(no subject)

I thought doing MIlton in two classes at once would be a great time-saver, but it's actually kind of maddening: we're teaching excerpts out of order, in the one, and going through it book by book in the grad class. By Spring Break we'll be done in Class A and halfway through in B.

The Ovid class is plugging into it in a lot of fascinating ways--and last term's pre-enlightenment criticism course was also very helpful. They *really* need to integrate these various courses as a kind of backbone for literary studies. I've read most of this stuff before, but in sequence it all connects up quite remarkably. You sort of pick up the entirety of what's being attempted, at each point--whereas individually you just accept that some parts of any given book will be weird and uninteresting. The connections to other texts, and to the broad movements of cultural history (how comparatively irrelevant the eddies are, even for Dante) clarify most everything. Various ideas I was in violent opposition to, and essentially still am, are rendered tolerable and intelligible as parts of this struggle, this heated conversation.

Ovid was a particularly good starting point because he gives you both himself and a Cliff's Notes version of G-R culture--though it's remarkable how often Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton go back to him rather than Hesiod, the dramatists, Pindar, even Homer. Greek must be hard? They keep his takes, his phrasings.

I regret more and more never finishing the Iliad (apparently I'm okay not reading the latter half of the Aeneid?) but won't be able to for years now, it feels like.

Anyway, the Milton. I'm much more interested in details this time around. I want his exact meaning, his exact ambiguities, exact evasions. This is probably hurting it as a story. I remember being hypnotized by it, by the characters, everything, the first time through. The language especially and how everything else seems taken up into it. This still happens at times--probably several different kinds of exhaustion are the main block. Book 4 was pretty damn amazing again.

And the connections. I need to learn to annotate. Every verse paragraph recalls/anticipates at least one other text, and not idly. I like this opening out. I like the depth, which is a cliche term, but needs to be dwelt on. The difference between entry and just passing by. I write in haste. My enemies near.