Stanley Fish’s article in the NYT struck a chord, given the way that I so often “miss” the glory of Shakespeare:
Shakespeare does many voices but identifies with none of them. (His, as Keats said, is a negative capability.) He’s hard to find, as his would-be biographers well know. Milton has many characters, but they all speak with one voice — his. You don’t have look for him; you can’t get away from him. Despite the variety of scenes and genres there’s always just one guy talking to you; the conversation goes on and on and it is a conversation in which, as Barrow first said, everything is at stake. This is a poetry that reads you.
One of my great flaws as a reader is my inability to track massive casts of characters during a story—I’ve always been drawn to lyric, to one voice that sings its own song. Conversation, in my experience, is always more rewarding in small groups rather than massive crowds. Fish continues:
We were in Ankeny, just north of Des Moines on the way home. Sitting next to the bar in an Outback, staring down a horribly desiccated ribeye, a heated conversation seemed to be progressing about sports teams in the Twin Cities. An older gentlemen opined, “Minneapolis is a fine city, one of the best I’ve ever been in.” A younger kid, who looked fresh off the farm in his tractor hat said: “I went to college in St. Paul, but I never saw much of anything. I pretty much stuck close to my dorm room.”
That’s always been a fear about going to grad school here—when will we be able to see stuff? It turns out that it really isn’t that big of a problem if you just get off your ass. On the other hand, there is just so much to see and do that it seems impossible to cover it all. We hit a new spot yesterday: The American Swedish Institute.
I was motivated by the notice of Stefan Peterson’s photographs. It seemed like a good reason to go. While the show didn’t excite me much, the museum made me think about other issues.
