Whitmaniacs, go HERE NOW for a Library of Congress link for schoolteachers that has digitized images of some of Whitman’s notebooks, including from the Civil War (and a wrenching photo of a dead confederate solider in Spotsylvania). Don’t just look, READ: their names, their mother’s names, their ages, where they worked, where they’re from, which had been at Pfaff’s, their wounds and injuries (including overdosing), what they need from him (a clergyman, something to read), their qualities (somewhat “feminine”; “tall, well-tann’d,” an “oily, labial” way of speaking; “noble, beloved”); their battle stories.
Monday, September 28th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Again, Sharon Olds:
You move between the soldiers’ cots
the way I move among my dead,
their white bodies laid out in lines.
____
You bathe the forehead, you bathe the lip, the cock,
as I touch my father, as if the language
were a form of life.
_____
You write their letters home, I take the dictation
of his firm dream lips, this boy
I love as you love your boys.
____
They die and you still feel them. Time
becomes unpertinent to love,
to the male bodies in beds.
____
We bend over them, Walt, taking their breath
soft on our faces, wiping their domed brows,
stroking back the coal-black Union hair.
____
We lean down, our pointed breasts
heavy as plummets with fresh spermy milk–
we conceive, Walt, with the men we love, thus, now,
we bring to fruit.
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Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
As if that wasn’t enough: this one is actually Whitman! Cut from the ad, the final two lines of the poem: “A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, / Chair’d in the adamant of Time.”
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Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
A former student, Amanda Rutstein, just sent me this link to a Levi's commercial. I think you will recognize the poem (indeed, I think some of us have trashed it--does this change your mind?), but the images, sound effects (gun shots?), homoeroticism, etc. call for some analysis. Among other questions, would Whitman love this or feel co-opted by capitalism? After all, Levi's are the working man's jeans...
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Friday, September 25th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Hey Whitmaniacs, here’s a shiver-inducer:
Today I was in C’ville for an appointment and when it was done, my traveling companion Professor Emerson and I decided to stretch our legs on the grounds of our alma mater. Professor Emerson has a friend who works in the new rare book facility, which I had not seen, and we stopped by to see him. Although we missed him for the day, we paused to look in a small display on the edge of the controlled rare book area. And (hold your slouch hats), I suddenly recognized the handwriting on two pieces of paper, each about 3×5 (one with ragged edges as though torn out): a hand-written manuscript of “When I Heard at the Close of Day,” in ink with WW’s revisions in pencil (description in the display: “autograph manuscript with pencilled and pasted corrections in author’s hand. 1857-1859”), the final lines of the poem squeezed near the bottom of the second page. Needless to say, I nearly shrieked, but instead read the poem aloud to Professor Emerson, who bravely offered to risk jail by using her cell phone as a camera in the controlled rare book space. Though I was perfectly willing to risk her freedom in pursuit of Walt, we both felt the manuscript would not photograph through the specialized glass, so instead you have only this, my testimonio, and will have to trust me that it was wonderful.
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
When I was reading Sam P.’s post this week, I commented that he and I had discussed that Whitman Immersion had affected our very way of encountering the world, even making us question if we were reading Whitman too much into everything we see and hear and do. I called this in the comment wearing “Whitman-vision goggles,” and included the following parenthetical challenge which I repeat here in case you missed it:
(ANNOUNCED NOW: EXTRA CREDIT TO ANYONE WHO CAN BRING A MOCK-UP OF WHAT WHITMAN-VISION GOGGLES MIGHT LOOK LIKE. SPREAD THE WORD)
I know Brendon the Cupcake Man is already musing on it; I invite one and all in to the challenge.
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Monday, September 21st, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
I came across this story and video (do NOT skip the video, which features the poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!”, t-shirts with Whitman in slouch hat, a bad rendition of “I Kissed a Girl,” people spouting such hate it will give you shivers, and the weirdest dancing religious prostester I’ve seen in a long time) about a protest at Walt Whitman School in Bethesda last April and the counter-protest staged by students and teachers. Here’s what one protester says to sum it up:
“Walt Whitman is a f*g who died years ago and obviously has been worshiped to the degree that he has a school named after him.”
My friends, this, too, is Whitman under our bootsoles.
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Monday, September 21st, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Here is something I came across on umwblogs from a first-year seminar that discussed Whitman in relation to banned and dangerous art.
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Sunday, September 20th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
As I trekked around F’burg this morning with my dog Groundhog, I was listening to a podcast from The Memory Palace about Marconi, credited often with inventing the radio.
According to Nate DiMeo, late in his life, Marconi came to believe that sound waves never disappeared, but rather went on and on, infinitely in time and space, and that if he could just find the right frequency, he could listen to the past– to great speakers and figures and historical events, to the praise of others that would ensure he would live beyond his imminent death, to the most intimate of moments in his own life.
I was thinking about this tonight as I read the poem “So Long!” from Songs of Parting, in which Whitman announces his own departure from the text, from the stage, from the world. (Isn’t there a great tension in the line “To conclude—I announce what comes after me”?)
“I remember I said…”, says Whitman. “Hasten, throat, and sound your last! / Salute me– salute the day once more. Peal the old cry once more.”
and:
Screaming electric, the atmosphere using,
At random glancing, each as a notice absorbing,
Swiftly on, but a little while alighting,
Curious envelop’d messages delivering…
and:
So I pass—a little time vocal, visible, contrary,
Afterward, a melodious echo, passionately bent for—
(death making me really undying)
and:
Remember my words—I love you—I depart from
materials,
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.
If Whitman is sounding his voice out into the ages, then I am Marconi (we are Marconi), hand at the dial, turning so, so slowly and carefully to get out the static– or maybe wildly turning the dial left to right and back, trying to find the frequency on which we can really, truly hear Whitman, the real Whitman (won’t he please stand speak up?). For all the sound and fury signifying everything that Whitman generates, for all the meta-discussion of his own voice, I am straining across the ages trying to hear it for myself, sure with that same certainty that afflicted Marconi that it is still resonating.
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Sunday, September 20th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Dr. Earnhart and I were bemoaning the fact that the online 1867 edition doesn’t include cover shots (something like glamour shots, but a little more satisfying). I wanted to provide this link to another element of the vast Whitman Archive that supplements a little , though 1867 has many fewer images than other editions. But if you look just above 1867 in the history, you’ll also see Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps as they were first published before getting stuck into Leaves in a most ragtag fashion. For those who really love history of the book/material artifacts/publishing history, the whole thing is definitely worth reading, or at least scrolling through, for its stellar images.
Darn, I wish I could figure out how to stick-ify this post.
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