{"id":271,"date":"2009-05-13T03:56:15","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T10:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2009-05-13T03:56:15","modified_gmt":"2009-05-13T10:56:15","slug":"a-dustyard-of-graves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/a-dustyard-of-graves\/","title":{"rendered":"A dustyard of graves"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence<\/em><\/a>, which is a truly bad-humored memoir about procrastination and D.H. Lawrence and depression and some other things. There seems to be something awesome on every page. I was so delighted by some of the passages that I wanted to share. This, on page 2:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had decided years earlier that I would one day write a book about D. H. Lawrence, a homage to the writer who had made me want to become a writer. It was a cherished ambition and as part of my preparation for realising this cherished ambition I had avoided reading anything by Lawrence so that at some point in the future I could go back to him if not afresh then at least not rock-stale. I didn’t want to go back to him passively, didn’t want to pick up a copy of Sons and Lovers<\/em> aimlessly, to pass the time. I wanted to read him with a purpose. Then after years of avoiding Lawrence I moved into the phase of what might be termed pre-preparation. I visited Eastwood, his birthplace, I read biographies, I amassed a hoard of photographs which I kept in a once-new document wallet, blue, on which I had written ‘D.H.L.: Photos’ in determined black ink.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this, on page 101, presented without comment:<\/p>\n

That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch. I recently met an academic who said that he taught German literature. I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke. Rilke<\/em>! Oh, it was too much to bear. You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke! You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust. Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, which is a truly bad-humored memoir about procrastination and D.H. Lawrence and depression and some other things. There seems to be something awesome on every page. I was so delighted by some of the passages that I wanted to share. This, on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}