Patrick Schumacher on OOO Architecture

I found this on Graham's blog just now. E.g.:

“Whatever object-oriented ontology becomes within architecture, it must be post-relational in the way Derrida, for instance, was post-structural.”

Realist Magic on Melancholy and Objects

I just edited this bit:

“melancholy doesn't imply anything about subjectivity. All you need for melancholy are various kinds of object. This is what makes it different, in traditional psychoanalytic theories, from other affects. Indeed, melancholy speaks a truth of all objects—recall that I here use the term “object” in a value-neutral way, implying any real entity whatsoever, not objectification or subject–object dualism. But melancholy doesn't require fully formed subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity is a result of an abnegation of the melancholic abject (Kristeva). The melancholy coexistence of objects predates the existence of the ego. Egos presuppose ancient layers of beings, fossilized remains.”

State Shift Alert

"Earth approaches a 'state shift'...never to return."

HT Dirk Felleman.

Harman Talks about His New Literature Essay

We both wrote things for New Literary History. Graham's is a total blast.

A Toaster, an Octopus, a Plan, a Canal

Ian Bogost is on a bit of a tear today about toasters not being octopi, and I don't blame him.

Ian says this: “So much of poststructuralism deals with blending and bleeding borders.” Yes. I was trying to get at that with my post on horror. Bodies are determinate and fragile. You can break them. They are not infinitely malleable. When I cut you, you bleed.

It's even more drastic than the admirably clear way Ian outlines it in his post, saying that an octopus is not a toaster. An octopus is not an octopus. Not because it is a toaster, but its very octopusness withdraws, even from its own appearance.

OOO finds cracks and chasms everywhere, where immanence theories find smooth fuzz.

For the immanentist to claim (as has been done recently on empyre) that the octopus is a toaster actually requires that octopi be distinct from toasters.

If they were toasters then they would just be toasters already, without being distinguishable from octopi. And so on. If a toaster really could be an octopus it wouldn't be a toaster, and so couldn't be an octopus...

It's like those drawings by Escher: they only work if foreground and background are in fact different.

OOO-ers are to some extent transcendence people. There is a radical cut between foreground and background, octopus and toaster.

For the immanentist, octopi are just n moves away from being bent into toasters.

Conclusion: you will fear OOO if you are an immanentist. It is you who think that the world is one great big lump of whatever, not us. We think it's octopi and toasters, forks, lemonade and Brazil.

The Thought-Fox

The first poem that really grabbed me, at age 7 or 8. By Ted Hughes:

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Thanks John

Thank you John--I suspected it was Adorno and you have saved me so much toil. Thank you.

Marina Zurkow's New Things

Marina Zurkow
WORLD ON A WIRE

bitforms gallery nyc


June 28 - August 3, 2012


Opening Reception: Thursday, June 28, 2012, 6:00 - 8:30 PM

Summer Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday, 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a summer group exhibition that features the work of seven artists: Marco Brambilla, Daniel Canogar, Yael Kanarek, Tim Knowles, Mark Napier, Casey Reas, and Marina Zurkow. Borrowing its title from World on a Wire, Rainer Fassbinder's 1973 sci-fi film set in a cybernetics and futurology lab, the exhibition explores behavioral complexity, madness and simulation.

Three projects in the exhibition are New York debuts: Mark Napier's net.flag: ten years of flags, comprised of nearly 23,000 flags created by visitors to the net.flag website; Marina Zurkow's The Thirsty Bird, an animation informed by a residency in Houston; and Marco Brambilla's RPM, a psychological video portrait of a Formula One driver's point-of-view.

Crooked Timber on the Virginia Unpleasantness

This really is a rather good parody of the unpleasantness via Jefferson's own words...HT Jeremy Braddock.

Help Me Source this Talk

"Freedom in Unfreedom." I'm shelving my books in my new office, and found this. It's a photocopy. It was given in February 1965 and it's translated from German. I think it's Adorno. Yes?

GMO Grass, Cattle, Cyanide

Unbelievable.

The Viriginia Unpleasantness

1. Dragas got the idea from a David Brooks op-ed piece? What the fuck?

2. The idea being to ... what? This was never ever made explicit, in particular in the minds of those who thought Doing Something was imperative.

2.a. The only Thing that has Happened has been the ouster of a particularly good president, the first woman to hole the job at UVa. 

3. Did no one check actually existing online programs? The UC one just tanked, costing about $10m (it made a loss). University of Illinois blew $120m on theirs before they pulled it. I did try to warn the UC guys before they started a couple years ago.

4. Sure, UVa could become like University of Phoenix. They accept anyone who will pay. LOL.

5. Online works if you're a superstar calc teacher or whatever and you have 200 000 students. But that's not a university anymore.

6. Private universities that are for real (Harvard, Rice, Brown, Princeton etc.) are (sorry to say) a lot less “corporate” than the public ones at this point. For instance, a majority of incoming Rice freshman two years in a row are not white. A majority are low income.

7. Dragas, do you think Jefferson et al. called y'all “Visitors” not CEOs or even managers for a reason?

Clara van Zanten Job

I'm so proud of her--she has an appointment at Luther College. She's the go to person for ecological readings of Ashbery and several contemporary Language and experimental poets.

A Reading of Jordan Crandall's Hotel

I posted this on empyre:

Hello Everyone,

My first reaction to Hotel is that the first few seconds are as it were without people, like that chapter "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse. The wet skin is also without a person, in particular, just the light of the bathroom reflected in the droplets of water. A conversation between a foot and a tap, some ripples.

One could of course read the whole thing as metaphorical for or otherwise figurative for the human-human interactions going on. But the paradox is that the movie relies on allowing the nonhumans to float free of specific ties to human significance at every opportunity.

The slightly threatening sense of sheer existence is there--we have no idea what is happening, along with a too-mundane all-too-familiar quality, coupled with a certain uncomfortable voyeurism. The idea perhaps that there should be something to see, giving rise to anxiety.

The whole thing is like a massively exploded version of the plughole moment in Psycho, from the camerawork point of view. Many many interstitial shots--a doorway, some pillows, the back of the room service girl. These sorts of shots are usually to prepare for something such as an encounter between humans, but they seem delinked from that, as if the camera itself wanted to talk to the moving trolley, the curtain and the shadows.

My Tibetan Buddhist teacher talks about mandala principle this way: you should be in life as in a hotel, because you enjoy it better that way. It's not yours, yeah it's a non-place, but not (even) necessarily in that scary Romantic way Augé talks about.

We have no idea what happened in that room. Each shot becomes a metaphor for each other shot, so that finally it's undecidable whether this is really a story about a room service girl, or a girl eating scrambled eggs, or a story about scrambled eggs talking to a fork, or skin talking to a faucet.

In the absence of a metaphysics of cause and effect (from Hume and Kant on), what we have are statistical correlations. The movie plunges us into the void of reason that Kant detects in the Humean destruction of causality (a destruction that just is the condition of modern science).

That void of reason is the gap between my (human) mind and another thing. But there are other gaps: between a pile of scrambled eggs and a bowl; between a foot and the bathroom floor; between a trolley and the doorway; between an eye and another eye, one looking through a crack in a doorway, the other not.

Only metaphor bridges these gaps, which is to say, metaphor just is how causality functions in a universe of entities that don't sum to one another. That is, if we're not living in a total blend-o-rama where the eggs are the fork and so on. The tension in the movie is precisely the tension between a myriad cracks in and between things.

Btw: My OOO use of withdrawal means open secret, not hiding or shrinking, or excess. Something unspeakable and irreducibly untranslatable.

Yours, Tim

The Museum of Failed Products

Aka GfK Custom Research, Ann Arbor. HT Roy Sellars. Sometimes accenting the positive is not such a good idea.

Drunk Me Talking Bollocks in Some SF Bar

With some anarchists. This actually happened, right after my talk at the ALA last month. Tim Morton, John Crossley, Bill Rose, Alex Zane (who recorded it), and some other good chums talking Objects and Revolution at Tosca Cafe, San Francisco, May 26, 2012. Alex called it “We're from the Future.”

My Initial Reactions to David Golumbia's Thoughts on OOO and SR

Darwin Writes a Grant Proposal

Oh my.

Heidegger Tries to Access Online Learning, Fails

Thanks to Roy Sellars. Laughter.

Rodney King RIP

I first showed up in America for a conference at CUNY that coincided with the start of the LA riots that erupted when the LAPD officers were acquitted for being Rodney King.

There was a march for Rodney King in downtown Mamhattan where I remember eating my first improbably immense (I love that word now) slice of pizza with broccoli on it.

So it's strange to wake up (20 minutes ago) to the fact that Rodney King just died 20 years later, almost exactly.

And I mean strange in that Wordsworthian sense of a spot of time--a feeling of trauma around which meanings are secreted but never quite enough.

Outside My Department

Beautiful, no?

Plant Sentience 101

On NPR. Thanks Dirk Felleman (finally getting to this as I've been in transition).

Another Great Line on OOO Politics

"OOO argues for more power and respect towards the inherent in a human being or society, rather than condemning it forever in the labyrinth of past/existing relations.” Mrinmoyee Bhattacharya (my Ph.D. student)

A Great Line on OOO and Politics

From my Ph.D. student Mrin Bhattacharya:

The necessity to break from ghosts of the past and believe in the reconstruction of new relations and identity is imperative for the progress of an individual and also society. OOO rescues entities from the oppression of order.

My OOO Class Projects

Guess what? A whole bunch about OOO, ethics and politics.

I'm reading this piece by Mrinmoyee Bhattacharya right now on India, imperialism and OOO. I'll see if she'd mind me quoting some of it.

Received Today

Scott Hess, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship. He tells me it has some Ecology without Nature in it. Thank you Scott.

Butter on the Paws of My Brain, Part 2

I know this feeling: I have arrived. It's taken my brain a good ten days to figure out that I'm here, in Houston, in this house.

I'm not used to it, no siree. I'm just saying something in me realized I had stopped moving.

Humans and Antihumanism

"It is odd, in the current debate on gender, sexuality and OOO, to see scholars steeped in the lineages of antihumanism (from Foucault, etc.), holding the line for humans against the dreaded 'objects.' "

Discuss.

Nice One Ian

“ We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.”

It's Rilke Time

With deep thanks to the one who found it.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Received Today

Well two days ago actually but I'm being a bit slow on this blog, sorry about that. Transition.

Kristen Iversen's Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. Just in time for Hyperobjects, which got an excellent report. Gosh I have lots of work to do. But because I'm a maniac, that's a good thing : )

Transitions

I'm undergoing it. The interesting thing is, I'm sleeping, like a lot. When I showed up in Davis, I would unpack stuff and fall asleep from 2pm to 6pm. It was strange because like a lot of people newly landed in Cali, I thought I was in paradise, so surely there couldn't be anything wrong...

This time I realize that it's my brain. My brain needs to feel like it lives here, in Houston's Museum District.

If my brain were a cat I could coat its paws with butter and it would lick off the butter and get used to the new tastes. We do it in the UK, you know...it's a real thing, we do it...

But sadly I have not been able to find a way to butter my brain yet.

Clara Van Zanten Has a Blog

And I have learned from it. So shall you. It is about poetics and weather.

"If you're feeling under pressure, try doing somehting different"

"Roll up your sleeves, or eat an orange." Immortal advice from Manny of Back Books. Or you can try this. “The Beach” by The Aloof. It's just a gigantic wave of whatever:

Edward Thomas vs. Prince

Who rocks the Levinasian “il y a” (the environmental creepiness of existence) hardest? YOU decide:

Prince:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June. 

_____

Edward Thomas: 

Hurricane Annie ripped the ceiling off a church
And killed everyone inside
U turn on the telly and every other story
Is tellin' U somebody died
Sister killed her baby cuz she couldn't afford 2 feed it
And yet we're sending people 2 the moon
In September my cousin tried reefer 4 the very first time
Now he's doing horse, it's June

Design Ecologies 2.2 cfp

The next issue, Design Ecologies 2.2: a sentient relic explores strategies and tactics in the deluge of our environmental alterity, through nexuses between ecological, notational, instructional and aesthetical design visions. We are looking for models and speculations for grasping non-anthropocentric as a design methodology and collapse of the natural onto the artificial, all in connection with Design Ecologies. Architecture as a convoluted plane of tactics and meta-strategies for giving rise to a twisted strain of designing in the built environment. Designing may be understood to be an exploration of alternative principles to emergent practical environmental problems.

Regular updates about design ecologies is at: http://designecologies.tumblr.com/

Hyperobjects Art

This is looking very right. You can order the cards on the website.

The Conversation: An Interview

Aegnus was so very good at his job. I look scary on his page about it!

Tropical Storm

First afternoon at the beach here. Tropical storm blew in a mound of weed. Wind and surf playing up. Different from the tranquil stillness I had heard about last week. I am using Logical Investigations as a sun shade.

Bless You Roy Sellars

Everyone should have a Swiss friend who sends them quotes from Heidegger every day just to share the love and chill. I've learned more from these quotations in the last few weeks than I have from a whole bunch of reading.

Lara Schaberg

She paints rock.

Hawking, Wha-?

Stephen Hawking once ran me over in his wheelchair outside the Oxford Covered Market. True story. I'm still a bit cross.

He is a positivist? Good heavens. He may be able to predict radiation from the event horizon of a black joke but my oh my. Anyway here's Graham cheering up your Sunday.

Egocentric Molecules

Romanticism: MP3 The Last Class of Tim Morton at UCD : (

Sadness and beauty are intertwined anyhow. I liked how it ended. Time to die...

Prometheus as Speculative Realism: A Black Metal Movie

Finally in Houston, where enormous cinemas proffer their wares. Went to see Prometheus in 3-D. Nasties jumping out at you and so on, tremendous depth, etc.

I don't wish to put any plot spoilers here. But I think you will dig it if you are into speculative realism. Thinking the human beyond the human, and then ... (well, okay I'm not going to go there). And the whole thing aesthetically looks like the cover of a Wolves in the Throne Room record. The boiling, roiling, complex water and rock.

The very first scene is a subarctic environment of waterfalls and rocks and ice, with a robed and hooded figure standing on the edge of a chasm, who turns to be ...

And three cheers for the protagonist, a woman archaeologist who ...

And of course the teetering on, and falling over the edge of, nihilism.

Objects at Rest, Dreaming

A beautiful piece by performance studies Ph.D. Kevin O'Connor. We all found it quite intense.

In Mishka's Again

If you are my student and want to stop by.

The Pleasure of the Snow Lion

In the Shambhala teachings, the snow lion is connected with being perky, enjoying the freshness of the highland mountains. The snow lion is vibrant, energetic, and also youthful, roaming the highlands where the atmosphere is clear and the air is fresh. The snow lion is not perked up by temporary situations but experiences unconditional cheerfulness. Just as the snow lion enjoys the refreshing air, the perky warrior enjoys continous discipline. For the snow lion, discipline is not a demand but a pleasure.
Trungpa Rinpoche

OOO Class: Aesthetics and Politics (MP3, video)

Apropos of the recent unpleasantness around Graham Harman's interview, I found it telling that Laura Meek, my Anthropology Ph.D. student, told me that she had gotten pretty strongly yelled at for even attending my OOO class. She was yelled at by the Marxists in her department.

I think that's pretty political, don't you? : )

Laura just taught anarchism at Occupy here.

You'll hear her discussion of it with me and the rest of the class about half way through this bumper final issue.

It seems as if Hegelians give us the most trouble, Marxist or no, so I'm not surprised that it was the somewhat nihilist/Hegelian/Žižekian AUFS that put Alex Galloway's response up.  Nihilist Christians. I believe in God more than they do, and I'm a non-theist.

BTW I had to change batteries on the MP3 recorder about 2/3 of the way through. 

Anyway, if you are looking for an OOO discussion of politics by an OOOer who has read all of Capital, look no further. Although why one hadn't been following Levi Bryant on this is a little bit strange.

There was the most incredible performance piece by my student Kevin O'Connor, called Objects at Rest, Dreaming. I videoed it and it will be up here soon.

Students, I'm about to Hold Office Hours

In Mishka's, and this is the easiest way to communicate that to you.

Romanticism 22: Frankenstein (MP3)

Stephanie Galasso, undergrad extraordinaire, was there (good luck at Brown!). I prowled up and down and growled a bit, about undeath. And Blade Runner (natch).

Enter the Void

You really really must see Enter the Void if you are:

a) a Buddhist
b) a speculative realist
c) having a pulse

It is everything I like about speculative realism and Buddhism condensed into a very powerful movie. Horrifying and sad and wonderful, and outrageous. An animal lover pointed me in the right direction. Haven't even finished seeing it yet but you can bet I'll be writing about it, over and over again.

It's called Enter the Void people. Enter the fucking Void!

Terrific Interview

With Harman.

"If you speak of “the Arab mind” or “the feminine essence” as if these were eternal and knowable constants unchanged across the centuries, rather than as historically produced phenomena, then there are obvious problems."

Romanticism 21: Shelley (mp3)

In My Head There Is a Mirror

You know what rocks? This.

How to Read Any Poem Anywhere Syllabus

You asked for it!

ENL45

Introduction to Poetry: How to Read Any Poem, Anywhere

Professor Timothy Morton (tbmorton@ucdavis.edu)

Assisted by Shane Kraus (smkraus@ucdavis.edu)

Olson 118, TR 10:30am–11:50am.

Professor Morton's office hours: Voorhies 211, M 9am–10am, W 9am–10am or by appointment.

Shane Kraus's office hours: Voorhies 335, T 12pm–1pm.

Grading: two short papers (45%), one exam (20%), homework and participation (35%). 

What is a poem? Why is reading poetry important? Are there techniques of reading that anyone can learn and apply? In this class we shall study a wide range of poetry with a view to understanding how to read poems. This class will set you up for life, and certainly for the scope of your undergraduate career. Say goodbye to close reading anxiety. This class will sort you out.

Requirements:

2 essays. Four pages, double spaced, 12-point font. NO secondary texts.

Essay 1: Due 2.9. Close reading of ONE short poem or a SMALL part of a longer one (you will be taught how to do this).

Essay 2: Due 3.15. Close reading of ONE short poem or a SMALL part of a longer one (you will be taught how to do this).

You can do as many drafts of Essay 1 as you like. If you hand it in on or before the due date, you can revise it as many times as you like until the final class.

Homework. Homework is set for each class. On the syllabus below, you will find the homework for each particular class at the end of the entry for that class.

·      Homework exercises. 

o   You will be required to write something short.  Bring your answers in for discussion. 

o   You will be called on at random in class and we will check your name off. 

o   You will be called on at random for written work and we will check your name off. 

o   There is a 5% extra credit for homework. Higher points will be given if you hand in your homework on or close to its due date.

Attendance.  Non-attendance must be excused by Doctor's note or religious holiday. 

o   Attendance also means taking care of yourself and others and being aware of your environment in class.

o   Attendance also includes the following: No mobile phones; No eating. 

Reading!  You won't be able to keep up with this class unless you do all of it. 

Participation. 

o   Participation includes reading aloud, speaking mindfully, being aware of others in your environment and being kind to yourself and others. 

o   Identify yourself when you speak!

Final Exam. 2 close readings and terminology. Blue books please.

Students with disabilities: please contact me and every effort will be made to accommodate you.

January 10. Class 1. Rendezvous.

January 12. Class 2. Structure and space.

            Charles Bernstein, “THIS POEM INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.”

            John Ashbery, from The System.

            e.e. cummings, “spring is like a perhaps hand.”

January 17. Class 3. Structure: lineation and stanza form.

            George Herbert, “Easter Wings.”

            Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” from Leaves of Grass.

            Brenda Iijima, “(a brittle day passed by).”

Homework: using two words on one page, arrange them in three different ways. Describe the effects of doing so.

January 19. Class 4. Structure: syntax.

            William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say.”

            William Blake, “The Lamb.”

Homework: write four lines with cool lineation. Write four lines with hot lineation.

January 24. Class 5. Texture: rhythm 1: stresses.

            Jane Taylor, “The Star.”

            William Blake, “The Tyger.”

            Christian Hawkey, “Hour of Secret Agents.”

Homework: write two sentences with cool syntax. Write two sentences with hot syntax.

January 26. Class 6. Texture: rhythm 2: feet.

            Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

            William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey.”

            John Clare, “I Am.”

January 31. Class 7. Texture: rhyme 1: end rhyme.

            Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.

            Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias.”

Homework: write two lines with a hot stress pattern. Write two lines with a cool stress pattern.

February 2. Class 8. Texture: rhyme 2: internal rhyme.

            Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

            Maya Angelou, Inaugural Poem.

Homework: write four lines with hot end rhyme. Write four lines with cool end rhyme.

February 7. Class 9. Perception 1: imagery ON or OFF.

            William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say.”

            D.H. Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians.”

            T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton 1 (Four Quartets).

Homework: write three lines with hot internal rhyme. Write three lines with cool internal rhyme.

February 9. Class 10. ESSAY 1 DUE.

Perception 2: imagery ON; positive and negative.

John Milton, from Paradise Lost. (2.629–680).

Jean Valentine, “Your Number Is Lifting Off My Hand.”

Homework: Write two lines with absent imagery. Write two lines with present imagery.

February 14. Class 11. Perception 3: imagery ON; positive; tropes and figures 1 (brightness).

            John Keats, “On a Grecian Urn.”

            Amiri Baraka, “Something in the Way of Things.”

            Audre Lorde, “Coal.”

Homework: write two lines of positive imagery. Write two lines of negative imagery.

February 16. Class 12. Perception 4: imagery ON; positive; tropes and figures 2 (contrast).

            Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”

            Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro.”

Homework: write two lines containing metaphor. Write two lines containing metonymy.

February 21. Class 13. Narrators 1: Point of view. Grand march past of the genres.

            William Blake, “A Poison Tree.”

            Dorothy Parker, “Résumé.”

Homework: write two lines containing hot imagery. Write two lines containing cool imagery.

February 23. Class 14. Narrators 2: Subject position.

            William Blake, “The Clod and the Pebble.”

            Homework: write an epigram.

February 28. Class 15. Narrative 1: plot and story.

            John Milton, from Paradise Lost (1.1–125).

            Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Homework: write a four-line poem that forces the reader to read it from the subject position of a stupid but very rich playboy.

March 1. Class 16. Narrative 2: frequency and duration; beginning, middle, and end.

            Homer, The Iliad (book 1).

            Christian Rossetti, Goblin Market.

Homework: Write a four-line story with strong aperture. Write a four-line story with strong closure.

March 6. Class 17. Advanced poetics 1.

            William Wordsworth, from The Ruined Cottage (first two verse paragraphs).

            Percy Shelley, from Alastor (first two verse paragraphs).

            Homework: Write a six-line story with strong development.

March 8. Class 18. Advanced poetics 2.

            T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land (part 2).

            Brenda Hillman, from Cascadia (first page).

            Homework: Write a sonnet.

March 13. Class 19. Advanced poetics 3.

            John Ashbery, “Clepsydra.”

            Homework: Write an ode.

March 15. Class 20. ESSAY 2 DUE.

Revision class.

March 22. FINAL EXAM. 10.30am–12.30pm. Blue books please.