Finished Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which was wonderful, and Ben Elton's Popcorn, which was OK. (How surprising, a great novelist writes a much better novel than a stand up comedian.)
Finished Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which was wonderful, and Ben Elton's Popcorn, which was OK. (How surprising, a great novelist writes a much better novel than a stand up comedian
I read the first four books of The Odyssey, which is really enjoyable so far. I don't think I'll ever tire of Dawn being described as rosy-tipped, or rose-fingered, I just love it every time. Homer is the master of metaphor, and already I feel the urge to re-read the Iliad as well.
Otherwise, I've read some more poems from Mandelstam (whom I've really come to like a great deal) and Emily Dickinson. I remember a great post from Stlukes way back when, where he talks about how when he read Dickinson in proper, he came to realise the depiction of her as some spinster and feminist holy grail (a total paraphrase sorry Luke) was all wrong and saw something deeper and more powerful in her, and I've had a similar experience. Dickinson is unlike most poets I have ever read. I feel sometimes she gets passed off like I mentioned, as either some spinster-type lovelorn woman on one hand, and on another, she gets co-opted by those desperate to find feminist readings throughout all her poetry to further their own ends. The truth is, she doesn't fit in to either category, she's just a great poet. Wholly unique and original, she has a stunning ability to say/portray/exude a lot, but with few words. Beautiful, choice words.
I quite liked this one, read just a moment ago:
The Doomed -- regard the Sunrise
With different Delight --
Because -- when next it burns abroad
They doubt to witness it --
The Man -- to die -- tomorrow --
Harks for the Meadow Bird --
Because its Music stirs the Axe
That clamors for his head --
Joyful -- to whom the Sunrise
Precedes Enamored -- Day --
Joyful -- for whom the Meadow Bird
Has ought but Elegy!
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
I'm also about to start Harold Bloom's The Western Canon.
I like Bloom. I don't agree with everything he ever says, and he can be completely hyperbolic, but his passion for literature is insurmountable and infectious. I love reading/hearing him talk about his favourite writers, the passion and the energy behind it I find inspiring, and he's helped me discover a number of new writers. Plus, anyone who loves Shakespeare that much always earns my time of day.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
Dickinson is my favorite poet. With her preternatural intensity she reminds me of Bach; only her work is more compressed, and therefore the intensity seems to me even more precisely aimed. I love the way she places words in unusual combinations: 'dazzle gradually,' zero to the bone,' 'are not all facts Dreams' (my italics). These combinations have an element of deadly surprise to them.
Her sense of the passage of time is also unique as far as I can tell. I can rarely place the narrator of one her poems within a particular linear strand of events. Nevertheless a sense of accuracy pervades the text, as though the poet were making a careful, authoritative incision in the surface of time; 'I heard a Fly buzz when I died' being the most famous example of this phenomenon.
The letters of hers I've read are also fantastic. If you're curious (and haven't already read them), Pierre, you might want to take a look at them. Here's a line from one of the Master letters:
"Oh how the sailor strains, when his boat is filling—Oh how the dying tug, till the angel comes. Master—open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired—"
I'm getting close to finishing The Guermantes Way. Most of it is taken up with two dinner parties, which are not so much chances for the guests to display their wit as they are opportunities for the narrator to lament the disillusionment he feels at the lack of said wit. Proust's fascination with names, of places and of people, is quite an important theme, but I'm not sure I fully understand it yet. Clearly ISOLT will repay many rereadings!
Her letters really are good and I usually hate books of letters or even epistolary novels.
So with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite jerkin tight at it's tether
i'm reading JM Coetzee's 'diary of a bad year' - he's and excellent writer, nobel prize winner.
Today I read the first story in Alice Munro's collection 'The Beggar Maid,' entitled 'Royal Beatings.' I enjoyed the plainspoken description of emotional release after savagery in this paragraph:
“Never is a word to which the right is suddenly established. She will never speak to them, she will never look at them with anything but loathing, she will never forgive them. She will punish them; she will finish them. Encased in these finalities, and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort, beyond herself, beyond responsibility.”
Munro's voice is an exciting mixture of simplicity and sophistication. Sometimes she will step back and narrate matter-of-factly, and then at unexpected moments she makes a comment which subtly extracts and renders vivid the idea essential to the passage. I'm very grateful my friend gave me this book!
Hamlet, the scene where Polonius is sending someone to spy on his son to make sure he keeps to the straight and narrow in Paris, and Ophelia expresses anxiety that Hamlet has gone barmy because she has rejected his advances - something Polonius advised her to do. Methinks Polonius, the meddlesome old boy, may be heading for a fall...
@ Clopin and Lykren - I definitely one hundred per cent plan to read Dickinson's letters, they've been on the amazon wish list for a long time now.
Today I was reading some modern American poets (Poets active in the last 50 years). Current poet laureate Charles Wright is a poet I've come to really appreciate lately, he's fantastic. I also really like Anthony Hecht - a poem from him:
SAUL AND DAVID
It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul
Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent,
That squatted within him wheresoever he went
And possessed the soul of Saul.
There was no peace on pillow or on throne.
In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed
Started a joyful rumor that he had died
Unfriended and alone.
The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he
Put aside arrogant ways and condescended
To seek among the flocks where they were tended
By the youngest son of Jesse,
A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon,
Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb
As Michelangelo later imagined him,
Comely even in his frown.
Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings?
Heaven itself delights in ironies such
As this, in which a boy's fingers would touch
Pythagorean strings
And by a modal artistry assemble
The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired
Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord,
And make Saul cease to tremble.
Last edited by Pierre Menard; 03-12-2015 at 03:07 PM.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
One from Wright:
"This, too, is an old story, yet
It is not death. Still,
The waters of darkness are in us.
In fact, they are rising,
Are rising toward our eyes.
And will wash against those windows
Until they have stilled, until,
utterly calm, they have cleansed.
And then our lives will take substance,
And rise themselves.
And not like water and not like darkness, but
Like smoke, like prayer.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
Siddhartha. Better than I remembered it being.
So with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite jerkin tight at it's tether
I read Beowulf today. First time going through the Heaney translation and really enjoyed it as well as all the extras placed in the Norton Critical edition. I've been really into the old Germanic works like that and the Eddas and Norse Sagas lately. I think it was Tolkien that actually got me craving for it this time. I almost want to learn Old English or Old Norse but it might be a bit too much of a commitment for me.
As for Emily Dickinson, I've gained a new appreciation for her lately. Her poetry is absolutely the toughest to really penetrate and understand deeply enough to appreciate out of anyone I've ever read. I really needed some good criticism to help me, and as mentioned its frustrating because a lot of critics are just boring old feminists who project their tired agenda on to her work which has nothing to do with that. Dickinson may have been interested in female rights for all we know, but she wrote as much about that as she did the Civil War, which was pretty much none at all.
It helps to sort of understand her language, just like any other poet. Someone mentioned Bloom's Western Canon, which is something I've been reading and appreciating lately and it was actually Bloom's criticism in that book that first motivated me to give her a more thorough rereading. I like the way he explains her way of "unnaming" and some of the key words and themes of her work. And I do agree that she is one of the most original and intelligent of all poets. I don't think she'll ever be one of my absolute favorites but there is definitely much more there for people who care to really give her the time and effort needed.
I have three books on the go and have been dipping in and out of each of them. I have to stop doing this and focus on one book at a time. I am reading a book on the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (would make a great film btw), Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando' and Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop'.
It was yesterday. I went to visit a friend and there I read a science fiction story about an extraterrestrial visiting Earth. It was short and interesting, trying to convey a message that people on Earth cannot live in peace because they must eat other living beings in order to survive.
...........
“All" human beings "by nature desire to know.” ― Aristotle
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
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