As an aside, I thought I might finally share my notes from a stellar performance at this year's MadLit conference: Mandy Glorian's work on the form of the personal essay.
Those unacquainted with Ms. Glorian's academic work will surely know her creative work, as she has succeeded where three and a half centuries of poets have failed: Glorian has rewritten John Milton's long, laborious, and ultimately dull epic poem, Paradise Lost. "The Tree of No" rattled the literary world with its elegant simplicity, rhapsodic musicality, and its daring forthrightness. Though some have argued for its shocking stupidity (one recent critic accused Ms. Glorian of poetic blasphemy and suggested that she be strung up from said "Tree of No") others have hailed her as a visionary. "Sons and Daughters of Mandy," as they call themselves, have begun the necessary work to rewrite literary history. Adaire Falcker and Daniel Lowenstine have laid claim to the rest of Milton's swollen corpus, beginning with Comus. D. Oucheb Ag, a graduate student at Rutgers - generally regarded as the nation's finest program in English Literature - has begun a project to paraphrase Shakespeare's sonnets; Al Legorical Name (pronounced Nah-meh), a creative writer at the University of Iowa, has shown definitively that Dickens' work can be improved by rendering it into stick figure drawings, thus eliminating the arbitrary nature of its excessive language; and Nire Refekytab, University of Wisconsin (Madison) writing fellow and future Nobel Prize candidate, has published her intentions to preemptively limit her poetry to Glorian guidelines.
Without further ado, here are my notes (my thoughts are in parenthesis). Those of you who were lucky enough to hear this magnificent essay should feel free to contribute your own notes.
- Montaigne was the first to puzzle over the question, "What do I know?" The more he asked, the more he realized he didn't know. He had to write himself.
- Montaigne was a swamp. (I had no idea.)
- Cultural apocalypse: psychological bifurcation of the self
- (Why are we talking about Ulysses? Shit, is Ulysses an essay?)
- Essay and fiction fuse. (Oh. Um.)
- Only in the modernist period could Borges say that the truth does not exist.
- Borges's essays are like bright pinatas.
- God is no longer paring his fingernails; instead, he's pinning the tail on the donkey.
- Essays turned to phantoms because there is no more self.
- (The girl seated next to Ms. Glorian on the panel is rolling her eyes.)
- New essayists turn away from themselves.
- Flickers of facts with festering fictions.
- Inner wanderings have turned to outward, and the "I" becomes a fiction.
- The blog is the new form of the essay.
- (Random insertion of "ok.")
- (That was ridiculous.)
As a further aside, I figured out how to make it easier to comment on posts. If you'd like to share your thoughts about Ms. Glorian's work or anything else on this blog, feel free.
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3 comments:
Being so early in my graduate career, I propose to focus my studies on Florianism so that not a mote of the elegant simplicity of her work will evade the watchful eye of scholarship. Should I accidentally be the founder of this new discipline, I will publish anonymously so as not to steal any recognition away from Florian, who deserves all praise for all things. I also propose that all instances of the word ¨knowledge¨ in the English language be de-kwledge-d.
In other news, I saw a 10-pound tumor lifted out of a woman´s stomach today. Mexico is weird.
It is with a regretful, but tranquil, resignation that I gratefully thank and acknowledge Florin relieving the Milton canon of what had become, frankly, a white elephant. We all knew that Paradise Lost was a mediocre effort at best, an unfortunate stain on the otherwise unsullied canon of this fine author, and I'm sure I speak for the whole Milton community when I say that I feel a delicious sense of liberty, now that I have ample time at my disposal to devote to Paradise Regained, Il Penseroso, and those inimitable latin sonnets. I think we all also look forward with hope to the day when Florian's rewriting is published for the world, and we can finally read a version of Paradise Lost that does not depress us with its abiding dullness.
....
I can't do it. I can't keep it up. I can't breathe because of the laughing. The phrase "laughing like a loon" comes to mind. Oh, god, and everyone's outside. The whole school thinks I'm insane. Like. a. Loon.
it is true that i originally intended to adhere to florianism in my future work-- what else could one propose to devote herself to while bathed in the light of such genius?
since, however, i have resolved upon a different tack: i am going to kill the aforementioned florian in her sleep. she is too good, and i am not one to fling myself into lake mendota because my budding literary career has been so summarily eclipsed.
in the end, i am more of a homicide person than a suicide person. perhaps, if i cannot attain fame through my own work or even a pale imitation of florian's, i can gain infamy by being her assassin.
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