Meshalim 2.0

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Dispatches from the Seamus Heaney Syllabus

I. One of the central challenges I’ve found myself facing writing poetry(? — still can’t quite say it without the question mark at the end) has been rather like one of the central challenges I think I face out in the world: I’m a fount of useless bits of knowledge that make up the entirety of the non sequitur-driven internal monologue that accompanies me and I have to remind myself that the rest of the world isn’t right there with me.  I tend to do the same thing when I write and it’s very hard for me to assess whether I’m being over-the-top obscure and allusive or whether I’m being fair in asking my readers to trust me and to look it up for themselves if they want to know more.  Reading some of Heaney’s earlier poetry (North, from 1975, this week, e.g.) is proving to be one model for how to do that in a very controlled way. 

II. I had planned to start with Heaney’s Beowulf and some more Beowulves but I found myself getting stuck in the interstice between his and Maria Dhavana Headley’s translations, treating his as the original. 

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Back to Normal?

I’ve traveled to see family three times between getting the vaccine and now, but this will be my first trip for research. Both the travel itself and the spontaneity with which I planned the trip feel so strange after two years of effectively not doing any profession-related travel. I used to go somewhere at least once a month to give a talk or visit an archive before the pandemic, but now I’m mostly planning how I will get digital surrogates for the archival and manuscript materials I will need to read  for my book-in-progress because going to the UK right now seems foolish. And yet, here I am, having freaked out last night about a dramatic turn in my research and writing, and having dealt with it by booking myself a last-minute trip to a domestic archive a flying distance away to see if I can salvage the project there.

Part of what feels frenetic is that this trip as well as my last trip to see family were booked at the last minute as the potential end of the domestic-flight mask mandate is set to expire. Last time, when I went home, it was extended; this time, I don’t expect it will be. And so even though my travel schedule is nothing like what it was before the pandemic, it doesn’t feel so different: the suddenness of needing to change gears and be in a different place after not being able to think about it too much or for too long.

The world seemed like it was closing down and getting very small at the start of the pandemic, and I have that sensation again: that just as we were beginning to be able to emerge and do some things we used to more safely, protections like the mask mandate on flights are being rolled back that are going to make those of us who believe in the germ theory of disease transmission begin to retreat again. Back to the old normal seems so unwise.

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Dispatches from the Roof

I went on the “vertical tour” of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine yesterday with a friend who was visiting from out of town — up into the clerestory, the space between the ceiling and the roof, and then onto the roof.

The wildest thing, for me, though, even beside being that close to an installation of Guastavino tile and the surprise, gorgeous, a cappella choir concert that was going on in front of the altar, was how *easy* it is to go up and down the narrow spiral staircase when the risers of the steps are perfectly even and the treads haven’t been worn down with seven or eight centuries of use. When I’m in Europe (or, when I used to go to Europe before the pandemic) I’d usually limit myself to one bell tower climb per trip because coming down, in particular, I would find really taxing; and I realized that it’s very much about the minute differences in the depth and evenness of the stairs .

One woman on the tour said she was worried about coming down, and I told her: “Look, I’ve been up and down a lot of these things, and worst case scenario, you can just sit down and scooch. It’s not elegant but it works.” She made it all the way down on her feet, in the end, though. 

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A Personal Seamus Heaney Syllabus

Following my surprising foray into poetry? as a pandemic project, I applied for and was accepted into a yearlong program at Brooklyn Poets — lots of writing, lots of reading, lots of critique, lots of class. One of the elements of the program is that each participant chooses a poet to do a yearlong deep-dive read. Because I’m particularly interested in translation and reworking medieval texts, I’ve chosen Seamus Heaney. I feel a little intimidated about having to be intelligent about the work of a poet that is totally out of my context, as if I should be able to jump in and be brilliant just because I already know how to read text; but if I can screw up my courage, I’ll try to blog my way through reading Heaney’s oeuvre. 

I’ve kept the secondary literature to a minimum, partly so that I’m approaching the poetry without it being filtered through others’ readings first, and partly, honestly, just because there are still only 24 hours in a day and I have an academic book, a trade book, and a translation that I’m also supposed to be working on, plus all the other stuff… But in any case,  what I’m reading this year is after the jump:

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My Year in Books: 2021

The idiosyncratically categorized record of my 2021 book reading:

Carried over from last year: Dante’s Inferno. 

Reading comprehension was never going to be the issue in Project #SarahLearnsItalian, but I’m really proud of myself for this all the same: Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi

I’m starting to toy more seriously with the idea of doing an MFA, but decided to take some one-off classes before committing to a whole degree; this is what I read there: Just Us by Claudia Rankine; The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison; In The Heart of Texas by Ginger McKnight-Chavers; Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal

And I’ve also been reading more poetry: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal; Hapax by A.E. Stallings; Accepting the Disaster by Joshua Mehigan; Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove

And especially prose poetry: Mean by Miriam Gurba; The Fire Eater by José Hernández Díaz

…and specifically some models of academics also writing poetry: The Day of Shelley’s Death by Renato Rosaldo; A Tithe of Salt by Ray Ball

I’m not the audience for this: Guide of the Perplexed by Dara Horn

I’m not the audience for this and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it and how well I thought it worked: The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan

And so I continued reading the series: The Language of Secrets,  Among the Ruins (I’m listening to the audiobooks and I wasn’t crazy about how the narrator handled all the accents in this one), and A Dangerous Crossing.

Skip it if you listen to the podcast: RedHanded by Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire, audiobook read by the authors

People take both Goodreads and Twitter way too seriously: Leaving isn’t the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough

I needed a break from George Smiley: The Russia House by John LeCarré

And then I went back to George Smiley: The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People

This wasn’t a book I thought I’d go back and reread, but I did after watching The Unlikely Murderer on Netflix: The Man Who Played With Fire by Jan Stocklassa

Now I want to read everything that the author has written, so I’ll get started on that in the new year: The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Best of the year: The Netanyahus, and Mean

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Poetry?

Confession time: I’ve been writing poetry all year. 

It wasn’t a deliberate pandemic project. In fact, poetry is pretty much the one type of writing that I was sure I’d never try because I’m definitely not a poet. But here I am all the same.

It came about entirely by accident. I was supposed to write an essay for a public-facing volume of heretical Jewish responses to the pandemic and the general state of the world. My plan was to write something on the impact of majority languages on the liturgy of minority religions or, more specifically, how King James’ language about God creeps into Jewish liturgy simply because that’s the language we have, and how that impacts how we think theologically. I couldn’t pull my thoughts together, though, and just started playing around with some texts. What would it look like, I asked myself, if the medieval Hebrew poets of al-Andalus, my guys, who quote constantly from the text of the Bible, had to be translated with that kind of English? What started as an experimental retranslation turned into a mistranslation, which turned into some original composition. I sent four texts off to the editor with a note assuring her that there would be no hard feelings if she didn’t want them because it was a first attempt at a new form, because I’m not a poet, and, let’s be honest, because they’re weird. She did want them, in the end, and the book is slated to come out next week. 

I’ve barely wanted to *translate* poetry in the past when I’ve had to for academic publications because you have to be a poet to translate poetry and I’m not a poet. But, as I said, here I am all the same.

I’ve continued playing in verse with overlapping questions of poetry and biblical language and day-to-day usage, with an eye toward what I hope will become a full length manuscript of texts I’m calling mistranslations, that hew more and less closely to the book of psalms and its commentaries through the ages. It has been a pleasure to play with language in new-for-me ways and to be able to express ideas and make arguments in shorter but no lesser forms. I’ve especially been enjoying the possibilities for expressing the surreal and the non sequitur that are a part of my experience of the world but that I’m never quite sure how to explain or what to do with.

There’s lots of new technical learning to be done, and also how to navigate a completely different world of publishing. I’ve got lots of submissions in process (which means I’m constantly refreshing my Submittable), some rejections, some successes .  I’m also in the process of shopping around a short chapbook manuscript based on what I’ve written this year, but I think I jumped the gun a bit, that there’s more for me to learn about expectations and submissions and the non-writing side of writing poetry. I’m revising and writing more for a stronger chapbook manuscript, and continuing to work on the longer-term project that kicked this all off in my head.

And I’m continuing to take classes and workshops here and there for practice, and exposure to new (which for me means non-medieval) forms, critique, and community. I’d been toying for a while with the idea of pursuing an MFA, which I always thought would be in creative non-fiction, but I feel like I’ve thrown into question my own writerly identity and, more importantly, the kind of work I want to do. 

I’m lucky that my academic life happens in a department that has a really strong creative bent and that I don’t have to work to hide this from my immediate colleagues. But most of the academy isn’t like that, and so it’s something I’ve wanted to play pretty close to the vest until I could at least show some results of the type that are recognizable in that world (publications, a short list for a prize, etc.). 

And the fact of the matter is that I’m as surprised as anyone. I’m not a poet. I’ve just been writing some poetry, and as much as when I say that sentence in my head it always ends with an audible question mark, I think I’ll keep at it for a while. 

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Post-Pandemic Travel Plans

Apropos nothing, really, this is the running mental list I’ve been keeping of little, out of the way places I want to go after the pandemic. Not the big things (Sarajevo, Camino de Santiago, Rome, Patagonia), but the little ones, specific sites rather than entire cities and in the continental US and mostly near home, that can be done as day trips. I’ll probably keep it updated irregularly.

Bay Area:

Tepco Beach

Glass Beach

The Pogonip

NY Metro Area:

Wyndcliffe Mansion

Letchworth Village

Point Breeze

Merchant’s House Museum

Elsewhere:

Dushanbe Tea House

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Thinking About Audience

What follows are my remarks from today’s webinar, Writing Outside the Academy. I didn’t have time to give the remarks after the second set of three asterisks, reflecting on public writing/public medievalism and yesterday’s events, but referred to them in the discussion. 

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My topic this afternoon is audience and how my role as a teacher shapes how I think about writing for the public and how I envision that public — in other words, how the pedagogical part of my job helps to shape my writing outside the academy.

I am currently working on a book-length project for a general audience on the past and present of the Spanish language, a project that has very much grown out of my teaching. It has been shaped by redesigning a class I had inherited from a retired colleague on the history and dialectology of Spanish, and by the ways in which students come into college and into my class thinking about language in very conservative and limiting ways, often shaped by introductory language pedagogy and popularly available resources about language in general and Spanish in particular. My students often come in to my class as strident prescriptivists, because that is how they have been taught Spanish and taught about Spanish, regardless of whether it is a learned language for them or whether they are heritage or native speakers, and so they end up very judgmental about the language as it changes over time and even about their own Spanish.

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Dante per stranieri

A copy of a watercolor by Dante Gabriel Rosetti depicting the lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, the subject of my first composition in L’Inferno per stranieri.

I’m taking an Inferno per stranieri course on Zoom over winter break — it’s reading Dante’s Inferno over twelve weeks in the original/sometimes in modern Italian or English translation and discussing it in intermediate-to-advanced level Italian. My writing has noticeably improved although I find speaking frustrating (I’m much smarter in other languages!) and I’m still firmly in the intermediate-level camp as I don’t feel like I have good control over the subjunctive yet or any kind of handle on which prepositions go with which verbs. Also, in a class that’s for stranieri who aren’t necessarily spagnoloparlanti, I can get away with hispanisms in my vocabulary that someone teaching primarily Spanish-speakers would call me on; so I just need to be a bit more attentive to not letting myself get away with not looking up the real Italian word after I’ve made something up on the basis of Spanish. Be that as it may, it’s exactly the kind of language class I like because it integrates interesting content with language learning and practice rather than treating those two things like they are separable.

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My Year in Books: 2020

This year’s book roundup, with 2020 being the first year in recent memory that I’ve come even vaguely close to doing as much non-work as I would like because the combination of tenure, quarantine, and audiobooks makes for getting through rather a lot of fiction and other miscellaneous reading. I’ve still got more on my to-read list than I’ll get through in a lifetime, though. Next year, more essay collections. I’m excited about the ones I have queued up.

Without further ado, a very idiosyncratic list of the books I read outside my own research reading:

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Least sympathy for a problem the protagonist created for himself and then exacerbated through his solipsistic outlook and life and very ineffective explanations to everyone in spite of situations being totally innocuous : Salvo Montalbano and all the women in his life he freaked out and otherwise upset by cluelessly toting around some suspicious blow-up sex-doll evidence from a crime scene in The Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri, (all Montalbano audiobooks read by Grover Gardner)

Why, yes, I have read Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca: The Game of Mirrors, by Andrea Camilleri

Best typesetting issue: The standard Olivetti in the office when the guys needed a typewriter that could type in Arabic letters, The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri

Lawrence of Sicilia: Ngilino “il sheikh” Sinagra in The Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri

The moment at which I was cautiously (if ultimately incorrectly) hopeful that this wouldn’t be a faux-benevolent Orientalist novel: “Montalbano was certain that the doctor was repeating word for word what he had asked him to say. Though he didn’t know any Arabic, he had the impression he understood a few words. As he was listening he remembered that once upon a time all the fishermen in the Mediterranean spoke a common language, known as ‘Sabir.’ It was anyone’s guess how it had come into being, and it was anyone’s guess how it had died. Nowadays it would have been extremely useful to everyone.” The Other End of the Line by Andrea Camilleri

Lost track of who all was shooting at whom, and honestly didn’t care: The Terra Cotta Dog, by Andrea Camilleri

Because it was time to try something different by Camilleri: The Sacco Gang, audiobook also read by Grover Gardner

The series really declined in the end: The Safety Net by Andrea Camilleri

Kinda can’t quit it, though: The Sicilian Method by Andrea Camilleri

But my God, is Montalbano a jerk to women: The Paper Moon, by Andrea Camilleri, audiobook read by Grover Gardner

Read more detective fiction by women: The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri*

Pre-pandemic women-in-translation book club: Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer (and I played nice was wasn’t the person who showed up to the lit-in-translation book club having read it in the original)

No, seriously, read more detective fiction by women: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, read by Phoebe Judge

With that said, I do tend to read monographically: A Small Town in Germany, Agent Running in the Field, Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, A Murder of Quality, all by John Le Carré.

Pretty sure I’m rooting for the wrong side: Call for the Dead by John Le Carré

Honest-to-God jaw drop at the end: The Looking Glass War by John Le Carré

Kept losing track of all the different intelligence agents: The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré

Kenneth Branaugh’s American woman accent is awful: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, audiobook read disappointingly 

I have been reading the series since the beginning and despite the kerfuffle over the latest entry, I chose to read it *before* deciding that I didn’t like it despite my previous comment about the value of reading more detective fiction by women: Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith, audiobook read by Robert Glenister

Should have read in Italian but didn’t: Chronicles of a Liquid Society, by Umberto Eco

Am reading in Italian: Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (to be finished next year; am taking a class for intermediate-to-advanced language learners)

This is not how the academy works. Not at all: Camino Island by John Grisham

Honestly, this is a better representation of university life, and it’s a *fantasy* novel: The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Not really that much less prudent than anybody else: The Imprudent King by Geoffrey Parker

The other books I read to prepare to take students to the aforementioned king’s palace at El Escorial because I am Not An Art Historian(tm): El Escorial by Henry Kamen and De El Bosco a Tiziano: Arte y maravilla en El Escorial by Fernando Checa

My own Madrid travel and thwarted travel reading: El anarquista que se llamaba como yo by Pablo Martín Sánchez (to be finished in the coming year — it’s a brick); Pagan Spain by Richard Wright

Further proof that I’m more of a non-fiction girl: The Man Who Played With Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin by Jan Stocklassa, translated by Tara Chase

Surprise neo-Nazis: See above.

Non-surprise neo-Nazis: Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin

Non-surprise, classic Nazis: Citizen 865 by Debbie Cenziper

Crossover/trade books read with an eye toward writing my own, a list that doesn’t include any of the books I was planning for it to at the start of the year: Jean Genet by Stephen Barber, Petrarch by Christopher S. Celenza, Maimonides by Sherwin Nuland

Haven’t read it since about the third grade and wanted to refresh my memory before watching the movie: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, audiobook read by Simon Vance

Palate cleanser after reading and watching Robinson Crusoe: Foe by J.M. Coetzee

Read in memoriam, just weeks after sending him his offprints from my edited volume: Ours: The Making and Unmaking of a Jesuit by Frank Peters  

Because, thank God 2020 is over already: Subtweet by Vivek Shraya; Diary of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe; Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump

*Disclaimer because I know some dude is going to pop up and make sure that i know that Andrea, in Italian, is a man’s name. Yes, yes I do. And that’s rather the point.