[close reading] We continue the Book of Ephraim; the furnace, the lives of animals from Miranda to Maisie to the cats and dogs that keep on raining.  What it means for God and the Unconscious to be one.  Water imagery. Strato.

[renaissance poetry] A last or almost last class on Paradise Lost.  God's evil sense of humor.  Similarities between God and Satan.  Adam and the son's superiority to them.  The point - not quite made in the class - is the way the narrator slowly comes to see this.

[close reading] Merrill continued: keeping the bumpkin seers down on the farm.  Erzulie's heart emblem. Miranda and the "Happy Sign."

[close reading] We continue, with Ephraim's long prose discourse, from section Q, and then with Maya's dream, and Erzulie's heart emblem.

[close reading] Some discussion of Colm Toibin's reading, and how good it was, and how much The Master is about English, American, and Irish issues. We continue mainly with Ephraim section I and discussion of Tom's asking JM to "spell it out": what does that turn out to mean.  Some discussion of Maya Deren.  Here's Youtube of her "Ritual in Transfigured Time" which is the dream she has in the city in section M:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctFPrLtSWg8&feature=colike

[renaissance poetry] More about Satan, his commitment to freedom, and his sublimity.

[close reading] Attention mainly to section I, but with some interpretation of what it would mean to break the (genetic) code to smithereens: mutagenic agents, that would be, including the radiation after Hiroshima ("smashed atoms of the dead, my dears").  Some snarkiness about Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James since he read later that day: his reading was grand and I regret the snarkiness, as I say in the next class, TK.

[renaissance poetry] Paradise Lost: its characters, its ambitions.  Meaning vs. name, including the meaning of the muse Urania.  Falling onto earth in Homer and in Milton.

[close reading] More on who or what Ephraim might be.  A set of quasi-grammatical constructions, like poems.  Did they even have a telephone? They had Ephraim: fruitful out of affliction.

[close reading] A second class on Ephraim: what it would mean to believe or disbelieve in Ephraim. How the Ouija board works: the desire both to make it say what you want it to say and to disbelieve that you're doing that.  Writing as interpretation; interpretation as writing.  Quotation from Middlemarch on the candle picking out a perfect circle in the mirror: mirrors in Ephraim, thought, wish fulfillment.