The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

I think he is hugely respected all round. Especially in a broader, sort of broadsheet cultural sphere where people only know him more vaguely.

I suspect, though, that people who are deeply immersed in comic book culture have more particularised and nuanced views of him eg: he hasn't been the same since 1990, his last series was an improvement, his second novel is better than his first, etc -- detailed and well-informed judgments that outsiders to the field wouldn't be able to make.

If the question is 'is he genre or mainstream, popular or artistic' then I think he seems a very good example of someone who has been able to have it both ways.

Sorry to interrupt, I've got a question for anyone knowledgable about the book industry:

I've read the first three books of the Yale University Press versions of In Search of Lost Time in paperback. The fourth was published in June of last year, in hardcover only. I've been waiting to see if it will be released in paperback, but now they've announced the fifth book for February on next year, also in hardcover only. Is it likely that they'll never release these later books in paperback?

It's really another thread at this point, not WHAT ARE YOU READING?, but -- my sense would be:

relations between genre(s) and mainstream have been restructured, for one reason or another, over a certain period (post-2000 at least, maybe a lot longer) -- but the effect has not been to erase boundaries and make everything a free for all. Rather, the visible boundaries are useful and are used by writers (as well as publishers, bookshops). To cross the boundary brings a kind of kudos, either way, but you need the boundary to stay visible for it to have effect. Ishiguro impressing (some) people (mainly mainstream readers, say) by apparently writing SF is again a standard instance. If SF no longer seemed separate then he couldn't produce that effect.

at the same time, the 'revolt of the genres' as though they are continually kept down by snooty mainstream people equally remains a strong rhetorical force, even though the actual rationale for it seems to have dissolved. Again it seems to be useful for everyone to have boundaries in place and in view against which they can make moves (like Bourdieu's 'position-taking in the cultural field', even, if you like), even though the number of times these moves are made would seem to invalidate the boundaries and some of the perceptions or hierarchies hitherto associated with them.

Poster Halfway, I cannot say (but just looked at Yale site), but it seems to me that a publisher would intend to be consistent and thus having released 3 in PB would release the others in PB also.

I can't keep up with editions of Proust. I made it 2/3 through the old Penguin (I think this is Terence Kilmartin?), mostly hating it; will probably never make it to try any of these other versions.

Meanwhile I return to Adichie's book of stories THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009). The writing is very cool and clear. Never spectacular, never vague. Most of the action so far has been in Africa. A lot of reference has been made to African war and history and I think I'll need to delve into that to understand better. Class hierarchies, in the society described, seem strong. People (the protagonists in fact) have drivers and servants while others live in poorer conditions.

it seems to me that a publisher would intend to be consistent and thus having released 3 in PB would release the others in PB also.

Thanks pinefox, that's my thought also, but I have no idea if publishers wait more than 18 months to issue a paperback version of their titles, or if there had been a sudden shift in the industry that made hardcover the only viable format for such a book. I had been wondering if they were waiting for the centenary of Proust's death next week for a bit of extra publicity.

(I am interested in the constraints imposed by form and how writers work within those constraints. I think that is one advantage of writing a work of a known genre or form: the writer and the reader have agreed to rules for communication and it becomes a game to impress each other with what one can do to express and interpret those rules.)

(many XPs) Delany's magnum opus had a healthy amount of gay (and straight) sex in it. It just about exploded my adolescent brain the first time I read it.

there's a lot of kinky stuff in dhalgren too, and underage sex, it just about exploded my late twenty something brain the first time i read it tbh.

delany's kinks i can get behind in theory but man, fingernails, nope not erogenous for me.

nest of spiders is like neverending slash fic written by a good writer who is into the raunchy stuff, it's fun.

Yeah, Dhalgren was the one I meant. What an amazing work, and not just for the sex. It was for me kind of what Steve Jobs described LSD as being for him: an experience that opened up his mind to seeing the world differently.

It should be considered considerably bad form to exploit reactions to win critical approval and the audience should not cater to the writer past the age when such sentiments are innocently expressed.

as usual i'm not reading anything right now, waiting for something promising to present itself. i tried with wolf hall after mantel died but it's too much of an adventure novel for my taste. season of migration to the north is the last amazing thing i read and i want something that is that good. i tried a few pages of dennis cooper, not for me, not now, i'm too soft. i think i want to continue reading authors on the colonized side of colonialism, chinua achebe maybe? but also i want queer subject matter but also i want characters who are shaped by trauma. i should go to the library and ask a librarian!

xp oh i think about dhalgren all the time. it's sort of become a lodestone for me when it comes to thinking about what my internal experience of a dystopic future. i really, really love and hold dear its dissection of and dismissal of the nuclear family.

sloppy typing but the gist is there

I read Angela Carter's very short story 'Werewolf'. It would be worth directly comparing it with a Grimm original of 'Little Red Riding Hood' to see how she changed the elements. Because I can no longer entirely remember the story of Red Riding Hood. In Carter's story I quite like the way she sets the scene of a cold Northern land full of superstition - the land whence fairy tales come, and also where this tale then occurs.

i think i want to continue reading authors on the colonized side of colonialism, chinua achebe maybe? but also i want queer subject matter but also i want characters who are shaped by trauma.

They're too young to have experienced real deal colonialism like Achebe, but Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater certainly ticks the other two boxes you were talking about.

... maybe have a look at Fiston Mwanza Mujila also? I read Tram 83 and recall being somewhat confused and very impressed, though I'm afraid I can't remember much about it now

Reading The Karamazov Brothers once again (the Avsey translation). The Godfather discussion a few days ago got me thinking about this book and made me want to go back to it. I don't think there's any other book that gives me the same raw emotion.

I finish the PARIS REVIEW 1961 interview with Robert Lowell. It contains a lot of waffle and name-dropping, and some material that could possibly be useful or relevant about writing in poetic forms. It's slightly interesting for instance that Lowell says that when reading poems regularly in public he rewrote them to make them simpler and more direct.

But, a) it contains the surprising statement from Lowell that fascism was a good thing for Ezra Pound, because it made him down to earth and engaged with history, rather than an aesthete. Those might be good things to be, but is fascism worthwhile as a way to reach them? Lowell literally says Pound's views, including fascism, 'were a tremendous gain to him' and helped to bring 'realism and life' to his poetry.

b) Much more broadly in this long interview what I notice is that Lowell says almost nothing about what his own poetry is about, or why he ever felt inspired to write it. On the last page he does finally talk about trying to render an experience into a poem, and how it comes out indirectly in a detail. But I find it fairly absurd that in a detailed 35-page interview you learn almost nothing about what this poet wrote about or what experience or feeling or belief ever made him want to write a poem. The main exception is something about Christianity, but he airily says that he doesn't know whether his poems are religious or not, which makes me think: if you don't, well, nobody else does.

Another example of Lowell's airy grandeur is his declaration that T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost are, "certainly", "the great New England poets". Now firstly this is banal because Eliot and Frost were practically the best known poets in the world at the time, so he's not having to work very hard to name them. It's like saying "Certainly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now the major Democratic politicians." Secondly, if you think about it, you wonder if it's even true of Eliot - who was from Missouri and who in London was known as "Tom (Missouri) Eliot", who lived in Paris and Oxford, who became one of the great London poets (certainly his most famous poem is not about New England) and more English than the English, and who in the Four Quartets writes most obviously about three English places (and one off the coast of MA, true). Well, you can kick it around and argue that TSE (who did spend some significant time in New England, yes) really was very New England (you can certainly say that most of the first book had New England settings in mind), and people will agree, but it's not a great argument to win given the banality aspect noted above.

That's a digression I admit. Mostly I wish the interviewer would, rather than chattily ask about this or that dropped name, ask what some of Lowell's actual poems are about and try to establish why they might be worth reading.

Maybe he caught on that they’re not worth reading at all, which is the correct opinion afaic

Despite my jest, I will say that Stevens is certainly more a New England poet that Eliot ever was— Stevens is practically the first person I think of when I think of New England poetry

But Lowell was probably jealous that Stevens was nine million times the poet he would ever be :-D

Lowell actually says:

"You hardly think of Stevens as New England, but you have to think of Eliot and Frost as deeply New England and puritanical."

it contains the surprising statement from Lowell that fascism was a good thing for Ezra Pound, because it made him down to earth and engaged with history, rather than an aesthete. Those might be good things to be, but is fascism worthwhile as a way to reach them? Lowell literally says Pound's views, including fascism, 'were a tremendous gain to him' and helped to bring 'realism and life' to his poetry.

I agree with you that even if he had acquired these qualities through becoming a fascist that would not be a net gain (lol), but this also seems to me like Lowell has no idea what fascism is? It's a cliché by now to call it the aestheticization of politics; certainly there is nothing at all down to earth about ethno-nationalist heroic narratives of the Ubermensch.

i have no brief for lowell -- the times i've tried to read him have not been rewarding! -- but is the hidden stress in that sentence maybe on "puritanical" (with new england as a shorthand for that), making this a cryptic comment on his own poetry (he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

robert traill mixx lowell IV

The River of Rivers in Connecticut
by Wallace Stevens
There is a great river this side of Stygia
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

stevens does not strike me as puritanical but others here surely know his work much better

He resides in a Connecticut of the mind. People exist as muses and intimations.

Mark S: I agree that 'puritanical' is a key word, but what does it mean in relation to Eliot?

The truth is surely that in relation to Eliot, it has its most banal meaning - the thing that everyone would casually think puritanical means - that is: a fear and suspicion of sexuality.

It is arguable that this is present in TSE's most famous poem. Arguable also that it was present in his life, though that's another matter.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

Or did Lowell really mean to say something else about Eliot, by this word? If so, I don't know what it was.

yes i agree it doesn't open things up very much at all, and that many readers will likely reach for the least testing meaning -- tho i'm guessing a boston new englander might have more complex references for it, including even some positive ones? as much as anything it's a religion-based philosophy (what should you do? how are you saved?) and eliot was both religious and philosophical…

the interviewer should have asked him what he meant the word! (i haven't read the interview so i'm just parsing that point) (instead of getting down to my own work)

The interviewer should have asked him a lot of things. A poor job.

I agree that Lowell probably did, indeed, mean it positively, as you say. But again, TSE was not from New England, and was not a puritan - he was raised as a Mid-Western Unitarian and then became an Anglo-Catholic in London. To say he was a New England puritan seems something of a fiction.

I think I should partially withdraw my last statement, as Unitarianism could perhaps be called a form of puritanism.

well i think he's making a provocative rather than a factual claim: TSE is the most "new england" of poets – despite largely being from elsewhere – bcz to be a puritan is above all to be "new england" and TSE was above all a puritan. what did he mean by this tho? we do not find out (bcz the joke or the trolling or whatever it is went over the interviewer's head, and requires ilx to tease it out)

That seems a good reading. The point of the statement is that TSE is "very New England" despite not being from New England.

(he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

Anthony Powell, almost certainly well aware of Lowell's family lineage, used to say that his own surname should be pronounced in just the same way as Lowell's (ie not to rhyme with 'towel').

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

brb developing a hilarious internet meta-joek in which they're pronounced poo-ell and loo-ell and also instead of boo-ie it's boo-urns

I did try to read Lowell 14 years ago. It was a struggle and unrewarding - just as Mark S has said. I seem to have got almost nothing out of them.

Can anyone who remembers tell me, or us, what (some of?) Lowell's poems are about?

Yeah, if Lowell meant puritanical and/or Brahmin related, then Stevens could not count, as he had to actually work for a living (horrors!) in the most dreary of professions, too.

mark s and the pinefox, he wrote what I would call historical confessional works that mostly involved the relation of the self to history as perceived in the present. “For the Union Dead” is an emblematic poem— blank verse, the intrusion of modernity and the (here literal) excavation of history, the way personal memory imbues a place with a certain subjective personal history as adjunct to objective history, a healthy dose of racism.

https://poets.org/poem/union-dead

I should say, i just woke up so “blank verse” not the term as it’s usually utilized— I meant free verse.

He wrote one poem that I love unreservedly— otherwise, meh.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

This made me laugh out loud.

His dense Tate/Eliot-indebted early work is about the only Lowell I can stand.

He lived in a tent on Allen Tate's lawn!

the only kind of influence i recognise

Poster table, thanks for your description of Lowell's work. This is helpful and clear. Apart from the racism, you do not make the poetry sound bad.

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

Hardwick. I like Blackwood too.

Hardwick's criticism, her fiction not so much.