Since we got back from Michigan, Billy and I haven't been up to much. He has been sick, and I have been reading. Our softball game was cancelled again (what does the weather have against our softball team?), we joined the gym, and my Nike+ sensor continues to be broken. I'm not hassling with a new one; the new Nano is built for working out. It has the Nike+ equipment all built into it, so I will no longer have to wear the sensor clipped to my shoe, and it has an FM tuner, so I will be able to tune in the sound for the TVs in the gym. It is really only a matter of time before I buy one, but until then, my mini will be complaining that I she hasn't had a workout. I am getting close to the 500 mile mark for the year, which is pretty unbelievable.
The only thing of interest that happened to me last week regards my PhD writing project. I'm looking at Willa Cather's novel, The Professor's House, as a sort of re-writing of her "war" novel, One of Ours. Instrumental to this project are two H.L. Mencken artifacts, so I can prove, essentially, that Mencken read the book incorrectly.
Prior to the publication of OoO, Cather wrote a letter to H.L. Mencken explaining what she was trying to do with the novel and asking him to review it. I have read several different summaries of this letter, but her will prevents all scholars from directly quoting her personal correspondence (this runs out in 2012- can't wait!). One of the summaries says that she wrote something to suggest that "it is not a sentimental novel." I must read this myself so that I can see what she actually said and because I might be able to re-paraphrase it to support my argument. Most of her letters are at the University of Nebraska, and they have never reproduced them, so you can't see them on microfilm or anything. However, through my research, I discovered that this letter is one that Mencken kept, so it is in the H.L. Mencken collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in... Baltimore!! I called the curator with hopes of visiting the H.L. Mencken room and seeing the letter for myself, but the Mencken room is never actually open, so he is going to send me a photocopy. I am half expecting to get a call back from him telling me that he realized he is not actually allowed to do this, but hopefully I will receive the photocopy before that phone call.
The other thing I need to see firsthand is the review Mencken wrote. I've read a few quotations from it, and it seems to me a particularly sexist review, because he says it fails because it's not as good as Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, and that it reads like a story for "Ladies Home Journal." The review was published in a 1922 issue of "The Smart Set," which much to my dismay, is not available online anywhere. The Philadelphia Public Library has the whole run of the magazine available on Microfilm, but I didn't see anything on their website about how to request a photocopy of a microfilm. I enlisted the help of the English research librarians, who discovered that there is an available copy of the precise issue I need on my VERY OWN CAMPUS! One of the previous presidents of the Mencken Society donated his random collection of Mencken materials to UMd and it includes the issue of The Smart Set that is supposed to contain the Cather review. I'm going to look at it this afternoon.
I have geeked out considerably about the discovery that I will actually be able to see these two documents myself. This reinforces my feeling that the PhD is the right path for me; a PhD in English is, quite simply, a research degree. As an undergraduate student, I tried to avoid research at all costs, but now, the thrill of the hunt is part of the fun. Now I just have to figure out how to inject the sense of this thrill into my personal statement!
(Menckeniana: A Schimpflexikon is a volume released by Mencken in 1928. In it, he presents a selection of articles and quotations, written by others, that criticized him in print. I believe his intention was to poke fun at these individuals, whereas my criticism of him will be, of course, wholly legitimate. : ))
No comments:
Post a Comment