The Dark Side of the Moon

Well, you never achieve everything you wanted to. It's the simple act of writing. You begin with a platonic ideal that is a shimmering tower carved out of pure diamond, that is this perfect thing that stands there unfouled by gravity and the weather. And, then, the thing that you build is this thing that you have to build out of whatever is at hand and you use empty sushi boxes and chairs and get friends to hold it up and try to make it look like it's standing. And at the end of it, people look at it and they say, "It's amazing." And you say, "Yes, but if only I could have done the thing that is in my head."

—Gaiman, when asked if he felt he'd achieved everything he wanted to with The Sandman. (Hanging out with the Dream King, p. 20)

I don't know many people who speak in perfect prose, but Neil's one of them.

—Dave McKean in an interview (Hanging out with the Dream King, p. 6-7)

What does that mean, to 'speak in perfect prose'? That it sounds, to the rest of us, like something worked out on the page and subsequently revised, I suppose. This is perhaps why interviews will Gaiman go so well: people read the author's person as they'd hoped to find him from his texts. 

Yesterday I read the Bouchard/Simon translation of Foucault's What Is an Author? Unsurprisingly, it's very, very good. My work has become ruled by the author-function as a point of obsession: applied to Gaiman, we call this celebrity; applied to Shakespeare, we call this scholarship.

The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author... are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.

When we read The Sandman for pleasure, we rely on our ability to address Gaiman's authorship as an entity in flux. Fans beg for backstory, annotated editions*, preliminary sketches. We interview him, over and over, we follow the blog and lose our knickers when the prequel is announced. Why? I like to think of it as a response to the world the text evokes, a kind of moving literary shadow. It's the reason we send up probes to take pictures of the dark side of the moon, the way we crouch down and peer into the backs of drawers when looking something, even though our hands have already come up empty. We want to confirm our suspicions, we want the intangible real. Realized.

But we can't have that with Will. Not until, as I have often fantasized, we dig up his grave and find The Long Lost Journals or recover Cardenio will we have 'new' academic flesh to sink our teeth into. What changes is the conversation--Shakespeare stays the same, but 'Shakespeare' evolves.

*A word on The Annotated Sandman v.1: yes, it is that good, except that The Sandman Chronology the editor uses is of variable quality.

because of boys in books

Gaiman, climbing a drainpipe, aged seven. 

"When I was seven I used to climb down drainpipes, because boys in books climbed down drainpipes."

Let us imagine

Today, the first (and arguably greatest) installment of our periodic Academic Badass series: Stephen Greenblatt.

As part of my ongoing project to force the rest of the world to revere academics as the rockstars they are, I want to spend a little time  shedding light on those individuals who only occasionally reach notoriety outside their own academic spheres. Greenblatt is an exception, having just won the Pulitzer for Swerve. Which, in my unsolicited opinion, is more a credit to the prize than to him.

Swerve, like Will in the World, is a masterful work of what my dear friend and gifted thinker M. Gaffney calls Pop-New-Historicism. Both indulge our desires to rummage around in our favorite versions of the past. Dirty laundry and lost libraries. I won't do either of them justice here, and so refer you to Gaffney's review on the former, which I find both illuminating and excellently crafted. 

Greenblatt writes deliciously on Hamlet and whatever else he puts his mind to. When I find myself despairing of the academic condition (and thus my life), sighing balefully and photocopying the Franklin Dickinson,  I pick up one of his essays and remember again why I do this. I write and read and dote, cite, compile and quote because I have to—we have to put ourselves into our pasts, our texts, to re-create them. And in that we create ourselves anew.

Three years ago nearly to the day, the person who infected me first with Shakespeare directed me to the OED etymology for the verb "to inspire":

Old French enspirer, inspirer (13th cent.), espirer (12th cent. in Littré), < Latin inspīrāre to blow or breathe into, < in- (in- prefix²) + spīrāre to breathe.

Or, as Greenblatt would say, "I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter".