Rhodri Lewis
@profrhodrilewis
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Literature, ideas, history, the arts | Reading & writing & teaching & parenting | Shakespeare's Tragic Art published 8 Oct | Writing a life of Frank Kermode
Princeton, NJ
Joined June 2016
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My first non-EU passport. In a strangely beautiful illustration of Brexit’s absurdity, it was printed in Poland by a French company, and delivered to me by a German logistics firm.
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Is there a name for this? V much wish publishers would do whatever it is more often.
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To celebrate Iggy Pop's 75th birthday, a reminder that he is also the author of a published scholarly article. On that "heavy dude" Gibbon.
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Registering our eldest for school next year, I'm a little taken back at the varieties of English the system thinks he might first have spoken.
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@DrDominicGreen
Of course, and HMG took advantage of it (rejecting a UK bid, the additional UK jobs/spending that wd have come with it, etc.) so that the documents affirming the old-new national/political identity could be produced as cheaply as possible. There's at least an irony there.
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In which I review--and very much admire--Noel Malcolm's astonishingly good new history of early modern homosexuality for
@prospect_uk
.
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@baghwallah
@Rokewood
Indeed. Tho I think it's fair to say that a version of this is the point of the original tweet.
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Isaac Newton had an intensely productive time of it when his university shut down on account of the plague in 1665. The key lesson I wish to draw from this is that he did not have childcare issues.
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There is a certain bleak hilarity in the thought that Boris Johnson has quite possibly spent more time in the past 12 months or so writing his Shakespeare book than I have writing mine.
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@_ryanruby_
It always pleased me that the Thai restaurant I used to go to in Berlin had various degrees of heat, with a note at the bottom saying that any dish could also be made Thai scharf. They would always check if you were really sure; I never was.
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3 yo comes in to ask what I'm up to. Writing I say. Pointing to my computer screen, he asks why I need so many words. I explain, and say that I need to concentrate now for a deadline. He pauses, then says: "It's ok daddy. If you just cry, you won't need to use yr words at all."
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I make it a rule not to tweet politics, but inelastic rules suck -- & this is v funny. Not just an English question.
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Me to my 5 year old: What’s up?
5 yr old: I’m in a bad mood.
Me: Oh no. Why?
5 yr old: Because I love and I hate, I hate and I love. [Runs off to rebuild lego crocodile.]
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So, we threw a small party for a colleague who recently got tenure. Our four year old was very keen to be as involved as possible, and handed the guest of honour a drink on arrival. "Congratulations", said the toddler, "you're stuck".
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Bruegel's The Triumph of Death (wch I think I'm going to use for the cover of the book I'm currently scribbling away at) really is an astonishing piece of work. Here are three details from it.
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It’s here! Celebrating with Shakespeare’s favourite late summer drink (or … checks notes … what would have been if he’d been able to try one).
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Well, it seems that this thing is happening, and that I'm excited about it. (Had better hurry up and finish the other one first.)
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Absolutely delighted to find a copy of this (wch looks to be astonishing) waiting on the doorstep, courtesy of
@OUPAcademic
.
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Eldest toddler has just declared that he can no longer watch Peppa Pig. His reason? “Everyone’s house is on a hill, and this is ridiculous.”
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I was just given a Covid booster shot by someone named Eros.
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Feels a little off to be celebrating anything right now, but needs must. Paperback launch party (quarantini and chocolate milk version) for Hamlet & the Vision of Darkness and Unscripted America.
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Not a bad spot for some jetlagged early morning editing.
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Blurbs are in. Grateful, gratified, and a little abashed.
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V sad news about A.S. Byatt. Not the least of her virtues was a certain style: when feeling gloomy in 1994, for instance, she took herself off for a week's staycation in the Ritz and wrote to Kermode about it on the highest-quality paper in his archive. RIP.
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It'll look better wrapped around 400pp. of book, but I'm v happy with this jacket mock-up from
@PrincetonUPress
.
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Enjoying my guest room (Cambridge really does do Cambridge v well). An utterly bonkers Charles I, even so.
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Publication day (at last!), courtesy of
@PrincetonUPress
. “You will stand for your priviledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first … whatever you do, Buy”.
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Whoop. V excited that this is happening... so much so that I've thus far successfully suppressed my terror at proximity of a January 2023 deadline.
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Just published by UCL Press: Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading, with pieces from
@scaliger
,
@BillSherman_
, the late Lisa Jardine, and many excellent others. Wonderfully, the online version is open-access.
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"Every act of reading, writing, or speech begins with a commitment to genre." David Kastan on magnificent form talking to my grad class on Shakespearean tragedy.
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Pleased to say that Hamlet & the Vision of Darkness is now out. In all good bookstores etc. (Coming v soon outside the US.)
@PrincetonUPress
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Quite the opening paragraph--from Hannah Sullivan's stunningly good review of new work on TS Eliot (incl. the superb online edition of TSE's correspondence with Emily Hale prepared by
@johnhaffenden
) in the new
@TheTLS
.
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Some news: after staying in Oxford for 19 years longer than originally intended, I'm taking up a new position
@princeton
later in the year.
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Delighted to find a copy of this, from my superlative colleague Susan Stewart, in today’s post. (Cancels writing plans for the pm.)
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The satisfying/unnerving experience of printing out yr entire draft in order to read it through sequentially for the first time.
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Walton's polyglot Bible is famous for its learning & typography, but I wonder if its mise-en-page gets enough love.
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RIP Helen Vendler. A critical giant; mischievous, too.
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Whoop. Just learned that my first big piece on Kermode (looking at his writing during WW2) will be published in Raritan. /Very/ pleasing news.
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“Daddy, can you check in the closet before I go to sleep? I think I might have...um...heard something...in there.” “Ok. Do you think it was a monster?” “No. Check.” +/−100 cicadas later (most of them still in the bucket they arrived in), we are finished for the night.
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Well, I've spent a good few months trying to work out whether doing so would be a good idea, and have reached a decision: once I've finished with tragedy, I'm going to write a book about the remarkable Frank Kermode.
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Pleased to report that my piece on crocodiles, rhetoric, and colonialism in Antony & Cleopatra is now out. It has some nice illustrations (mainly of crocodiles), and is freely available on the Shakespeare Quarterly website.
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Books, covers, judgement, proverbial wisdom, etc. Even so, I very much like what
@PrincetonUPress
have done.
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Waiter to 3 yr old (playing with a chilled water bottle looking as they do on hot/humid outdoor dining nights): “Hey little guy, d’ya know what that water on the outside of the bottle is called?” 3 yr old, deadpan and probably (I hope) unwitting: “condescension”.
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A notably cheering discovery: Iggy Pop once published a piece on Gibbon in a scholarly journal,
@ClassicsIreland
. H/t
@CorpseScholar
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The miniature gold Bible (C15th?) just discovered by metal detectorists is v cool. I'm particularly struck by the fact that St Margaret of Antioch appears to be hanging around not with a dragon, but the Cheshire Cat.
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I have a new favourite factoid. Muriel Spark threatened to sue for libel when it was suggested that she had hosted dinner party and done the cooking herself.
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Toddler: Daddy, are ghosts real?
Me: [Attempts answer saying probably not, but it depends on what you mean by reality; some people ecperience them as real, and that’s definitely one sort of real.]
Toddler: Daddy, you’re unusual. [Changes subject.]
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For the 400th anniversary of the First Folio (almost), I reviewed some of the excellent titles on Shax published this year. Come for the puzzling but wonderful Vapespeare illustration, stay for Greg Doran on Sicilian lemons. (Or vice versa.)
@prospect_uk
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I'm sure I'll start to loathe it again soon enough, but for now it is /very/ good to be back in my office for a little while.
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On venturing outside just now, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of this handsome object, from
@scaliger
and
@Harvard_Press
, on the doorstep. V much looking forward to learning from it.
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@pjcboro
@DrDominicGreen
I think that the EU was/is a deeply imperfect institution, and that it was a mistake for the UK to have left it--for the UK and the EU. Versions of the status quo ante will continue into the medium term, with the UK coming out worse. Long term, who knows.
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Nabokov to Edmund Wilson on the enduring appeal of Hamlet.
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4.5 yr old just approached a stranger sitting, more or less still, on a park bench: “how do you know you’re not a sculpture?” He evaded the question.
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Delighted to say that my “Polychronic Macbeth” is out in the new issue of Modern Philology. (Feel free to DM me if you don’t have access.)
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My phone does them no justice, but having a flock of pelicans fly past your window doing their prehistoric looking thing as you drink to the sunset is just very cool.
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Am re-reading Aristotle's Poetics before class, and am struck afresh that the man himself is so much more flexible/intelligent than many of those championing doctrines derived from his work.
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Lewis 2017a. (Though I'm not sure that I even qualify as lead author.)
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My three year old is charging around the garden yelling (in the manner of a Viking making landfall in C9th Yorkshire) "I am a vegetarian, my name is Ferris". Neither of these things is true. Am I missing an obvious cultural reference, or is he amusing himself?
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Terrific: inscribed presentation copy of Jonson's 1616 Workes
@PrincetonRBSC
, with corrections in J's hand.
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Grateful to James Shapiro for this review in
@nybooks
. Tho to answer his final question, my motivation was less professional gloom than the urge to demonstrate that drama (esp Shakespearean drama) has the virtue of being able to tell difficult truths.
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Four years into American parenting, and I still stumble over the fact that Play-doh and Plato sound the same.
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The performance of Lear that I’d most like to have watched, and rewatched. (And the best RSC poster I’ve seen.)
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Very much looking forward to this new collection of essays by Quentin Skinner. The pieces I've seen already are first-rate.
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The utter joy of hearing yr 4 y.o. wake up at 06.55, go to the bathroom, and then—astoundingly—go back to bed.
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Not a bad place to begin a day’s work, even while regretting the last glass or two yesterday evening. Ah, Oxford.
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Re-reading the Miller's Tale for the first time since I don't when (1993, maybe), ahead of teaching it. Suffice it to say that my teenage self did not quite grasp how magnificently smart/subversive/funny/humane Chaucer is.
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Can anyone recommend a standard response to a four year old repeating "penis, butt, boobies" (with varying intonations, all much to his own amusement) to a perplexed looking plumber? Not asking for a friend.
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A cheering surprise with which to start the new year: Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness has been made a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2018. Many thanks to
@Choice_Reviews
!
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Cool meets sang-froid meets chutzpah. Strolling down the side of the street, going about her (I think) business.
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I was just sent (by the nice people at
@HarvardArchives
) the photos of Kermode delivering his Norton lectures in 1977-78. This one (listening during a Q&A) is my favourite. Has he been exposed to the "more of a comment than a question" formulation for the 1st or the Nth time?
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My toddler just looked long and hard at Holbein’s Cromwell portrait: daddy, he looks like he has a headache.
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Intensely sad to learn that Stephen Booth has died. Disagreements here and there, of course, but one of the best writers on Shakespeare over the past 50 years: patient, sceptical, fine-grained but capacious of vision, independent of mind, frequently v funny. RIP.
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Chuffed to find myself in distinguished, if rather miscellaneous, company at Labyrinth Books in Princeton.
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After buying my first one (Henry V) in April 1997, it feels oddly epochal /finally/ to have a full set of the Arden 3s.
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Reading the letter from the MLA in my inbox this morning, I’m reminded that it’s better to keep quiet and have everyone think you’re craven/spineless/woefully out-of-touch than to hold forth and leave no doubt.
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The mid-September moment when you inadvertently discover the still shrink-wrapped notebook that you bought in May for the summer research project.
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And speaking of doorsteps, it’s a thrill to lay eyes on my first big piece about Kermode in the new
@RaritanQR
.
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My body has reservations about teaching a 9am graduate class the day after my book launch party.
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In which I review a book and offer some thoughts on Shakespeare, sex, & the classical heritage. (Not necessarily in that order.)
@LAReviewofBooks
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TFW, sixteen years after publication, your first book has sold enough copies to warrant a second royalties payment. Suffice it to say that it'd be hard /not/ to spend it all at once.
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Too jetlagged to do much more than admire the cover, but v pleased to find this—by the incomparable
@scaliger
—on the doorstep. A good end to 2023 in books.
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Was just reminded that it's 19 years to the day since I made it through my DPhil viva. Feels more like a couple of months ago. Parting shot from my internal examiner: "Well, Mr Lewis, I'm sure it'll make a fine first monograph--just not one that I think I want to read."
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Very good piece from
@holland_tom
in the
@NYRDaily
. (Tho my working week might not recover from the desire to go away and re-read parts of Gibbon.)
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