Headpiece Filled With Straw

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

Republishing, for Good Friday, and the tremendous dramatic reading by Sam Waterston and Harold Holzer on Bill Moyer's Journal, on this Lincoln bicentennial year.

Assassinated on Good Friday as the Civil War was coming to a close, Abraham Lincoln was transformed from man to martyr and myth. A special performance edition of Bill Moyers Journal on April 10th, celebrates Lincoln's profound legacy in his bicentennial year. Acclaimed actor Sam Waterston and historian Harold Holzer share poetry and prose by great American writers as different as Frederick Douglas, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsburg, Langston Hughes and Herman Melville. Responding to the arc of ideas, language and history in this performance piece, Moyers says, "Lincoln changes as we hear these words, and so does the country."

By Walt Whitman

1
WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

2
O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!

3
In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.

4
In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary, the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)

5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground,
spotting the gray debris;)
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

7
(Nor for you, for one, alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:
For fresh as the morning—thus would I carol a song for you, O sane and sacred death.

All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies;
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you, and the coffins all of you, O death.)

8
O western orb, sailing the heaven!
Now I know what you must have meant, as a month since we walk’d,
As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic,
As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all
look’d on;)
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something, I know not what, kept me
    fromsleep;)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west, ere you went, how full you were of woe;
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze, in the cold transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,

As my soul, in its trouble, dissatisfied, sank, as where you, sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

9
Sing on, there in the swamp!
O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes—I hear your call;
I hear—I come presently—I understand you;
But a moment I linger—for the lustrous star has detain’d me;
The star, my departing comrade, holds and detains me.

10
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds, blown from east and west,
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there on the prairies
    meeting:

These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.

11
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding
    the
air;
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific;
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and
    there;
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;
And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.

12
Lo! body and soul! this land!
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
The varied and ample land—the South and the North in the light—Ohio’s shores,
and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies, cover’d with grass and corn.

Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty;
The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes;
The gentle, soft-born, measureless light;
The miracle, spreading, bathing all—the fulfill’d noon;
The coming eve, delicious—the welcome night, and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

13
Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid, and free, and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear......yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

14
Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,
In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer preparing his crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,

The many-moving sea-tides,—and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of
daily usages;
And the streets, how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo! then and there,
Falling upon them all, and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail;
And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

15
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me;
The gray-brown bird I know, receiv’d us comrades three;
And he sang what seem’d the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars, and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held, as if by their hands, my comrades in the night;
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

DEATH CAROL.

16
Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach, strong Deliveress!
When it is so—when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee—adornments and feastings for thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky, are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song!
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death!

17
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist, and the swamp-perfume;
And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.

18
I saw askant the armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody;
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

19
Passing the visions, passing the night;
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands;
Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul,
(Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,)
Passing, I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves;
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring,
I cease from my song for thee;
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night.

20
Yet each I keep, and all, retrievements out of the night;
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor;
With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well;
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands...and this for his dear sake;
Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.

Link: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed -.

Theory Theory: A Designer's View*

By Thomas Erickson

Theory weary, theory leery,

why can't I be theory cheery?

I often try out little bits

wheresoever they might fit.

(Affordances are very pliable,

though what they add is quite deniable.)

The sages call this bricolage,

the promiscuous prefer menage...

A savage, I, my mind's pragmatic

I'll keep what's good, discard dogmatic.

Add the reference to my paper,

watch my cited colleagues caper,

I cite you, you cite me,

we've got solidarity.

(GOMS and breakdowns, social network,

use those terms, now don't you shirk!)

Clear concepts clad in fancy clothes,

bid farewell to lucid prose.

The inner circle understands

but we overlook the hinterlands

Dysfunctional we are, it's true,

but as long as we're a happy crew,

if strangers stare and outsiders goggle,

or students struggle, their minds a'boggle

(Dasein, throwness, ontology

ethnomethodology)

A pity 'bout that learning curve

but who's to blame if they lack verve?

A ludic take on structuration,

perhaps this causes consternation?

 

I see four roles that theories play:

They divide the world, come what may,

into nice neat categories,

enabling us to tell our stories.

(Info scent sure is evocative,

and cyborg theory's quite provocative)

Our talk in turn makes common ground,

where allies, skeptics may be found.

Prediction's theory's holy grail,

most that seek it seem to fail.

 

The world is messy, fuzzy, sticky,

theoretically 'tis all quite tricky.

Theories keep it at a distance,

cov'ring up the awkward instance.

(Objects, agents, actor networks,

banish life with all its quirks)

But when edges grate and things don't mesh,

that is when I think my best.

So let not theory serve as blinders,

welcome disruptions as reminders!

 

Oddly now, I'm theory cheery

I find I have a theory theory!

Neither holy grail, nor deep disgrace,

theory's useful in its place,

(Framing, talking, predicting, bonding,

evoking discourse--Others responding)

Like goals and methods, plans and actions,

theory's situated, not pure abstraction.

So make your theory a public way,

where passers by may pause and stay.

* Written upon reading a commentary for a special issue of JCSCW on Theory (Version 5)

Theory Theory, by Thomas Erickson.

Louisiana 1927

By Randy Newman

What has happened down here is the wind has changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day,
The river rose all night.
Some people got lost in the flood,
Some people got away all right.
The river has busted through clear down to Plaquemine:
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.

Louisiana, Louisiana,
They're trying to wash us away,
They're trying to wash us away.

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has done
To this poor crackers land."

Link: Randy Newman - Louisiana 1927 Lyrics. Album: Good Old Boys.

Aaron Neville's version: Link: Album: Warm Your Heart.

For those struggling with events of Election Day...

A little Dylan Thomas to soothe your soul. Sure, it was for his father, but everyone has to rage against the dying of the light sometimes.

It can also be found here: [minstrels]

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

By Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The New York Times: Public Lives: A Poet of Suffering, Endurance and Healing

Great profile of the wonderful poet Yusef Komunyakaa in today's New York Times (I'll have to go looking for the evergreen NYTimes link).

I especially like the poem that was quoted at the end of the article.

Chris

The New York Times: Public Lives: A Poet of Suffering, Endurance and Healing

A Poet of Suffering, Endurance and Healing

By CHRIS HEDGES

Published: July 8, 2004

TRENTON

IT is morning on West State Street, a wide expanse of asphalt hugged by brick and clapboard houses, some refurbished and others in need of help. The city has yet to hum to life. Sitting in a living room filled with books, Yusef Komunyakaa explains why he fled from Princeton, where he still teaches poetry at Princeton University, to New York, and finally settled four years ago in this city whose segregated neighborhoods and urban poverty remind him of the Deep South, where he grew up.

A decade after he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Mr. Komunyakaa (pronounced koh-min-YAH-kah) is teaching classes to African-Americans of all ages and walks of life, in the belief that poetry is not simply about verbal dexterity, but about meaning, about experience, about the intimate and sacred struggles of human existence. His classes here are sponsored by Cave Canem (Latin for "beware of the dog"), a group committed to discovering and promoting black poets.

His voice dips low, dripping with the honey inflections of Louisiana. He keeps his eyes downcast. He mumbles at times, or draws his words out in odd syncopations that give them a disarming intimacy. He knows enough of pain and discrimination and suffering not to be too impressed with his status, not to forget where he came from and why he writes.

Mr. Komunyakaa was born James Willie Brown Jr. 57 years ago in Bogalusa, La., the eldest of five children. His great-grandparents, stowaways on a ship from Trinidad, had given up their surname, Komunyakaa, which he legally reclaimed. Mr. Komunyakaa's father, a carpenter, was illiterate and not quite sure what to make of his son's love of books, but he pressed the child to write his mother apologetic letters on his behalf after violent arguments that drove her from the house. Words, young James saw when she walked back in through the door, had power. They were his tools.

[...]

Mr. Komunyakaa wonders at how quickly we forget the injustices perpetrated in the name of God and country, on the Great Plains, in the segregated South, in the soporific heat of Vietnam, in the slums of Newark and Trenton and in Iraq. He fights against this forgetting, for only in remembering is there healing. "I excavate history," he said. "I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them."

In his poem "Tu Do Street," after being expelled from a Vietnamese bar for white soldiers, he walks into a bar for black soldiers and sees the Vietnamese bar girls, "wounded by their beauty & war," noting that "back in the bush at Dak To & Khe Sanh, we fought the brothers of these women we now run to hold in our arms."

There's more than a nation

inside us, as black & white

soldiers touch the same lovers

minutes apart, tasting

each other's breath,

without knowing these rooms

run into each other like tunnels

leading to the underworld.

Knock the dust off your boots, my boy

Nicholas Kristof has a collection of poems from the Iraq war in the New York Times today:

An embittered second lieutenant who asks not to be named wrote:

Knock the dust off your boots, my boy,
It's time to ride again.
The frontier has gone restless now
And we must crush this rebellion. . . .
These people understand only violence,
So let's give it to 'em now.
We'll ride 'em down like Cherokee;
We'll trample 'em like Pueblo.
These savages are ruthless;
They understand no law.
So we'll pick up our Peacemakers,
And shoot 'em like Choctaw. . . .
Rally round the flag, my boy,
And grab your rifle, too.
The Red Man's turned Brown, my boy,
And there's a lot of peacemaking to do.

Remembering Reagan?

(tip 'O the pen to William Rivers Pitt at truthout.org for "Planet Reagan")

Buffalo Bill's/defunct

By e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Wanna get wonky?

Hee hee. This article in the UK Independent has no place on a poetry site, so of course I must excerpt it here, and link to the book on my book list, just to scare the bejesus out of all of you folks who find even the smallest suggestion of Language Poetry abhorrent (hey, I'm one of those...).

I'd like to think I predicted postmodernists would get themselves into this predicament the next time they (re)discovered fascists, and then I went and sort of became a pointy-headed type myself (not really), which means, in true postmodern fashion, this article below gives me a big laugh on at least 3 different levels.

Terry Eagleton: Culture and society

The man who 'sexed up' literary theory believes that postmodernism is dead. Christina Patterson talks to Terry Eagleton about love, sex, God - and the global crisis

27 September 2003

"You won't believe what happened last night!" Terry Eagleton announces, with a twinkly smile that is clearly something of a trademark. He had, it turns out, been walking along the Strand, after seeing Michael Frayn's new play, Democracy, when he was stopped by a young man with a Yorkshire accent. "Where's that David Blunkett?" the youth demanded. Eagleton suggested politely that he try the Home Office."No, no," insisted the youth, "the one in the glass cage."

It is a strangely surreal scenario, but somehow not surprising: the former Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford being asked for directions to the weirdest show in town, the sort of narcissistic, navel-gazing enterprise, in fact, that has been one of the triggers for his new book. After Theory (Allen Lane, £18.99) is an explosive follow-up to Literary Theory, the book that changed the intellectual lives, and curricula, of a generation of undergraduates. At a time (the early 1980s) when students of English literature were either battling with Beowulf or ploughing through swathes of opaque prose by literary theorists announcing the Death of the Author and the pre-eminence of the Text, Eagleton took the literary theoretical bull by the horns and, well, deconstructed it. With him as their down-to-earth and witty guide, thousands of students suddenly saw the postmodernist light. If all was not clear exactly, at least they knew why.

There was no such thing as clarity, only the "seething multiplicity of the text", hitherto obscured by one's hidden, and simplistic, assumptions. The advantage of this view, as he helpfully points out in the chapter on post-structuralism, "is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else's beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself".

More than 20 years on, After Theory is not, of course, an attempt to redress the balance (a woolly liberal concept that Eagleton would hate) but a response to a crisis. The jacket bears the silhouette of a plane, a motif that could imply the book is yet another knee-jerk response to September 11 and the rise of fundamentalism. That is part of it, Eagleton admits, but the general issue is very much wider. Students today, he asserts, are engaging neither with history nor with post-structuralism. "What is sexy instead is sex," he announces, in the first chapter, on "The Politics of Amnesia": "Quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies." Cast adrift in the stormy currents of postmodernism, they prefer to focus their energy on "the history of pubic hair" or the evolution of "Friends," a trend that Eagleton regards as "politically catastrophic".

Considering I did my dissertation on the online mostly lesbian fans of "Xena: Warrior Princess," and wrote the argument in native hypertext in a form impossible to reproduce in print (on purpose) (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation), I sure do know where I fall in the above picture Eagleton is painting. And that makes me laugh even more, because I do believe I was making an original argument involving VERY big ideas (which were centered on power and politics) on many different levels that most certainly did deliberately loop around recursively (see, I'm not PoMo enough to disbelieve that there is any such thing as an original idea. Hell, I used to get in trouble in grad school for putting too many original ideas in my stuff, overstepping, not paying enough homage to previous scholarship).

We are sitting in a minuscule office on the eighth floor at Penguin, surrounded by leaning piles of Penguin Classics. We'd been promised panoramic views over the Thames but the posh meeting rooms on the 10th floor have all, today, been colonised by Pearson. Our conversation in this cramped corner is, in more ways than one, a consequence of the Triumph of Capitalism. The entire building, with its vast, open-plan vistas and rabbit warren of tiny, glass-walled offices and spaces for meetings and parties, is a symbol of contemporary cultural production. Here culture is acquired, processed, marketed and launched, with sauvignon and canapés, before hitting the media and then the shops in its final incarnation as cash-producing commodity.

We have to of course get in our obigatory pseudo-critique of capitalism, as if being a postmodernist exempts one from being painted as an utter hypocrite with 3 homes and a 30-year career as an elitist Oxford don. But more on that below.

Eagleton looks back, he says, with "proper nostalgia" to a time when "there was a sense that culture was somewhere you could make a political difference". He even, astonishingly, expresses a long-standing regret at having turned down a job at the Open University. He went instead to Oxford, where he stayed for 30 years and which he left "without the slightest twinge or sense of nostalgia". Oxford gave him "a lot of freedom", but he never came to terms with its innate conservatism and unfriendliness. "When I came to Oxford some of the rather hostile vibes that I felt I was getting I thought were because I was a Marxist," Eagleton confides with a wry smile, "but were probably because I was from Cambridge."

If he really WAS a Marxist, he would have taken the position at Open University, or been like Paulo Freire in Brazil, teaching dialogically among the rural poor. It oughta be against the LAW to take a job at Oxford or Cambridge, or maybe even the Open University and still call yourself a Marxist. That's the problem with PoMo heads. They have embraced irony so fully they can't even muster up proper shame at their own hypocrisy.

It is certainly true that Eagleton has been "ill-served by his acolytes", those jargon-spouting, willfully obfuscating and, sadly, often not too bright purveyors of the kinds of arguments that prefer to loop endlessly rather than take the risk of any kind of original thought. Whoever bears the responsibility for this cultural mire - and only a conspiracy theorist could lay the blame entirely at Eagleton's DM-shod feet - there is, he believes, an urgent need for fresh, and more profound, thinking about the world we are in. "History now is such," he explains, "with the political drive from the right, that thinking small isn't really an option any more ... There are different ways of thinking big, or deep."

After Theory outlines just some of them. With his characteristic lucidity and wit, it charts the gains and losses of cultural theory and its refusal, or inability, to engage with the Big Issues: not just political, but moral and metaphysical, too. Unlike the vast majority of contemporary cultural theorists, Eagleton is not afraid to talk about love and death, or to reinstate the body as on object of frailty as well as a source of Californian myths of eternal youth.

Methinks he should be afraid. Or rather, I'm wondering, if one's theories are thin as water, if one doesn't become far more fearless than those who strive for greater substance. I'd wonder that, surely, if that wasn't what my professors used to say about me when I was off bird-walking across disciplines and theories in a single bound, being original and thinking big, and as a result, not paying enough homage to the entrenched canons of Great Ideas that had gone before me. Once again, I resemble the thing I'm criticizing. I must be having a postmodern moment too. Oh! The irony!

(all exclamation marks are provided exclusively courtesy of various Romantic Poets, and not postmodernists. Byron and Shelley always had a few to spare, so next week I'll have to post some of those in here just for equal time, to make up for the borrowing)

Chris