SLSL Wandering Scholars

[Bahia Quasimodo]

Dave, 

"...exaggerting their reading is the eternal
temptation of bibliographers." 
                      -Waddell, Helen

New at my library. 

Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar
America 

http://www.hprob.com/May2002Reviews/conspiracynation.htm

Cognitive fictions / Joseph Tabbi. 
Minneapolis, MN ; London : University of Minnesota
Press, c2002.

Narrative innovation and cultural rewriting in the
Cold War era and after / Marcel Cornis-Pope. 

Thomas Pynchon's Narratives: Subjectivity and Problems
of Knowing (Modern American Literature, Vol. 24.) 
Alan W. Brownlie / Hardcover / Published 2000

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and
artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him,
for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

T.S. Eliot,  "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
(1922). 

There is no beginning, this side of the classics, to a
history of mediaeval Latin; its roots take hold too
firmly on the kingdom of the dead. The scholar's lyric
of the twelfth century seem as new a miracle as the
first crocus; but its earth is the leadrift of
centuries of forgotten scholarship. His emotional
background is of his own time; his literary background
is pagan, and such furniture as his mind contains is
classical or pseudo-classical. W. xi

This [classical, pseudo-classical, pagan] liveliness
is not the popular impression of mediaeval
scholarship; but this is a good deal due to the
diabolical and immortal parody of the sixteenth
century, of Erasmus, or Rebelais…It was true enough in
the for the fifteenth century outside Italy, and for
the fourteenth, when theology and law and the
commercial spirit among them had killed the study of
classics at the Universities. Already in the
thirteenth century John of Garland complained that the
grass was withering in the ancient fields. W. xv

This study of the Vagantes is little more than the
scaffolding of its subject. W.Preface (1926) 

Waddell's study looks at lyric poetry as it sprang
from the green in Ireland, withered, dried up, and
died. She approaches her subject chronologically.
Still, she too becomes something of a wandering
scholar zigzagging in and out of the centuries because
dead poets from one century have a way of rising from
the grave in another and disturbing the "season due"
to the living.  Moreover, since the lyric poets are
great thieves and grave robbers, the voices of the
dead haunt their songs. It is not often possible for
Weddell to determine who wrote a particular lyric or
when it was composed. A Vagabond may have composed a
lyric attributed to a Pope: one of Waddell's themes.
Waddell comments on a couple of scholarly debates
about authorship, but she does not burden the reader
with these. Her objective is not to determine the
authorship of lyrics or to show that authorship is
often a matter of politics/religion and scholastic
revisionism, but to show how the lyrics were born from
very mixed marriages of the living and the dead. Her
chronological schema says more about how she
structured the book into chapters than how the lyrics
were constructed. 

The truth is that, with very few exceptions, there is
no pigeonholing possible. We can not often say that
this was written by a vagabond and this by an
archdeacon. W.vii

Why did the scholars wander? 
There are many reasons. 
Some would have prefered not to wander but were forced
to. And, they took to an Irish tradition: "wandeering
is second nature to the Irish race." W.35

Close to the end of his last term at Cornell, Farina
seemed to grow impatient.
                 -Pynchon, Intro. BDSL


Today is world kindness day, 

Sal



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