Endless Nights, 147

(although the wish and the thing are so close in the realm of the Endless that you cannot get a thin-bladed knife between them)

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".

Milo Manara's Desire

 originally published in Endless Nights, which I found here.

Do what thou wilt, buster!

Dave McKean's illustration The White Road from Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, which in some way is the only appropriate way to begin this blog, as indeed the blog begins with it.

The beautiful advantage to writing a thesis concerning something you love (in my case, Sandman, Shakespeare, & Plautus) is what ends up falling under the purview of "research". In my sick and twisted rationale, every attempt must be made to uncover anything which could possibly contribute to the project at hand.

This, by the way, is impossible. And, as H.H. Furness avowed a hundred or so years ago, "were I told that my closest friend was lying at the point of death, and that his life could be saved by permitting him to divulge his theory of Hamlet, I would instantly say, ‘Let him die! Let him die! Let him die!"

Shakespeare, and his very corporeal body of work, is someone we simply cannot shut up about—as he himself could not keep his mouth shut nor quill clean of Titus Maccius Plautus (we write what we know, I suppose). Gaiman's well on his way, as this blog and every other of its kind will attest. So to begin a project obsessed with amassing said body of work is suicidal.

Which is exactly the fight I had had with myself yesterday, "researching" McKean's current work while re-reading Preludes & Nocturnes, trying desperately to justify the intensive google image search with my very own completist research philosophy. I looked at this damn picture and knew it would never be useful in my thesis. It's just gorgeous. And no, that's not enough: beauty for its own sake is not the province of an academic piece—or at least not this one. But I can't bring myself to trash these gems I find along the way. Nor the conversations they may inspire.

So, a blog.

Here, I hope to host a forum of indulgence. All the Gaiman/Sandman information I cannot part with, juicy tidbits here and there on Will and Plautus. Nerdy interludes. Fantastic musings. High-minded rubbish, occasionally. And you, my dear and prospective readers, are invited.