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Now that we are almost done with Plato, the bulkiest figure in my little Greek philosophy readalong, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit, clarify, and puzzle over the texts that will take us to the end of the project, now that I have given the matter a little more thought. Next month I will turn to Aristotle and The Nicomachean Ethics, a substantial and as I remember readable book.  I am not sure if I will read much more Aristotle.  On the Soul, which sounds like it is about religion but is really more about psychology, is tempting, and only a hundred pages.  I read Politics thirty years ago and remember it as admirably clear, but I won’t revisit it now.  I may look Metaphysics but doubt I will really read it. But just reading Ethics may be enough.  It is a real book. In June the topic is Cynicism.  The first text I have picked is some version of the sayings or quips of Diogenes the Cynic (4th C. BCE).  I strongly recommend the presentation, stripped of sources, in Guy...
over a year ago

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More from Wuthering Expectations

What I Read in June 2025 - A life of agony was all for naught.

My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.   FICTION The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasant misery.  Plague, starvation, abuse, and then the Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a number of places.  I had planned to breeze through this on the way to Xiao Hong’s more famous Tales of Hulan River (1942) but that will have to wait.  “For Mother Wang, her day of agony was all for naught.  A life of agony was all for naught” (p. 29 of the Howard Greenblatt translation). The Witch in the Wood (1939), T. H. White – By contrast, a marvelous piece of nonsense, a much sillier book than the preceding The Sword in the Stone.  Monty Python and the Holy Grail now seems somewhat less original. The Sheltering Sky (1949), Paul Bowles – An American couple tourist around Morocco after the war.  The husband seeks the sublime; the wife does not.  The husband is also a sociopath, and I at one point wondered how long I could stand his company, but after a crisis hits I was fine.  Existentialism can seem awfully adolescent when the only problem is ennui, but in the face of a real problem working through the ideas become interesting.  All this before the last section, the last 40 pages, as bleak a blast of despair as I have encountered in an American novel.  “She felt like saying: ‘Well, you’re crazy,’ but she confined herself to: ‘How strange.’” (Ch. XV, p. 91)  That’s how I felt! I, Robot (1950), Isaac Asimov – I have picked up the idea that people working or theorizing on computer programs that are for some reason called “artificial intelligence” take this collection of stories form the 1940s seriously.  See for example Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor of computer science (do not look at his list of publications!) who writes in or on the New Yorker that he was “struck by its [the book’s] new relevance.”  I was struck by how irrelevant the book was, or I guess how it was exactly as relevant as it has always been.  The first story is a little chemistry problem written by a 21-year-old working on an MA in chemistry, but Asimov soon switches to philosophy.  What I think is the most famous story, “Liar!” (1941) is a simple puzzle in Kantian ethics.  In the next story, “Little Lost Robot” (1947), the characters solve problems by pushing fat robots in front of trains.  I had not realized how young Asimov was when he wrote the first Robot and Foundation stories.  If they sometimes seem a little undergraduate, well. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Patricia Highsmith – A regular old murderous psychopath story, good fun compared to some of these other books. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), Anthony Powell – Another installment of the higher gossip. The narrator has gotten married and spends the book writing around his new wife, so that by the end I know as little about her as at the beginning, although I learn a lot about everyone else. ’I suppose she lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust.  I don’t think Charles’s father – “Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with.  He used to be very handsome, and so amusing.  He looked wonderful on a horse.  He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya.  Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’ (Ch. 2, 89) Neither Boffles, Amy, the Frenchwoman, or the horse are ever mentioned again in the novel. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Cynthia Ozick Suzanne and Gertrude (2019), Jeb Loy Nichols – A short, sad novel about an introverted English woman who adopts a stray donkey.  Expect more donkey content here over the next few months. When These Mountains Burn (2020), David Joy – A final miserable novel, compassionate this time, but unflinching in its look at the ongoing American narcotics epidemic, this time in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, so painful in places.  Joy has recently discovered that where he is lucky to get seven people to attend a free reading in North Carolina he can get seventy people to buy tickets to one in France.  He is joining a sadly well established American literary tradition.   HISTORY 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), Eric H. Cline – In a sense more misery, but at some distance.    POETRY The Far Field (1964) & Straw for the Fire (1943-63), Theodore Roethke Sunbelly (1973), Kenneth Fields Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1954-60), Richard Eberhart – the poems of the 1950s, really, not the whole thing. Foxglovewise (2025), Ange Mlinko – Possibly a major work.  I think I will revisit it next year when the paperback is published.  Recommended to fans of Marly Youmans.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Só (Alone, 1892), António Nobre – Since Portuguese literature is often imitative, I could call Nobre a Symbolist, and he sometimes sounds like the missing link between Romanticism and Pessoa, but I thought his voice was individual.  A long poem about a stay in a sanitarium (Nobre died young of tuberculosis) should be translated; it all should be translated.  I read a school edition that says the book is recommended to 8th graders.  I have no idea how, or how often, this book is actually taught, but I would be shocked if one percent of American 8th graders are assigned such a complex book of poems. Pierrot mon ami (My Pal Pierrot, 1942), Raymond Queneau – Pure jolly fun, but between the slang and wordplay and sudden shifts in register, hard as the devil.  Sometimes it felt like I was reading a Godard film. Roberte ce soir (1954) & La Révocation de l'Édict de Nantes (1959), Pierre Klossowski – Two odd novellas.  The wife sleeps with the houseguests and the husband theorizes about why this is a good idea.  Each novella has one long scene that might be pornographic if not written in such a comically formal register.  The second book turns the first inside out, which is interesting.  Perhaps those ridiculous sex scenes, for example, are just the art-loving husband’s painting-inspired fantasies.  One curious scene describes a painting that could easily be by Pierre’s older brother Balthus.  Utterly different style than Queneau but just as difficult.  I need to find an easy French book, a Simenon novel, something like that. Contos Exemplares (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Not as intricate, but often a bit like Isak Dinesen.

a week ago 14 votes
A draft Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them. Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong. Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Nicholas Udall Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553), authorship much disputed – start with two influential pre-Elizabethan comedies written for academic settings. Gorbuduc (1561), Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville – the first English tragedy in blank verse, performed before young Queen Elizabeth. Somewhere in the mid-1570s permanent theaters begin to succeed, and it is tempting to see what might have been on those early stages, but let’s jump to Marlowe, the great young innovator. Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587), Christopher Marlowe – not that you would know from this one, not that I remember. Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587), Christopher Marlowe – cheating a bit, putting the two plays together.  Now things are starting to get good. The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd – the first revenge tragedy, very exciting. The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe Arden of Faversham (1591), ??? – more cheating, since this may actually be Shakespeare, not Not Shakespeare.  Or it’s Marlowe.  Or anyone. Doctor Faustus (1592), Christopher Marlowe Edward the Second (1592), Christopher Marlowe Selimus (1592), Robert Greene – one of many, many Tamburlaine knockoffs.  Static and dull, I assume. The Massacre at Paris (1593), Christopher Marlowe – Oddly, this is the only play I will mention of which I have seen a performance, an almost hilariously gory French adaptation.  It is not a good play, but it is sure an interesting one. The Old Wife's Tale (1593), George Peele – A parody of a genre of fairy tale romance plays none of which are extant, meaning this might be gibberish. Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson – I do not remember this as a great play, but young Jonson is inventing a new kind of comedy that will pay off in his later masterpieces. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – An early “city comedy.”  Antonio's Revenge (1600), John Marston – revenge! The Tragedy of Hoffmann (1602), Henry Chettle – revenge! Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Ambitious Jonson wrote a couple of serious Roman tragedies.  I remember them as weak, but I’ll give this one another chance. A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – A domestic melodrama, in case you were wondering why those were not popular in the old days.  Oh, they were. The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – Really very early Jacobean, but it let’s me end the list on an unusual masterpiece, featuring one of the period’s great characters. What was going on in that five-year gap after Marlowe’s death in 1593?  I will have to investigate more.  I know one thing.  If Shakespeare, like Marlowe, had died at age 29, perhaps knifed in the same tavern fight, he would be remembered as the promising young author of Richard III.  Over the next five years he became the greatest playwright in British history.  The greatest writer?  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Falstaff, his sonnets.  He became the center of gravity that turns everyone else into Not Shakespeare, into Shakespeare’s great predecessor or disciple or rival, something defined against Shakespeare. I am still tempted, I don’t know, by a Greatest Hits approach, which would drop a dozen of the above and continue on into the 17th century with Jonson’s great comedies, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Atheist’s Tragedy, some selection of Thomas Middleton, those two magnificent John Webster plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ending with the collapse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a decade before the Puritans put the exhausted, decadent London theaters out of their misery.

4 weeks ago 13 votes
Not Shakespeare - a preliminary, semi-formed invitation to read plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew Fair.  It has been a while since I have read them, twenty years or more.  Plays are well-suited for ongoing readalongs, so in the spirit of reading the Greek and Roman plays a couple years ago, why not invite anyone interested to join in. I have been calling this idea Not Shakespeare.  What am I trying to do? 1.  The plays are so good.  Many of them.  I want to read them again. 2.  I want to learn more about the technical aspects of the innovations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, especially the poetry and structure.  Things moved very fast for forty years. 3.  Genre, too, which appears to be where a lot of the academic attention has gone (as with fiction generally).  It is here that I am most tempted to read bad plays, and not just revenge tragedies, for which I have a strong taste. 4. I want to put a personality of some kind on more of these writers.  Some of them are easy.  Just read The Duchess of Malfi and you know John Webster well enough to get Tom Stoppard’s jokes about him in Shakespeare in Love.  I think I know Marlowe and Jonson.  But other major writers are ciphers, Thomas Middleton especially.  I don’t know if the answer is to read more of the writer, read more about the writer, or think more about them.  I hope not the latter.  I should say I mean know them as artists, not whether or not they were nice people.  Maybe I should also say that this is all a fiction, a creative collaboration between the writer and the reader. Still, Middleton, who was that guy?  If you have read a lot of Shakespeare you have likely read a lot more Middleton than you realize.  A good fifth item for this list would be to learn more about how these writers collaborated, but I fear that is hopeless.  We wish we knew.  The computer programs can only get us so far. The logistics of Not Shakespeare are a little different than the Greek plays.  The Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are longer and the English is more difficult than the modern translated English I read with the Greeks.  A play a week with the Greeks, but I think a play every two weeks makes more sense with the Not Shakespeares.  Plus that will give me more time to read other things.  The poetry of the time – John Donne, George Herbert, the sonnet craze, much more – is also tempting me.  And I want to read some secondary works, although how far that will go I do not know. It is tempting, and likely best for a readalong, to read the Twenty Greatest Hits.  But I want to go a little deeper.  How about twenty Elizabethan plays to begin, actually Elizabethan, stopping in 1603?  Marlowe, The Spanish Tragedy, Jonson finding his voice, new genres, many crazy revenge tragedies. My method was to see what New Mermaids has in print, and then poke around at Broadview and Penguin Classics, and then add this and that.  George Chapman and John Fletcher seem to be out of fashion in the classroom for some reason. Twenty Elizabethan plays in forty weeks, beginning in September, how does that sound?  In August I will rewrite this post and put up a timeline.  I do not expect anyone to read all, or most, of the plays.  Someone may well be inspired to read Shakespeare rather than Not Shakespeare, which is understandable. I am asking for advice in some sense.  Don’t miss this play; that Cambridge Companion is the really good one; so-and-so’s essay is way better than T. S. Eliot’s.  I don’t know.  Anything.  This is also a method to make myself write more.  For some reason a committed structure, however artificial, does the trick.

a month ago 18 votes
What I Read in May 2025 – “There’s the store that’s shaped like a duck,” Franca said.

First, my poor email subscribers missed some of the installments of my newsletter about Anthony Powell.  If this keeps happening I will have to think of something or even do something.  Here they are: A skippable piece of throat-clearing about the roman fleuve. What I think Powell is doing in A Dance to the Music of Time, the first four novels anyways. How I think he does it. After Finnegans Wake, I only wanted short books, or easy books, or even better both, so these are those.  For a while I thought this would last all summer.  It might. FICTION Everyman and Medieval Mystery Plays (15th C.) – I am beginning preparations for my upcoming Not Shakespeare event.  Soon I will ask for advice about it.  That is Knowledge up in the post’s title, helping out Everyman, and supplying an epigram to the edition I read. The Stronghold (1940), Dino Buzzati – The new translation of The Tartar Steppes, less odd and Kafkaesque than I expected.  More plausibly about military life.  Still, somewhat odd, somewhat Kafkaesque. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Thornton Wilder – Wilder took up Finnegans Wake as a hobby for a couple of years, treating it a puzzle of some kind, like a crossword.  I thought I would revisit his amusing Adam-and-Eve satire that was directly inspired by – but is nothing like! – Joyce’s novel. Johnny Tremain (1943), Esther Forbes – A kid’s novel about the beginnings of the American Revolution in Boston, one of the best-selling books in American history.  It has faded, understandably, but I was happy to find that it is a real novel, with solid characters and a sensible story that is not overtly educational, a genuine American descendant of Scott’s Waverley.  Still, mostly recommended to New Englanders planning to enjoy the upcoming Sesquicentennial events. The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), Bertolt Brecht Nine Stories (1953), J. D. Salinger Mission of Gravity (1953), Hal Clement – A landmark of “hard” science fiction, where the author’s main concern is getting the math right, which does not sound so exciting, which is likely why I skipped this one long ago when I was reading more science fiction.  How wrong I was.  This book is a scream, a seafaring adventure novel with a crew of rubbery foot-long problem-solving caterpillars.  It also has an unusually satisfying ending. Jane and Prudence (1953), Barbara Pym – I wanted to test my sense that Powell’s novels were the purest comedy of manners I had ever read.  This Pym novel is also quite pure. At Lady Molly's (1957), Anthony Powell Light Years (1975), James Salter – The quotation I put in the title is from p. 305 of the Vintage edition.  It’s a real building, the one shaped like a duck! Turtle Diary (1975), Russell Hoban – Almost too much to my tastes, in humor, sentence-level surprises, sensibility, and even romance.  I almost distrust it.  Wonderful book. The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Gloria Naylor – With these last three you can almost see me doing my second-favorite thing, browsing at the library.  I like to think reading the books is actually my favorite. The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), Nghi Vo – I had this Chinese-flavored fantasy novel in my hands when the owner of The Briar Patch in Bangor, Maine, a few blocks from Stephen King’s house, told me it was “really good,” obliging me to buy it.  Some really good things about it: 1) it is a hundred pages long and tells a complete story, a rarity among fantasy novels today; 2) the magical more-or-less Chinese setting is although I am sure filled with it’s own clichés still fresh to me; 3) poking around online I found complaints about the weak world-building, which is just about the highest compliment a fantasy novel can receive today.  Despite the light magical touches it turns out to be more of a spy novel.   POETRY Open House (1941) & The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) & Words for the Wind (1958), Theodore Roethke – I’ve been wandering through Roethle’s Collected Poems alongside a curious selection from his notebooks. Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems (1948), Kenneth Fearing – Energetic. Eternal Monday: New & Selected Poems (1971-96), György Petri – A fine, funny Hungarian poet, an accidental dissident, recommended to readers of Milosz and Herbert and so on. Shoulder Season (2010), Ange Mlinko – And a Hungarian-American poet.  I should be getting to her new book soon, but the library had this one.   LITTLE ART BOOKS Clavilux and Lumia Home Models (2025), Thomas Wilfred Some Stones are Ancient Books (2025), Richard Sharpe Shaver –The last two of the conceptual art books from the set I started last month (website).  Both, all, of real interest if you like unusual things.  The Wilfred book has an introduction by Doug Skinner, longtime friend of the blog.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Le parti pris des choses (The Part Taken by Things, 1940) & Proêmes (1948), Francis Ponge – the first book is a semi-Surrealist masterpiece, a collection of prose poems on, mostly, things, objects, turned into language.  The second book is more miscellaneous. Le petit homme d'Arkhangelsk (The Little Man from Archangelsk, 1957), Georges Simenon – A roman dur, so a crime-like event occurs.  A guy’s wife runs off, which does not bother him so much, but she takes the most valuable stamps from his collection, which does.  Police detectives will be involved at some point, but the novel is really about the psychology of the character.  It’s a sad book. Cinco Voltas Na Bahia e Um Beijo para Caetano Veloso (Five Returns to Bahia and a Kiss for Caetano Veloso, 2019), Alexandra Lucas Coelho – Maybe the Portuguese crónica system, where writers make their livings writing ephemeral essays for magazines, has some disadvantages.  This is the third book I have read this year by a veteran journalist who has trouble distinguishing interesting from dull.  Bahia is highly interesting (well, Salvador, Coelho barely leaves Salvador); Caetano Veloso is extremely interesting.  The author’s trips to the beach and book tour are not.

a month ago 16 votes
Anthony Powell's style and sensibility - Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one

Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishing, writes a novel, gets a girlfriend, gets a job as a script writer, splits with the girlfriend, and writes another novel or two, none of which, except for getting the girlfriend, is depicted in the first four novels of A Dance to the Music of Time.  Instead, in long scenes, four or five chapters in a 200 page novel, Nick goes to parties or lunches or perhaps a bunch of characters pile into a car and drive around.  All of the school and jobs and even losing the girlfriend happens between the parties. Meeting characters in different social situations is the structural basis of Anthony Powell’s novel, perhaps even its metaphysics, the governing principle of the fictional universe: He had cropped up in my life before, and, if I considered him at all as a recurrent factor, I should have been prepared to admit that he might crop up again. (A Buyer’s Market, 1, 29) I had the idea that characters were going to recur in surprising situations, but at this point there is no surprise. I myself was curious to see what Mildred Blaides – or rather Mildred Haycock – might look like after all these years, half expecting her to be wearing her V.A.D. outfit and smoking a cigarette.  But when my eyes fell on the two of them, it was the man, not the woman, who held my attention.  Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.  This was just such a performance.  The fiancé was…  (At Lady Molly’s, 1, 42) But I am in the fourth novel here, so the surprise would be if the much younger, much gossiped over fiancé were not “the horribly memorable Kenneth Widmerpool” who has been the “recurrent factor” since the third chapter of the first novel.  I will be shocked if a novel goes by without Widmerpool.  John Banville is the source of “horribly memorable,” and also “in all his egregious awfulness,” but at this point Widmerpool, a narrow, clumsy social striver, is not quite awful.  He strives towards awfulness but does not seem quite competent enough to reach it.  I will enjoy seeing his awfulness increase as the series progresses.  Some people think of him as one of the great comic characters of English fiction, although at this point he is more like Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle than Waugh’s Basil Seal.  Now that is a character with some egregious awfulness. Please search that Banville review for Waugh.  Since I brought up the subject, let’s have some samples of Powell’s style.  This is Widmerpool, from above: Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored and unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. (ALM, 1, 42) Widmerpool generally has (we are two full novel earlier) a “piscine cast of countenance, projecting the impression that he swam, rather than walked, through the rooms he haunted” (ABM, 1, 28).  Powell’s metaphors are specific and imaginative, among the greatest pleasures of the novels: “He made a sweeping movement with his hands, as if driving chickens before him in a farmyard…” (A Question of Upbringing, 4, 189). It is unlikely that many people, writing up their life, would remember such a thing, but that is Nick.  I do not have to suspend disbelief; our narrator is the rare bird who would remember this detail when writing his memoir twenty-five years after the fact.  He is a stylist, a fussy one – I believe some of the fussiness is visible in the quotations I have used – hardly as original as Waugh or his friend Henry Green but attentive.  Some of his aphoristic lines seem blatantly wrong.  But the sensibility is Powell’s own.  The sensibility, and the sentences, keep me reading, and will likely keep me interested through the twelfth novel.

a month ago 23 votes

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How much of the planet should we harm for our comfort?

Becky Chambers’ gentle sci-fi on the right amount of carbon, AC, airplanes, and yachts.

11 hours ago 2 votes
'After the Rain, Perhaps, Something Will Show'

Most of us are born with a brain but without a user’s manual. This soggy organ weighs on average about three pounds and contains 86 billion neurons. That’s our birthright, and we did nothing to earn it. We tend to operate our brains passively, ignoring most available perceptions. We “tune them out” – the electronics metaphor is nowadays almost inevitable. It’s easy to be lazy, coast through the ocean of data we dwell in and go on living. Paying too much attention to the world can be madness, as is paying too little. I become aware of this only when I’m looking for something lost or misplaced, whether it be a word or the car keys. It’s like adjusting a camera lens – looking at what’s there, not what we have already assumed is there. The Indiana poet Jared Carter describes in the title poem to his 1993 collection After the Rain the hunt for arrowheads in a farmer’s field once the rain has stopped:  “They seem, like hail, dropped from an empty sky, Yet for an hour or two, after the rain has washed away the dusty afterbirth of their return, a few will show up plain on the reopened earth. Still, even these are hard to see – at first they look like any other stone.”   I’ve often gone hunting for arrowheads, pottery shards and other Indian debris, but Carter’s poem reminds me of a visit to a dairy farm near Belfast, N.Y., run by one of my mother’s cousins and her husband. This was sixty years ago. The pastures were dotted with limestone rich in trilobites and other fossils. My brother and I filled a milk crate with chunks of stone and brought them back to Ohio. There we fantasized about the future paleontologists baffled by their appearance so far from their native range. Carter continues:   “The trick to finding them is not to be too sure about what’s known; Conviction’s liable to say straight off this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay, and miss the point: after the rain, soft furrows show one way Across the field, but what is hidden here Lrequires a different view – the glance of one not looking straight ahead, who in the clear light of the morning sun Simply keeps wandering across the rows, letting his own perspective change.”   Impatience sabotages perception. Carter concludes his poem with these lines: “After the rain, perhaps, something will show, / glittering and strange.” I’ve learned to stop looking, especially for a word I know is out there – or in there somewhere – in order to find it. “Finding” is an essay by Guy Davenport published in Antaeus in 1978 and later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). It may be the finest thing Davenport ever wrote, and it recounts the weekend expeditions his family took “to look for Indian arrows.” Davenport was born in 1926 in Anderson, S.C. His essay is a delicate balance of memoir and meditation on many things – family, lost time, the importance of attentiveness and the formation of sensibility. The essayist says he hopes the meaning of those childhood expeditions “elude[s] me forever,” that he will never find the meaning of finding but he can’t help speculating:   “Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake.”   We learn best by doing and by watching others do. Learning one thing (finding arrowheads) later may teach us another (reading texts, writing others). Davenport writes:   “I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”   As A.E. Stallings says in her poem “Arrowhead Hunting” (Hapax, 2006): “The land is full of what was lost.”

an hour ago 1 votes
Snake in the Grass

The post Snake in the Grass appeared first on The American Scholar.

yesterday 2 votes
The way of arrival

Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.1 Peter Brown's Journeys of a Mind: A Life in History is over 700 pages but remains fascinating upto and including the final page, and while Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio is over 500 pages shorter, reading it again only multiplies the pleasure. All three writers display a commitment to their research not limited to a 9-to-5 academic career. It is embedded in their lives;2 the two surviving authors are still working in their 80s. But why did they dominate my reading? I wondered if it was a vicarious living of an alternative life, the one in which I was able to dedicate my time to reading and writing, perhaps to enable a more satisfying production. I daydream of the garden offices I see advertised in my Instagram feed in which I might escape distraction and finally concentrate after decades of superficiality. The archive of this blog reveals a movement from naive enthusiasms and bitter agitations to more ambitious content that doesn't quite escape the original form and may in fact diminish its strengths. At its best, blog writing glances at subjects, whether that is a new book or literary current affair, acting as the corner of an eye catching sight of something regular coverage blanks out, while, at its worst, it merely imitates.3 Ultimately, however, it remains a dilettantism. It doesn't nourish. At least, that is what I have felt. Then I reread the passage in Self-Portrait in the Studio in which Agamben writes of a postcard on his studio desk of a 17th century painting depicting a woman feeding from her own breast.4 After acknowledging its 'cloying lineage', he argues for it as an allegory of the soul nourishing itself. He asks what it means to nourish oneself: "What is a light that feeds itself? A flame that no longer needs fuel?" In the process of nourishing—in any kind of nourishing, spiritual or bodily—there is a threshold at which the process reverses direction and turns back towards itself. Food can nourish only if at a certain point it is no longer something other than us, only if we have—as they say—assimilated it; but this means—to the exactly the same degree—that we are assimilated to it. The same thing happens with the light of knowledge: it always arises from outside, but there arrives a moment when inside and outside meet and we can no longer tell them apart. At this point, the fire ceases to consume us, 'it now consumes itself'.5 This, I realised, was why these books had dominated. Each in its way marks multiple crossings of thresholds, the meetings of inside and outside, and I was drawn to these books because I was aware that I had been impatient for such a threshold to make itself known and want to know how others had climbed above the shameful lowlands of secondary writing. Like so many others, I had sought assimilation in the consumption of ideas, washing down the keywords and catchphrases of philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory like so many pills, downloaded using the convenient shortcuts technology offers, but which map only the landscape of the outside. No meeting ever arrives. Ten years ago when I read Nathaniel Davis' translation of 'Across the Border', Sebald's beautiful essay on Peter Handke's Repetition, a novel that had dazzled me in the late 1980s alongside Slow Homecoming, Across, and The Afternoon of a Writer, I was also dazzled. I had read the novel several times was frustrated each time that I couldn't find words to express why it and the three other novels had stood out above almost everything else I had read,6 and Sebald's essay only deepened the frustration as it focuses on the novel's metaphysical ideas, its mythological scheme, and its relation to the theme of 'Heimat' in Austrian literature and Filip Kobal's quest for redemption from the inheritance of fascist violence; that is, nothing much to do with me, but did help me to understand "the particular light which filters through" the novel, the words Sebald uses to describe Handke's prose in Repetition. The light made "the text itself a place of refuge among the arid zones" and "by the power of words alone" made visible "a world more beautiful than this one". Reading Jo Catling's translation of the essay in a book we have waited for two decades and on which I hope to write more, I realised the larger issues had over those years become embedded in me, so familiar that I could set them aside to concentrate on what really nourishes, perhaps refuge, beauty and redemption. This is another reason why the books dominated: they emphasised the value of finding what such nourishment rather than trying to assimilate the food that passes right through. Assimilation may take a lifetime to arrive, but, as Blanchot says: "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there."  Notes Terry Pitts' two-part review of the collection is especially good on this.↩ This becomes clear in the remarkable final section of Agamben's What I saw, heard, learned in which he remembers a note he wrote as a child that "seemed to be the secret core of my philosophy"↩ All these years later I still cringe at the memory of when the Litblog Co-Op, set up to promote formally adventurous fiction and challenge the conservative coverage of print newspapers, announced its first 'Read This!' promotion as Kate Atkinson's best-selling novel Case Histories with the co-op member referring to the author as "a juicy pro", as if novelists were gymnasts and the novel a pommel horse.↩ The painting by Giovanni Serodine is given the title as Allegory of Science by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but most other sources refer to it as Allegorical Female Figure.↩ Agamben is quoting Plato's Seventh Letter on which he bases the claim.↩ I wrote a blogpost on three of the four and another on Handke's book-length poem To Duration also written in the mid-1980s but didn't appear in English translation for another 25 years.↩

2 days ago 5 votes
'It Is Always Summer, Always the Golden Hour'

I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly, even in summer. The poet Jane Greer is seventy-two and lives in North Dakota. For twelve years, she edited the Plains Poetry Journal. She is a poet of domesticity and technical rigor, Midwestern in her good-humored seriousness, a Roman Catholic who reveres the wonder of creation. I’m from Ohio, a semi-Midwestern state, but there’s nothing homogenous about the Midwest and its people. She’s rural, I’m urban/suburban. Most of the stereotypes don’t hold, though Midwesterners indulge them and laugh. I remember being surprised when a buddy and I got lost in Illinois trying to outrun a tornado that never happened. We found ourselves in Lewiston, where Edgar Lee Masters moved with his family at age twelve. It served as his model for Spoon River. And the surrounding fields of corn felt almost claustrophobic.   I read Those Days: An American Album By Richard Critchfield (1931-94) when it was published in 1986. Like Greer, Critchfield was a North Dakota native, and the book recounts his family’s history in that state and Iowa. I remember associating it with Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Greer, I discovered, reviewed the book in the April 1987 issue of Chronicles, and it begins with a passage any writer would be delighted to hear:   “This is a book I wish I’d written, a love story of the largest and best kind. Like most people, I remember my childhood, that eternal summer, in a glow of happy forgetfulness, simply out of pleasure. Richard Critchfield ‘remembers,’ as if he had been there, his parents' lives and society before he was born, and shows why it’s important to remember and to go back even further than our own birth: Because like it or not, we are attached. We are not historyless like Adam, breathed out of nothing; we’re drawn from the narrow end of a real and compelling vortex—history—vivid with blood and bone, passion and fear, as it touches down to make us in the here and now. Part of everything that was and will be, we move up the funnel of history to make room for those whose history we will be.”   I envy Critchfield’s reconstruction of his family’s history, in part because most of mine is a blank. I know almost nothing about my father’s family and only unconnected shards about my mother’s. These people didn’t talk about the past, whether out of guilt or abject indifference, and bequeathed little living memory to their descendants. I’m left with all the questions I didn’t ask.   “This is no vague nostalgic trek back to the nonexistent ‘good old days,’” Greer writes, “or mere homage to a loved mother, but a gifted writer’s careful examination of all available resources, to reconstruct the rhythm and immediacy of the past—its sounds and smells, human passions and disappointments. Critchfield has resuscitated those days, given them breath and pulse, and made their relevance to us, now, evident.”   Here is “The Light As Thick As Clover Honey,” the first poem in Greer’s third collection, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022):   ‘Here is the square pink house on the green street. Here is the long back yard sloped to the alley. Here is the rusty swing, and here is the pup-tent bleaching the grass. Here is the happy family like all the others. Here is the sunburnt child on her blue bike whose streamers are the reins of a great stallion; here they gallop the world from home to grandmother’s and home again on odd brick streets, around the painted bandstand, through the gap in in the church’s high trimmed hedge. Here is the small town hugging the river bend, cicadas rasping out their alien urge, the light as thick as clover honey. Here it is always summer, always the golden hour.” “Eternal summer” in the review, “it is always summer” in Greer’s poem.

2 days ago 2 votes