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October 31, 2007
MILTON-FEST '07
I’m going to do this in a pretty rambling style, so expect no grammatical competency and/or writing polish and/or well-thought-out-pretentiousness, which means that it will be illegible at worst and mildly unreadable at best.
So I presented at the John Milton conference. Earlier, I proudly announced, “I AM A MILTONIST!” No I can proudly say, “I AM NOT A MILTONIST BUT SOMEONE WHO HAS WRITTEN ABOUT MILTON.”
In short, the conference went really well. I got there early Friday Morning and spent the entire day sweating my paper and half-heartedly listening to others give really complicated academic theses about Milton. Some of the papers were actually really interested: one teacher had a student who turned Book One of PARADISE LOST into a graphic novel (which I have mixed feelings about), and another paper showed the influence of Milton on Thomas Jefferson.
Pretty much everybody there was smarter than me and more experienced than me. It was something of an imposing setting, but everyone was nice and encouraging.
The latter paper was particularly interesting because the speaker was a high school teacher, at McCallie in Chattanooga. It is an interesting and new concept that someone can both teach high school and pursue serious scholarship.
My “panel” met in the smallest room offered. In one of the earliest sessions there, only five people showed up. I both hoped and feared that mine would turn out this way. The room was pretty full: about 15 folks in a room that only seats 25. One of the listeners was one of the premier Milton scholars in the world.
I was the last one to go. The paper went off smoothly; I even told a few jokes and they were received well (I was told not to, but I saw other people do it, so I thought, what the hey.) I read the paper well, pronounced all the words with as much correctness as I knew, and emphasized what needed to be emphasized.
Perhaps since I was last, I got more questions than the other two presenters. One of the presenters (this guy) seemed skeptical of my paper, but not my scholarship. I was prepared for the question and answered it*. Then someone else in the room echoed my thoughts, so that was a relief. I got a few other questions (not so much questions actually, as long pontifications on the subject), and ended up talking about THE ILIAD.
Nobody came up afterward to tell me I had changed the way people were going to think about Milton forever, but no one asked me what the hell I was doing there. I count that as a success.
I also met some pretty cool, laid-back Milton scholars who are making me rethink my decision to become an Antebellum Americanist, even though it’s a hot field. I stayed at dinner until they had the shut the room down; a lot of good conversations and free wine. The Renaissance and Restoration is where I want to be. However, I’m still going to write my thesis on the Federalist papers, so that’s that.
Then I went to the Tennessee-South Carolina Game and watched Tennessee do everything within its power to lose the game, only to win thanks to a few lucky plays.
Thanks for all your prayers. I had a great time.
Now a movie review: THE DARJEELING LIMITED is the first movie I’ve seen in theaters since August. Wes Anderson is, of course, one of my favorite directors. RUSHMORE is a flat-out masterpiece. Some people didn’t like his last, THE LIFE AQUATIC, and while it was certainly his most uneven, I enjoyed its whimsy, messy but fascinating characters, music, and ambition.
So even though the naysayers (and there are a lot of them) scoffed off the yet-unseen latest effort by Anderson as “more of the same,” I was excited. The trailer featured two songs off one of my favorite albums, LOLA VERSUS POWERMAN. Adrien Brody is involved. Why all the bad buzz? Because people want to take down Anderson for some reason, probably because he gets to play with a lot of filmmaking toys and because actors love him.
DARJEELING is somewhat uneven, but for me it was like candy that’s kind of sour at first but leaves a good aftertaste (I’m not going to change that, even though I feel like it should). It’s proof that Anderson can make his tinker-toy playsets and still deliver some remarkably resonant drama. Despite the fact that the situations reek of melodrama, nothing is melodramatic; the way the brothers Wilson, Brody, and Schwartzman deal with their father’s death is messy, uncontrived, and yet totally authentic; keeps with their oddball, self-absorbed characters.
In a journey that’s supposed to be about self-discovery and overcoming grief, the movie reminds us that we’re often too selfish and, er, Western to do this. All our hangups keep us from dealing with our other hangups, and our desire to think our tragedies unoriginal or uncompelling force us, like Owen Wilson’s Francis Whitman, to bake up some scheme involving shrines and a train in India.
There’s also a man-eating tiger that terrorizes an orphanage. I love Wes Anderson.
Each of the brothers have their own trademark quirks and neuroses, and yet none of them are the equivalent of the depressed Proust scholars and bow-staffing/break-dancing Idaho teenagers that usually populate films that are aping Anderson. What’s cool about the brothers Whitman is the things the share AND the things that make them different. It’s a credit to the actors and the writers that they act like brothers and that their fights seem to grow out of actual conflicts and a clearly contextualized (and yet mysterious) relationship among them.
Ignore the naysayers; it’s a great movie.
** - Basically, the ? was this. My paper dealt with a rhetorical approach to PARADISE LOST. I argued that, read through the lens of a Sophist (4th century public speakers/ political whores), PARADISE LOST conforms to a pre-Socratic idea of persuasion – simply that the persuadee has no control over the sorcery that well-spoken words offer. In that sense, when Satan seduces Eve, it’s similar to “enchantment” and thus echoes their theories of language, its shifting meanings, and persuasive power.
Dude asked me a question about “epideictic rhetoric,” and how it seems more appropriate to discuss the “rhetoric” of PL. I did not disagree, but was merely pointing out that the text could be read through a “Sophistic” lens; what they might make of it. So his skepticism was in an argument I didn’t make, and I just responded that my paper deals with a “Sophistic” focus that no one has ever discussed before.
| By Andytown | 12:13 PM
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Comments
Sounds like the Milton conference went well even if nobody gave a panegyric for you and brought epideictic rhetoric out of Milton and into the lecture hall. By the way, who was the renowned Miltonist at your talk? Last summer my dad read a paper at the Hardy at Yale conference, and a pre-eminent Hardy scholar and (former) deconstructionist actually fell asleep while he was talking. Pretty encouraging, eh (although I think the scholar was over 80 and had been to a million conferences in his career, but still)? Also, I'm glad you're finally "beginning to see the light" and gravitating toward Renaissance studies. But you already know my affinities lie with English lit instead of American.
Posted by: Jonathan at November 1, 2007 12:43 PM