| Title |
Excerpt |
Author |
Date |
Total Comments |
Recent Comment |
| True Enough |
The Social Misconstruction of Reality by Richard F. Hamilton, 1996 Hamilton gives us a polemic and a series of debunkings which ascend from trivial observation to war-cry: Wellington cared nothing for the playing fields of Eton. Mozart didn’t die neglected and rejected. Weber couldn’t connect Calvinism to capitalism. Hitler wasn’t elected… |
Ray Davis |
01/17/09 |
7 |
01/18/09 |
| All My Communities Are Hermitages |
(The bulk of an earlier version of this entry began as a private email message, and it should have stayed that way. Posting it was the worst mistake I can remember making in my years of offline and online publishing, and my having made such a mistake here may serve as… |
Ray Davis |
05/07/06 |
6 |
05/10/06 |
| La vita nuova e nuova e nuova |
Ah, the old critical exercise: Does a hard science fiction story become unreadable once the science is invalidated? Is a historical novel worthless once the evidence refutes it? Not being a Whig historian, what interests me more than those questions are the contextual nuances around them. For example, it seems to… |
Ray Davis |
04/30/06 |
20 |
05/07/06 |
| The Sunday Snifter |
Lorine Niedecker of Black Hawk Island, Wisconsin, sent this advice: To my smallelectric pump To sense and sound this world look to your snifter valve take oil and hum Swirl, spirits, swirl.... |
Ray Davis |
03/26/06 |
18 |
03/31/06 |
| Emily Dickinson : The Poet as Selflorist |
Rhyme's easily defined so long as we ignore the evidence. As actually deployed, the device is slippery. For example, people who read silently become confused about what's supposed to repeat: the terminal phonemes or the terminal graphemes? The latter is called "eye rhyme"; when it conflicts with "ear rhyme", it's a… |
Ray Davis |
03/17/06 |
11 |
02/10/08 |
| What We Genrify When We Mean to Talk |
Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes by David C. Rubin I'm no blurbing brook — I think all a publisher ever fished from me was "... courageous ..."— but I'm tired of writing about stuff I can't recommend, so here goes: Memory in Oral… |
Ray Davis |
03/11/06 |
5 |
03/11/06 |
| “… our solemnities.” |
I confess that, aside from watching Jesus try to decide if he looked better with a beard, my last clear memory from last night is reading these two pieces by the Reverend Doctor Jonathan Swift: December 27, 1733 I waked at two this morning with the two above lines in my… |
Ray Davis |
02/17/06 |
3 |
02/19/06 |
| Paid with Interest |
For those with (or with friends with) online access, a new issue of American Literary History is available. In “The Post-Welfare State University”, Jeffrey J. Williams “follows the money trail” to capsulize American higher education: The features of mass attendance, of federal and foundation funding, of technological development, and of faculty… |
Ray Davis |
02/05/06 |
28 |
02/08/06 |
| Mystery Macintosh, My Darling |
"The M'Intosh Murder Mystery" by John Gordon, Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2005) 1 All right-thinking people agree that The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism's most unconscionable omission was James Thurber's "The Macbeth Murder Mystery", and so I'm certain John Gordon is a right-thinking person. Except in this case. [For… |
Ray Davis |
01/30/06 |
3 |
02/01/06 |
| I. “Graphs, Maps, Trees” by Franco Moretti |
Moretti sounds like a happy guy. And it's infectious. Why pledge allegiance to a groove and turn it into a rut? Get out of that stuffy coffee shop and into a cool refreshing stats lab. Live a little! (With the aid of twenty grad students.) An OuBelLetriPo is overdue. Let's pick… |
Ray Davis |
01/11/06 |
21 |
02/27/06 |
| “Always the cautious scholar, eh, Dr. Hunt?” |
The title doesn't leap with jaw-clenched dagger from hundreds of faking-the-funk post-Tromatic direct-to-videos. But Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is the real Cormanesque deal: an exploitation comedy that's genuinely funny. Aside from the glaring absence of Queer Studies, its '80s-era academic and feminism jokes are knowing and affectionate.… |
Ray Davis |
12/27/05 |
3 |
12/28/05 |
| What Goes On |
"It was exactly as if she had been there by the operation of my intelligence, or even by that — in a still happier way — of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her, was assuredly emotion. Yet what was this feeling, really?" The Sacred Fount… |
Ray Davis |
12/24/05 |
1 |
02/13/06 |
| Three Ways of Looking at a Blacklist |
Chandler Davis, full time mathematician, sometime fiction writer, and lifelong political activist lost his career in American academia for the third quality. Dr. Josh Lukin kindly mailed me copies of two of Professor Davis's comments on that loss: "... From an Exile", written in 1960 "Did the Red-hunt Win?", delivered in… |
Ray Davis |
12/01/05 |
23 |
09/25/08 |
| Salomé, What She Watched |
Fenitschka and Deviations by Lou Andreas-Salomé, tr. Dorothee Einstein Krahn The Human Family (Menschenkinder) by Lou Andreas-Salomé, tr. Raleigh Whitinger Looking Back by Lou Andreas-Salomé, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, tr. Breon Mitchell Two-and-a-half stories into Menschenkinder (timidly Englished as "The Human Family") and I'm pleasantly surprised by their oblique viewpoints, the suggestive… |
Ray Davis |
11/27/05 |
18 |
11/29/05 |
| Just Possibly Like So but Maybe Not So Much Stories |
The Transition to Language, ed. Alison Wray, Oxford, 2002 If DNA analysis has secured the there-that's-settled end of the evolutionary biology spectrum, language origins lie in the ultra-speculative. As a species marker and, frankly, for personal reasons, language holds irresistable interest; unfortunately, spoken language doesn't leave a fossil record, and neither… |
Ray Davis |
10/25/05 |
13 |
10/30/05 |
| Playstationed |
Variations on a theme by Amardeep Singh I have always liked Andersen's fairy tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier. Fundamentally, it is the symbol of my life. - Thomas Mann to Agnes Meyer At that moment one of the little boys picked up the soldier and tossed him right into the… |
Ray Davis |
10/07/05 |
17 |
01/02/06 |
| School of Hard Equinox |
No one has time this time of the academic year, and some people have even less. We Valvettes, for example, haven’t had time to arrange the catering and formal invitations needed for a properly Bakhtinian carnival. I haven’t even had time to write my own weblog post. Luckily for the world… |
Ray Davis |
09/25/05 |
8 |
10/09/05 |
| The Terrorist of Malta, Part III |
No government which executed so many citizens could be called "small," but Elizabethan England was certainly privatized: Constantinople's "British ambassadors" were directly employed by the Levant Company. Government's role was to coordinate espionage networks, corporal punishment, military action, proclamations of religious intent, spectacular patronage, and highly profitable monopolies by and for… |
Ray Davis |
09/18/05 |
4 |
09/28/05 |
| The Terrorist of Malta, Part II |
And so if I knew someone who was going to read The Jew of Malta or make other people read it, I would recommend "Another Country" to them. (Or more likely give them a copy.) Without wanting to denigrate (or re-trace) Wilson's hard work in the archives, I would also mention… |
Ray Davis |
09/11/05 |
3 |
09/12/05 |
| The Terrorist of Malta, Part I |
"Another Country: Marlowe and the Go-Between" by Richard Wilson, Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreas Höfele & Werner von Koppenfels I first read The Jew of Malta as shallow trash at about the level of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, with hand-waving taken care of by anti-Semitism in… |
Ray Davis |
09/05/05 |
12 |
09/10/05 |
| Correlation methods of comparing idiolects in a transition area |
The cover of Jack Spicer's seventh book seems such a straightforward depiction of the poet's place in the academy. I wish some other poets with day jobs had tried similar designs: a paregoric prescription by William Carlos Williams; a double indemnity policy by Wallace Stevens; a profits chart by Ron Silliman;… |
Ray Davis |
08/16/05 |
0 |
|
| _Warlock_ by Oakley Hall, 1958 |
The judge nodded. "Just a process," he said. "That's all you are. What are men to me?" He rubbed his hand over his face as though he were trying to scrape his features off. Warlock's prose is solid, sturdy, heavy — less lively than Elmore Leonard's; less introverted than Charles O.… |
Ray Davis |
08/06/05 |
22 |
07/02/11 |
| The Liebestod of the Author |
(Started as a response to John Holbo before it merged into another piece & became ridiculously long, but the original, its sequel, & their comments are at least as worth reading as this) "And it does no good knowing certain biographical and historical facts about Wagner, or facts about his sources… |
Ray Davis |
07/30/05 |
17 |
01/05/06 |
| Return of the Snobbish Dead Part III |
Somewhat perversely, Limited Inc. asserts that "Santayana is a philosopher one should read." Although I don't myself share LI's high opinion, I do share his perversity, and therefore am pleased to pass along the single piece of Santayanania I've enjoyed, "What Is a Philistine?", if only for its magnificent final paragraph.… |
Ray Davis |
07/04/05 |
6 |
07/05/05 |
| O Felix Errorem! |
In whom the dear errata column Is the best page in all the volume! — Thomas Moore Establishing the "real meaning" is one goal of the critic's game, but no one achieves a perfect final score, even when they live in the author's time and know the author intimately. (Sociologists estimate… |
Ray Davis |
06/25/05 |
11 |
04/11/06 |
| Occasioned |
The use of the essay, for example, a kind expressing liberal interest at first, began with Humanism in the sixteenth century; and one of its forms, the miscellaneous familiar essay, ceased to be popular after the crisis of Humanism in the 1930s. - Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature At 9 PM… |
Ray Davis |
06/16/05 |
5 |
06/20/05 |
| Heathcliff, Come Home |
I suppose many readers of The Valve eventually get around to The Yale Journal of Criticism on their own, but if un-lit blogs can point you to the New York Times front page, it must be OK for me to point you to "Petted Things" by Ivan Kreilkamp, starring the Brontë… |
Ray Davis |
05/28/05 |
2 |
06/03/05 |
| Precision and Theft |
Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity Stefan Jonsson reads like a nice guy. When he plays hunt-the-applicability against a full hand of voguish theorists, his point isn't to diagnose Musil away. His point is that The Man Without Qualities anticipates them. Not in the sense of… |
Ray Davis |
05/16/05 |
3 |
05/16/05 |
| The Perfecting of a Love |
Not many people share my interest in the contingency of canons and the fluidity of genres, but nearly everyone enjoys seeing bad reviews of (now) acknowledged "masterpieces". Either you get the warm satisfaction of mocking the (now) powerless for their stupidity, or you get the warm satisfaction of shared iconoclasm. I'm… |
Ray Davis |
05/12/05 |
9 |
11/12/07 |
| Straight “A"s in Love |
From "Representing Isabel Paterson" by Stephen Cox: While I was writing about Paterson, academic friends asked me, "What thesis do you want to prove?" I learned to answer, "None." A thesis is expected to be "cutting-edge," but I didn't want to cut anything. I wanted access to the longest circuit of… |
Ray Davis |
05/08/05 |
4 |
05/09/05 |
| Kubrick, Critic |
The first time I watch a Stanley Kubrick movie, I'm thrilled by its ambition and clarity. The second time, the anticipated moments of humor, beauty, and shock re-arrive precisely in order, but thinner, like an anecdote that's outlived the memory it tells. Actors who'd conveyed life in other roles are played… |
Ray Davis |
04/23/05 |
7 |
04/28/05 |
| The Spasmodic Gap: Textual Notes |
Although the editors and authors of Victorian Poetry, Vol. 42, No. 4, don't feel the need to issue a manifesto, they clearly enough share ideals of class mobility and aesthetic diversity. I wonder if any have considered that their work can only be reached by associates of fairly well funded institutions?… |
Ray Davis |
04/16/05 |
8 |
04/20/05 |
| The Spasmodic Gap |
In mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain, a group of left-wing lower-class poets publish autobiographical free verse epic dramas. Critics name them the Spasmodics. It sounds like a Howard Waldrop premise. Could the Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Poetry be hoaxing us? For a while, my answer was "Baby, I don't care." Editors Charles… |
Ray Davis |
04/16/05 |
8 |
04/20/05 |
