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“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.” And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are. The transmutation of… read article
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid. Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some… read article
We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis. Despite our culture’s bias for the drama of cataclysm — the violent heartbreaks, the very notion of falling in love, implying a sudden tripping along the path of life — the most profound of these motions of the soul are the work of gradualism, their pace geologic, their velocity that of continents, so incremental as to be imperceptible, until one day two people find themselves a sum… read article
There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized your soul from the outside. But when you look back on them once they have had their way with you, if you are awake enough to your own life and conscious enough of your unconscious, you come to realize that they were not a possession by some external… read article
Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those… read article
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If you're familiar with Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at all, it’s likely as a collector of folk and fairy tales. I remember as a kid reading some of his twelve “Coloured” Fairy Books. He was also a prolific poet and critic, though that work is largely forgotten. He remains best known not for his original productions but as a collector of other people’s work. Here’s how Lang begins the title essay in his Adventures Among Books (1905): “In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions.” That’s probably the finest almost-polite description of Coleridge’s gassiness I have ever encountered: “alien disquisitions.” He is the father of today’s critical bombast. Lang is something else – a dedicated reader whose bookish tastes started when he was a boy in Scotland. He continues: “The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.” Like other longtime readers, if I were ever to write an autobiography (fat chance), its scaffolding would be my reading history. That would reveal more about my nature than a recitation of schools attended and jobs held—mere externals. I enjoy the company of old-fashioned, unapologetic, non-academic bookmen like Lang. His example reminds me of John Gross’ bookish apologia in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1991; rev. ed. 1991): “Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds. . . . Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”
“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive. Writing can jump-start inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with inspiration in detail: “The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own right . . .” [The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
Ian Kumekawa tells the story of the global economy in one barge The post The Shipping News appeared first on The American Scholar.
I should make that the new official slogan of the blog. It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read. FICTION The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth. It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody and outstanding British nature writing in the tradition of Gilber White (mentioned in the novel) and Richard Jefferies. It turns out that the most important thing in the education of a king is to know what it is like to be a fish. Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce – begin Here and Continue to the End. The Big Clock (1946), Kenneth Fearing – A jittery Whitmanian poet of the 1920s and 1930s finally cashes in with a jittery multi-voiced semi-mystery. The “detective” is the staff of the equivalent of Time Inc., making the killer Henry Luce. The detective is deliberately not trying to solve the mystery. The single best part is narrated by a cranky painter. Odd, odd book, but I see why it survives. The Mountain Lion (1947), Jean Stafford – A Boston writer, but this sad descendent of What Maise Knew is set in California and on a Colorado cattle ranch. The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Samuel R. Delaney – His first novel, clumsily constructed but stuffed with imaginative conceits. I’d never read Delaney. God's Country (1994), Percival Everett – Almost every Everett novel and short story I have read has a similar voice and narrator, a PhD with a savior complex. James in James does not have a PhD, but might as well. In this Western, however, Everett’s narrator is an idiot and another, non-narrating character fills the usual role, which is a lot of fun. Thirty years older, God’s Country is a companion novel to James (2024). I urge anyone interested to read them together. It is time to get the James backlash going. I have seen a couple of interviews where Everett himself seems to be trying to get the backlash going, but it has not worked yet. I have read eleven of Everett’s books now and hope to read many more. James is the worst one! POETRY Blues in Stereo (1921-7), Langston Hughes – It is like a gift book, a pointlessly tiny volume that could and should be expanded to include all of The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), both of which are in public domain, which seems to be the limiting concept. But for some reason this book does include the pieces of a never-realized collaboration with Duke Ellington that is a fantasy refraction of The Big Sea (1940), Hughes’s first memoir. I do not think the theater piece has been published before. Worth seeing. Collected Poems (1940), Kenneth Fearing – High-energy Whitman mixed with advertising=speak and business lingo and gangsters. So sometimes it’s kitsch. Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) & Autumn Sequel (1953) & Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice Chord of Light (1956) & Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), Zbigniew Herbert What Rough Beasts (2021), Leslie Moore – An earlier book by a Maine poet and artist I read a year ago. She specializes in prints, and poems, about birds and other animals. About an hour after reading her poem about grackles invading her yard and establishing a grackledom the grackles invaded my yard and ruled for several days. That was enjoyable. MISCELLANEOUS Lexington and Concord: The Battle Heard Round the World (2018), George C. Daughan – Preparation for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which is another thing I did in April. Here I am at the Concord parade, the library in the background. Sound May Be Seen (2025), Margaret Watts Hughes Lecture on Radium (2025), Loie Fuller No Title (2025), Richard Foreman – Three little collectible conceptual art books. I will just point you to the website. IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto: Aventuras extraordinárias dum português no Oriente (The Pilgrimage of Fernão Mendes Pinto: Extraordinary Adventures of a Portuguese Man in the Orient, 1614), Fernão Mendes Pinto – The real book is a 900-page semi-true account of a Portuguese wanderer in the 16th century Far East who, in the most famous episode, joins up with a patriotic privateer, or a bloodthirsty pirate. The book I read is a rewritten abridgement for Portuguese 9th graders. How I wish I knew how it was taught. La femme partagée (The Shared Woman, 1929), Franz Hellens La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear, 1943), Jean Ray – I plan to write a bit about these two novels, my excursion to Belgium. Navegações (1983), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
