Issue #11 - The Critic's Dream of Eden
News
Maybe you've noticed, but summer broke my streak of producing a bi-weekly newsletter. In June I found myself upside down at the bottom of a wild spring semester, and had to make a choice between the newsletter and other writing. So no twenty minute sketches because twenty spare minutes are scarce.
However, I have managed to nearly complete a full collection of poetry. My daily writing is currently flipping between two long poems, and Lord-willing, I'll finish them during the first month of school and send the collection out.
Also of note, we began school two weeks earlier than planned. Desperation is the mother of creativity, or something?
Reading
My reading this summer has mostly consisted of W.H. Auden and scholars of W.H. Auden. I've long admired his poetry (the title of this newsletter "In Solitude, For Company" comes from his "Horae Canonicae"), but haven't committed myself to it. I decided to remedy that. He's smarter than I'll ever be, but there are things I can emulate. I'll be satisfied with imitation.
Auden on Reading
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says apropos of a work of art, "I know what I like," he is really saying "I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu," because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read. Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else's. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments.
Auden's Questionnaire
As he mentioned above, there is no objective critic. But readers of criticism--whether you're reading album reviews, or your aunt's critique of Facebook's censorship policies--need to know where the critic stands, subjectively. Auden developed a questionnaire, and answered it, so his readers would know the position from which he viewed a subject. It probably helped him feel more confident too when he wrote criticism.
Here's his questionnaire, but I’ve included my answers. I'll be forty in five months. I can (almost) comfortably say, these are the things that give me pleasure, subjectively. Since I occasionally offer criticism here, it might be worth you knowing where I stand. I'm nearly free of feeling the need to justify myself to you.
Eden
- Landscape: Flat, shortgrass prairie, dotted with (full) playa lakes, undammed rivers, gridded with square crops of a size that can be managed with a Farm-All tractor.
- Climate: Semi-arid without the extremes, meaning average rainfall is still 20 inches, but it falls evenly across all months of the growing season, rather than in three sessions during harvest.
- Ethnic origin of inhabitants: National Geographic made some predictions about what Americans will look like in 40 years. We'll be a handsome group of people. But since ethnicity also involves cultural heritage, then highly varied.
- Language: Of mixed origins, like English
- Religion: I will sing of steadfast love and justice. - Psalm 101. Those are nice abstract terms, and religion is about the business of taking abstract things and turning them into concrete, flesh-and-blood practices. So I'll answer the abstracts of love and justice with the flesh of Christ and him crucified.
- Size of Capital: Under 200,000. Total population matters less to me than population density because density has direct correlations to violent crime rates. Since this is Eden, each family manages four acres of land, so not dense.
- Weights & Measures: Metric and no fractions. Of course, this means we'd all be managing 1.6 ares of arable land.
- Form of Government: Independent Municipal Democracy
- Sources of Natural Power: Solar electricity, bison dung, natural gas
- Economic Activities: natural gas production, local textiles, solar panel production, farming, tractor manufacturing
- Means of Transport: Feet, the Farm-All.
- Architecture: State - Second Empire like Parker County courthouse; Ecclesiastical- Gothic Revival like St. Mary’s in Umbarger, Schulenburg, or Las Animas, CO; Residence - a style which can reasonably be built by a young family and surrounding neighbors. I grew up in a typical High Plains farmhouse that looked a lot like all of my neighbors' houses. Although I’ve been taken by a single slope roof that my friend Mason Rogers, at Playa Design, has been designing. It’s simple to construct and makes a lot of sense for this climate.
- Domestic Furniture and Equipment: Vernacular staked furniture. Refrigerators, natural gas stoves, and indoor plumbing are matters of public health.
- Formal Dress: Something that can be worn for manual labor and also tucked in.
- Sources of Public Information: Gossip and technical periodicals and letters.
- Public Statues: Well-pruned trees
- Public Entertainments: Athletic competitions and music that requires participation from all in attendance (whether that is dancing or passing around the instrument). No entertainments should be experienced passively.
How would you answer Auden’s questionnaire?
Chera Hammons' Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom
I've mentioned Chera several times in previous issues. She has a novel coming out on Tuesday, August 18.She'll be doing a virtual reading--because those are the only readings anymore--hosted by Burrowing Owl Books to celebrate its release. I encourage you to tune in.
I'm Seth Wieck. Thanks for the company.