Some musings

Today I went to a great lecture as part of the History of Material Texts Seminar being hosted by Penn. Today's speaker? Leonard Barkan from that one school in Jersey. He talked about papers of Michelangelo's with sketches and poetry on them. In the first slide he showed Michelangelo had used a picture (of a crane) as part of his signature but most of our time was spent talking about pieces which had multiple studies and poems on one sheet that were not explicitly connected. Michelangelo had beautiful handwriting. One woman at the round table made an interesting observation. She was curious about the juxtaposition of obviously unfinished drawings and this meticulous handwriting. One might very reasonably argue that sketching is to drawing as drafting is to poetry but the aesthetic differences between these two practices is startling. As a person who pays close attention to the materiality of a text and the materiality of the signifier, I found myself wondering what would it be like to sketch a letter.

As a child I practiced my signature and was forced to write even regular letters over and over again until I wrote them just right. In fact, my grandmother would sometimes throw away my homework if it was written sloppily. But even after an artist is skilled at his/her craft he composes sketches. What would a visual poet's sketch look like? And what would that mean for language?

The lecture (and the bibliography I'm working on) made me think of what status unpublished works have in the contemporary textual world. One might say that the internet has elevated unpublished texts to a new level of validity and certainly accessibility. "Valid" texts, such as Wikipedia or the OED are undergoing constant erasure yet in the world of literary history even such things as performing Shakespeare plays in modern setting make some scholars wince. How can we, as literary critics, even study unpublished works? If nothing else, it seems that this is our "data" to borrow from science. Without a title, a date or even a material existence (on paper at least) our job will become much different it seems to me, at least for people who study the contemporary.

Also, I think I've come up with a poetry project for myself that might be seriously worthwhile. I haven't worked out the exact perameters yet, but it may be promising. Perhaps I'll run it by the peeps. Working title: 100x100.