listeners in on every little detail of his carwreck of a lovelife. The album's fifteen tracks describe no literal "concept" or narrative arc, but are, rather, unified by the sorts of things that the sonnets we've read have been linked by: point-of-view, a pervading sense of romantic hopelessness, etc.
(His self-deluded claim that "romance is boring" happens to echo Sir Thomas Wyatt the Edler's "Farewell, Love": "Farewell, love, and all thy laws forever/Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more." Of course, neither Wyatt nor Campesino are actually done with love--but both desperately wish they could be. But, then, without love, what would they write about?)
The album has a couple of recurring motifs. Multiple songs reference a TV news program that counts down Gareth's worst breakups of all time, underscoring that feeling that doomed relationships are this guy's entire world: he can't even turn on the TV without being reminded of how bad he is at the whole boy-girl thing. Elsewhere he laments his and his partners' lacking physical appearances; excoriates those who (like him) put intellect and irony over visceral, truly felt emotion ("I think we need more post-coital, and less post-rock") and describes scene after vomit-encrusted scene of youthful, romantic hysteria.
I've written about Los Campesinos for Prefix Magazine, if any of you guys want to check it out.
(His self-deluded claim that "romance is boring" happens to echo Sir Thomas Wyatt the Edler's "Farewell, Love": "Farewell, love, and all thy laws forever/Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more." Of course, neither Wyatt nor Campesino are actually done with love--but both desperately wish they could be. But, then, without love, what would they write about?)
The album has a couple of recurring motifs. Multiple songs reference a TV news program that counts down Gareth's worst breakups of all time, underscoring that feeling that doomed relationships are this guy's entire world: he can't even turn on the TV without being reminded of how bad he is at the whole boy-girl thing. Elsewhere he laments his and his partners' lacking physical appearances; excoriates those who (like him) put intellect and irony over visceral, truly felt emotion ("I think we need more post-coital, and less post-rock") and describes scene after vomit-encrusted scene of youthful, romantic hysteria.
I've written about Los Campesinos for Prefix Magazine, if any of you guys want to check it out.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
This is my test post!
So this is my test post. Spent the afternoon reading Beowulf, which was a surprisingly engaging and lucid experience. I guess I figured it'd be written in some obscure dialect I'd have to translate personally, word for word (luckily Seamus Heaney has done a crack job of that for us).
ANYWAY. Looking forward to getting to cyber-ing it up with you guys this semester. I don't know a lot (and by "a lot" I mean "anything") about the period under examination, so it should be enlightening. Expect the requisite two comments later in the week...
--Daniel Kolitz
ANYWAY. Looking forward to getting to cyber-ing it up with you guys this semester. I don't know a lot (and by "a lot" I mean "anything") about the period under examination, so it should be enlightening. Expect the requisite two comments later in the week...
--Daniel Kolitz
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