much and earnest

The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.

- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text  (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.

But if we consider that the “purest,” eighteen-line version of the poem survived only in a single manuscript, and the twenty-four or thirty-line versions of the poem were historically more important, what is the sense of editing “Ralegh” in a way that denigrates nonauthorial variants or that encourages historical erasure in the name of rescuing an authorial archetype that is allegedly prior to historical vicissitude? The “Ralegh” that emerged within the transmission and reception of a body of verse that was a mixture of authorially sanctioned work, additions and revisions to these texts, and the incorporation of texts by other writers is, finally, an authorship sign that makes sense historically in terms other than those of verifiable canon.

- Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 145-6

In calling a text a space, then, Barthes has diverged from reality and has started to write not so much an argument as a kind of fantastical poem.

- more from Carey.

…I have never understood how statements about what is valid or invalid in literary criticism can support themselves. To say that something is valid is to invoke a legal system or a set of rules, as in a game, which there is an agreed obligation to obey. But in the case of literary criticism, what is this system? Who made the rules? The readily observable reality is that critics are free to proceed as they choose, using or not using biographical material as seems to them fit, speculating or not speculating about the intention of the author. The claim that to do so is not valid can have no weight, since it can point to no accepted criteria of validity. It seems, indeed, not a statement but a wish or preference – the wish to denigrate biographical criticism as improper.

- John Carey, “Is the Author Dead? Or, the Mermaids and the Robot,” Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, eds. Takashi Kozuka and J.R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006: 43-54).

I want to do nothing but read this book, all day.

My wits my wealth, my learning is my lands

My gownes my goods, my bookes for buildings stand,

Arts are my acres, tongues my tenements,

Pens are my ploughs, my writings are my rents.

- a poem (partial?) transcribed in a Christ Church, Oxford manuscript anthology. Poet unknown, but the experience is common among graduate students. Found in Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, ch 1.

Stephen Hackett (ForkBombr), a good friend of mine (he was a groomsman in our wedding), a former co-worker (haveastandard.com), my go-to guy for Mac and iPhone questions (at least the ones Google can’t solve), and the fellow who introduced me to Rooney, Johnny Cash, and Death Cab, has been interviewed for Cornfedtech.com. Check out the first installment of the interview (text, audio, and a beard-y picture).