All Up On Appleton House

Yeah, that was a lame title, but it does introduce the fact that I spent most of today working on a lecture about Marvell's famous country-house poem. It's a great lecture, too: it introduces the Civil War, it talks about Marvell himself, the genre of country-house poems, and then goes on for about six pages of textual readings. I approach "Upon Appleton House" as a kind of psychogeography, and while I know that's mostly about urban places, I'd like to think it applies to any land/mindscape. I take into account the ideological function of the prioress' speech and Wm. Fairfax's retort, along with the excessively martial fields (not a pun) that force Marvell into the sweet, self-deconstructing woods that are also his patron's daughter. It's a weird poem, to be sure, and I'm going to have fun with it.

Surprisingly, this has left me a little braindead, which is frustrating, because I still have to:

• Write the final for my world literature course;
• Heavily revise (or not) my Don Quixote lectures;
• Type out and subsequently revise my Son-Jara lectures;
• Write the last section of the "close reading" part of the Green Arrow paper; and
• Figure out what's salvageable from that same paper so that I can write a better one.

That's going to end up being what happens this week, if I'm lucky.