Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

Bit of both? I think he's generally convinced that there's an astonishing wealth of good music from that year that he wants to share. He probably realises this is also true of every year.

there's a podcast on a bbc sounds about it all. i like him, but when he was on Later... talking about it his music taste struck me as bad, so i haven't listened.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p089rfmk

i finished rings of saturn and am about halfway through austerlitz. i'm enjoying its relative straightforwardness.

The podcast's better than the book I think, earnest enthusiasm does more on an audio medium.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Total Library Non-Fiction 1922-1986

500 pages worth of essays and (later in life, due to what seems like a mixture of further fame and blindness) transcried talks. The essays up to 1955 or so (pre-blindness) are a series of optical illusions. He has an incredible ability to convey the essence of a whatever he is reading or seeing (about a dozen film reviews here) in about 3/4 highly satisfying pages that also manage to display the sense that he has read about half a dozen books on that book or author (this could be another optical illusion but maybe if you spend all your life reading or writing that might be true, either that or he has good skim-reading ability). That's whether he is writing for a journal, the desk, or a woman's magazine. Throughout, we have a series of slightly longer essays that seem like 3/4 pages stitched together, as he talks about the translators of The Arabian Nights (v interesting discussion of Orientalism as a thing before Said?) Benjamin's essay on it gets far more hits than Borges and while there isn't a take on it per se that isn't fused with the books he discusses it feels a little unfair. I love his 20 pages on Dante, just different aspects of the book, on Icelandic Sagas, on Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát (this was a marvel, his account of Fitzgerald felt like a short story!), Flaubert, Gibbon, Coleridge, and first reads of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner as being published for the first time - his reckoning with modernism and sharp judgment (the way he is so open to what Joyce does on Ulysses while at the same time struggling through Finnegans Wake, compare this to Woolf's dismissal based on snobbery and jealousy in her diaries), plus his Refutation of Time (which has won out in discussion of literature) over space is something to go back to. The range of reading on a level I have not seen since Auerbach's Mimesis (Auerbach ofc also published his own separate account of Dante) that feels like reading has taken place (unlike George Steiner lol, no name dropping). Both are as light and exhausting as they try to give as open a read as their faculties will allow them (at the edge!), and for the Borges there is no better demonstration of how a writer of fiction worth reading is always a reader first and foremost.

In the end its clear how I took Borges for granted too. I reckon Labyrinths is a possibly flawed collection. The power of the stories doesn't put the essays in perspective. Also brings to mind how people like Eco and Manguel really feel like bad copies of him. It can't be empahsized how much of a one-off Borges was.

I read Borges' essays and the fictions as essays, as banal as it sounds. The Whole of Harmonium, as it were.

*Borges' essays as fictions

Yes, for sure there is a relationship here between the stories and criticism. Nothing else like it.

Great post, xyzzzz

I am still ploughing my way through a big anthology of horror short stories called The Dark Descent, edited by David G Hartwell. As well as the expected big hitters (Lovecraft, Poe, King etc) the pick of the bunch so far would include 'The Swords' by Robert Aickman and 'Good Country People' by Flannery O'Connor (both dark comedies about sexual innocence yet utterly different in style and milieu), 'The Summer People' by Shirley Jackson, 'The Autopsy' by Michael Shea (a tremendously gory variant on The Thing), 'Sticks' by Karl Edward Wagner (which anticipates certain aspects of The Blair Witch Project before going full-on Lovecraft), 'My Dear Emily' by Joanna Russ and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which put me in mind a little of 'The White People' by Arthur Machen (who is strangely absent from this selection).

It also includes 'The Jolly Corner' by Henry James, which put me in mind of this comment from Borges - “I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James.”

I've never read Borges, but a lot of authors I like have been influenced by him. Where should I start?

Any of the famous stories. "The Library of Babel," "The Lottery in Babylon," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Aleph," many others. Most of his writings you can easily finish in half an hour or less.

Thanks!

I think the key to Borges is time. Each of those stories jmm mentions (or indeed the essays xyzzz mentions) took maybe 10 or 15 minutes to read but they've taken up huge spaces in my imagination - to the point where one reaches for Borgesian metaphors to explain the phenomenon.

There's an element of Kafka inventing his precursors here, but I do wonder if Borges is an inevitable literary archetype: just distant enough in time and place; the blandness of his biography that, alongside the impossible nature of his writing, that seems to invite mystery; adrift in the bowels of the national library, dreaming of gauchos, becoming that rare thing, the man who has read everything; the blindness in later life that he embraces, enabling the shift into the sightless sage.

His 'creation myth' is intriguing. Short version (as I remember it) is that he received a nasty concussion and was briefly hospitalised and during convalescence decided to start writing fiction, resulting in his most productive period. It'd make an interesting book alongside Dylan's crash, Eno getting run over by a taxi. I'm sure there's a bunch more.

Hi PBKR, you might dig these threads:
Borges translation?

Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

My gateway/first love object: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 (Dutton, 1978. ISBN 0-525-47539-7), translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, who is still my favorite for that, though Hurley and others I've read in comparison seem okay too.

I tried to get a start in Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion last night, but I couldn't get any traction with it. After watching that horrifying Trump/Biden 'debate' its tone of childlike innocence was a million miles from where my feelings were. I'll try again tonight.

So glad you liked the Rubáiyát essay. One of the most lovely little gems I've ever read.

I finished the collection of 2 Natalia Ginzburg novellas Valentino and Sagittarius. I thought they were pretty great. I will definitely be seeking out more of her books. It's hard to think of who to compare her to. For some reason, I thought of Collodi's Pinocchio. There is something like Collodi's fairy tale in the unity of effect, the excision of anything extraneous, in the way the comic and tragic run closely together, the treatment of her characters that borders on the malicious, though with an underlying sympathy -though nothing happens in these stories that couldn't happen in real life.

Now I'm reading True Grit by Charles Portis, which is a rollicking good time so far.

Great to hear all this Borges talk.

My gateway/first love object: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969

Portuguese bookstore employee blogger I used to follow had a story abt someone coming in the store requesting "the ALF".

I finish Terry Eagleton's 'The Good-Natured Gael' at last. He praises Edmund Burke a bit more than I expected.

Then his essay on 'The Masochism of Thomas Moore'. Superb analysis: incredible that TE worked his way through the complete writings (and loads of criticism and scholarship) of this writer who he says at the end of the essay doesn't even stand up very well. TE's judgment of writers and their place in history is so consistently sound. But the attention to detail in these essays would be uncharacteristic of his later work.

Really enjoyed the Borges discussion, will track down 'The Aleph and Other Stories' (and I love the Labyrinths poll thread, ILB at its best)

Ward - that looks like an excellent comp. One aspect (of many) I neglected to emphasize is his love of fantastical literature (brings to mind his love of James, who seemed to be at ease with both fantasy and something more 'psychological'), something that I just don't read that much of these days. It might explain why he never won the Nobel prize too, its not their bag. Might be interesting to contrast his essay on The Detective Story with Auden's in The Dyer's Hand. For Auden iirc it seems to be something to relax with. For Borges, aspects of it appear every now and again in how he perceives the world of the page.

"I finished the collection of 2 Natalia Ginzburg novellas Valentino and Sagittarius. I thought they were pretty great. I will definitely be seeking out more of her books. It's hard to think of who to compare her to. For some reason, I thought of Collodi's Pinocchio."

Lol I love those Ginzburg novellas (read them in a past edition, one of NYRB's best reissues in the last year imo) but never thought of it along Pinocchio (which I have always meant to read ever since NYRB put out an edition of it).

NYRB are also putting out a couple more Ginzburg novellas next year.

Working through Norma Cole's "Mars" today. One of her books that isn't featured as heavily in her selected poems, I can understand why— it is strange and hermetic, in a sense, mixing prose and poetry and without standard reference points. I still find myself enjoying it, though, but as we've been discussing on the poetry thread, my tastes run pretty weird.

Sweet, that's my main thing these days, why I've gotten hooked on W.E.B. Bu Bois, who fearlessly ranges though forms, themes, data, imagery, whatever's right. New Sante book is said to do some of that as well.
Also v. interested in this, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse (shit title, but can see relevance in this essay):

The several dozen stories of “Written in Invisible Ink,” artfully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, read like schoolyard confessions carved into a desk. Surveying Guibert’s work from 1975 to 1989, the book reveals a young writer confident in his themes yet restlessly experimental in expression. Realist vignettes alternate with fairy tales, ghost stories, and descriptions of imaginary erotic machines. In one story, a knife-thrower tricks the narrator into agreeing to perform as his partner (in drag); in another, a man steals a wax head of Jeanne d’Arc. The over-all impression is that of a writer in search of shapes for his unruly energy, as though picking through limbs in an anatomist’s workshop.
...Other, more sinister stories revolve around codependent relationships.
"A streak of cruelty" also noted, along w splatters of cold obscenity, but I say this is Teentown, buddy, and I consider myself warned.

Chronologically not all from Teentown, but he seems like the perpetual adolescent for quite a while in this saga.

The fantasy anthology Borges mentioned---I've got it, read from it sometimes, not something I wanted to plow straight through, as I do with everything else:

The Book of Fantasy Hardcover---November 1, 1988
Edited by
Jorge Luis Borges
Sivina Ocampo
A. Bioy Casares
Introduction by
Ursula K. Le Guin

From Publishers Weekly
Originally conceived of by its Argentinian editors in 1937, and now published in English for the first time, this unusual and provocative volume is an omnibus collection. In addition to stories by Ballard, Poe, Saki, Max Beerbohm, Ray Bradbury, May Sinclair, de Maupassant and Julio Cortazar, there are shorter pieces, anecdotes, folkloric fragments, dreamlike moments. Most of the 79 selections are only a paragraph or two long, giving us brief passage into magical visions of the world culled from the work of an international array of authors of the past three centuries, including less well-known authors such as Santiago Dabove, Edwin Morgan and Niu Chiao. The keynote tale may well be Borges's own "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in which an imaginary world, conjured up by manufactured documentation, ends up eroding our reality: reality is malleable, and imagination necessarily subverts and alters it.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Amazon purchaser Martin Chandler says:
This collection is excellent. Along with the deservedly famous selections such as The Monkey's Paw and The Man Who Liked Dickens, there are many stories even the most erudite fantasy reader may be unacquainted with. Some of the tales, such as The Story of the Foxes by Niu Chiao and the unsettling Guilty Eyes by Ah'med Ech Chiruani, are half page at most, but will implant themselves in the memory as effectively as the longer narrations. ("Guilty Eyes" is as durable as a poison oak seed.) Also present is a fine selection of Latin American fictions, with a focus on Argentine writers. Kafka' Josephine the Singer, Cocteau's The Look of Death, and Beerbohm's Enoch Soames sound straight out of the world of Borges, a tribute to the latter writer who managed to forge a world view at once deeply personal yet universal. Borges's own Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is included as well as a piece by the under-read Casares. All in all an indispensable collection, marred only by an astonishing number of typos. Buy it! (At 92 cents it's a steal.)
Haven't spotted any typos in mine, maybe it's a later or earlier printing.

"The Aleph" probably my favorite Borges.

It's a good one.

Doesn't that particular Borges anthology contain a little passage from Ulysses episode 9, about the definition of a ghost?

(Unless that's another anthology again, about ghosts, Gothic, or something.)

New month and time to trawl through 72 pages of Kindle monthly deal... Penguin Classics ghosts stories (in fact they had a few Halloweeny things) and the big Greek myths book by Graves were the only things that caught my eye.

Currently reading, very slowly, The Man Who Laughs. Has been two days and I'm still literally on page 1 because I keep falling asleep.

TE's long essay on Cork is incredible. The erudition, the detail, the obscurity, the humour.

I get on to the Father Prout business - Cork wits, pen-names, fake plagiarism. It's Flann O'Brien 100+ years early.

Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens - Reading for a book club, and certainly wouldn't be otherwise, but it's pretty good? Great description of swampland, and a sort of Robinson Crusoe tale of an abandoned girl growing up alone. Uncomfortable with the portrayal of black characters - there solely to help the protagonist, overly angelic and while all characters speak in Southern US dialects whose authenticity I am no fit judge of, the black characters in particular sound a lot like black characters in a 1940's Hollywood film.

In my teen years I once read a guide to writing better fan fiction and one piece of advice that's stuck with me is to not impose your cultural tastes on your characters. Owens does this quite a lot, with the swamp rat characters getting into Edward Lear and other poetry.

Finished Norma Cole's 'Mars,' then finished Sophia Dahlin's 'Natch.' She's a young queer poet with a lot of talent, this book is hopefully a promise of many more good things to come...it is sensual, weird, and resistant toward any expectations. Great book, out from City Lights.

Now I'm onto 'October,' my first Mieville book. I'm excited so far...I think I've read more of the theory and speeches of Russian Revolutionary leaders than a history, and it's promising to deliver those lessons in a somewhat entertaining manner.

The only Mievelle I've read is The City and The City, a richly imagined and developmental urban and urban (alternating, hey it's cultural buddy, don't judge)thriller, also implicit satire (and homage, seems like, though I won't drop any names), very entertaining, though with a few moments of accidental comedy (the best kind), a few wobblers along the way, but well-worth a read if you end up liking October pretty well, and it does sound promising, his kind of material.

I have been reading Susanna Clarke's new novel Piranesi (I keep wanting to write Pirandello). I am in the second part, and so far everything remains very mysterious. Shades of Borges's "House of Asterion," perhaps also Wittgenstein's Mistress although I may be just thinking of the latter because I tried (and failed) to reread it earlier in lockdown.

going back to butler's wild seed, the ending of which i gave up on last year because i could tell it was gonna be depressing. but after having read two sebald novels i feel like i can handle it now.

Yes, I want to read Clarke's new one, and her others too, intriguing article about her life and works in recent New Yorker.
Butler is amazing, not that much like any other writer, in range, combination of elements, presentations. Doesn't always seem to work, at least expectations-wise, but yeah, worth going back in.
xxpost Natch sounds good, and as I said in response to your original description of Norma Cole's Mars, Sweet, that's my main thing these days, why I've gotten hooked on W.E.B. Bu Bois, who fearlessly ranges though forms, themes, data, imagery, whatever's right.----in the same vein, I've just finished my first reading of Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar, with a brief, incisive quote of De B. therein, and also ranges through various forms, themes, storylines, jumping back and forth, usually with good timing. He's mostly a playwright by trade, the kind who sits in the audience at many performances, and he's learned about attention spans.
The playwright skills bring fiction, memoir, essay through many voices within monologue---as with Dylan, this Pultizer Prize-winning creator->narrator drives fast cars, eats fast foods, contains multitudes, although his spill out, and at least for a while in here he'd rather take limos and eat and especially drink, also fuck, richly beyond dreeems---when he's traveling with a fan and mentor, a fellow Pakistani-American who has become a billionaire of debt.
This guy, who is also a or maybe the central character in one of Akhbar's plays, where he is deliberately presented in an ambiguous way, resulting in some confused responses, in reviews and post-performance Q&A: such confusion, among Muslims and non-Muslims, to this play and some (not all) others, is a big part of why this book is being written, this explanation given, says the narrator: it's all How We (Pakistani and American and others who are tagged as "Arab," among other things, who are natives, immigrants, sons and daughters of the pioneers, going back and forth and/or through one homeland and/or another when "homeland" is becoming and long since has become a common word) Got and Are Getting This Way. With a lot of dirty laundry aired, which some from the narrator's "background" find exhilarating---he's saying what they feel they can't say---others find it disconcerting for the same reason, or distorted in expression.
I haven't seen or read the plays, but having all this performed and extended on the page, through a fairly long, unpadded book, does give the individual audience member time and space to absorb, beyond the limits of stage performance, no matter how well-timed that may be. I do think that here, the billionaire of debt, still deliberately ambiguous, is also blurry, and mainly a subplot device, although it's a good subplot, and one that teaches the narrator things (De Niro: "I hear *things*") about himself and others. Although this also has to do with what I so far find to be the most limiting aspect of the essay/lecture turns, in what the Pakistani-American Citizen King of Debt (and another, better character, a Black Republican Billionaire who considers himself to be secretly gaming the System built on exploitation, expropriation and exclusion of the Other, thus confusing even the narrator), both of these legends in their own minds lecture the narrator, as he does us elsewhere, in terms which he finds revelatory, but I, probably like you and many of the author-narrator's fellow financial-political laymen will, find all of it---familiar, as far as it goes.
Still, he's a hell of a storyteller, yarnspinner, occasionally too gimmicky, even annoyingly so---yes you're a fascinating child, now run and get you parents, your other relatives back, now there are some characters omg
I think that if any of you think you might like this at all, you probably will.

WE also incl. non-"ethnic," also part of where the narrator is coming from, as an American-born son of medical professional immigrants, himself well-educated, nurtured in a leafy suburb of Milwaukee, one of the more traditionally liberal-to-grassroots-left parts of Wisconsin (though his father, secular and exasperated with Muslims who he sees as using the obvious downside of the System as an excuse, is also, has a secret life as a high roller, and for a while in the 90s, is a specialist called in to treat Trump---this professional-personal relationship is all in the first chapter though, mercifully enough).

non-"ethnic" also in that he grew up not wanting to see himself as so, like, brown in the kid mirror.

I didn’t like october. Surprisingly light on analysis and context until the epilogue. Really just: “and then what happened was...” for hundreds of pages. City and the city is great.

many xposts: i didnt know Clarke had a new book out, i will have to read that. I loved Jonathan Strange et al

I finished Toop's Ocean of Sound. It's brilliant albeit the further I got with it, I was surprised at an almost total lack of crisis in the text. Instead, it functions as a kind of gazetteer for a particular mode of exploring sound. It has led me back to a whole bunch of stuff: Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, Thomas Koner.

Now reading Kay Jamison's Unquiet Mind.

That's a good one. What do you mean by "crisis"? A kind of gazeteer is what I expected. You mean not exploring tensions within and between musics, incl not enough saying "he fucks up here, but this part is better"? Which is what I always want.

Caek, not far in enough to agree with you, but I've read enough analysis of what happened...so the sort of 'and then what happened' historical side of it is appealing to me. He's also clearly a great stylist.

Mike Davis books can sometimes do the same thing that you're ascribing to October, and I love Davis.

Yeah I think it just wasn’t what I was looking for. Agreed he’s a good stylist. But I would put like Davis on another level of non fiction to october (haven’t read his new one yet)

Haven't read Davis' new one either. Already read Prisoners of the American Dream and Late Victorian Holocausts this year, so going to wait a minute before I get the new one. Late Victorian Holocausts did me in, it's the bleakest book I've ever read tbh

I have to give it up for just one more Homeland Elegies character: Asha, who is serially involved long-term with a crazy white guy, but the narrator is her sidepiece/has a relationship with her. She is complex, also complicated, but never scatterbrained: "I'm a lawyer, I can pick it apart," she says of the situation with her fortune teller: she's well aware of the angles, levels, shell games, all sides of the board, but the teller's told it right enough, often enough, including that she will meet someone with certain traits, and the narrator fills the bill, in her estimate--so, whatever the percentages of "suggestibility and coincidence," the process as a whole feels right so far.
That's just one example, and she affects the narrator in several important ways, more than he affects her, I think, and then she's on her way, no more downlow with him. I miss her.

In reply to a post a bit upthread:

I also read Where the Crawdads Sing for a book club, and was very much not a fan of the way she wrote the black characters, or of the way she uses accent to signal morality, so that the "bad" characters all speak in heavy hick accents regardless of their social status or level of education, while the "good" characters - including our entirely self-educated protagonist - sound like they're on NPR. The abusive dad has the heaviest accent/dialect, the unscrupulous rich kid has the second-heaviest, while the pure-hearted poor kid, the protagonist, and the protagonist's brother all speak standard English.

Huh, I hadn't noticed that, will look out for it. There's definitley a striver impulse in there, with the whole "ain't isn't a word" thing.

I see more myth than Classical allusions in Heaney -- Irish myth, but rooted in peat, loam, mud, and the smell of farm animals. It's what I like about him.

I recall now that there is a massive Heaney thread here:

Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

In which several of us turned over the same ground only last year. ILX poster Gyac posted exactly the same quotation! And I, for instance, after a period of reading him quite intensively, wrote:

I come back - when I actually read him - to the fact that Heaney, much more especially late Heaney, has certain obsessions that he unabashedly indulges, primarily:

1: his rural childhood (I don't especially see the father as central to this; more place, objects, etc) -- and various named local characters, who are by definition unknown to almost all readers

2: the classics, ie: poetry, mythology or whatever from ancient Greece, maybe with Rome and old Norse also thrown in. There must be a fair number of people who see this stuff and think: YES - HEANEY'S REWRITING VIRGIL'S LAST WORK! But then a majority must be like me and have no idea of any of these works, and no identification, unfortunately, with the passion that presumably draws Heaney to them. He must LOVE this stuff, love engaging in depth with it, to go on about it SO MUCH.

You can say that 2) shows the limits of the audience, it's our fault, and Heaney is prompting us to learn. That's reasonable and optimistic. Most of us won't learn that much.

1) meanwhile can't be blamed on the reader, ie: you could only know who those people were if you read an in-depth biography of him.

What would be an equivalent? Maybe ... a contemporary person writing about their childhood friends from 20 or 30 years ago, and going on and on about things like ice lollies, Space Hoppers, Bros, Pokemon, etc -- and then, the rest of the time, going in for endless rewrites of a certain body of culture -- like, say ... STAR TREK. So every poem that wasn't about lollies or seeing Bros on TotP in 1988 would be eg: 'The Search For Spock, Scene III', in verse form.

This is a way for me to perceive and to say that despite my great affection for Heaney, I find his actual poetic choices, of subject etc, often dead ends, private obsessions. Suppose someone did write lots of poems about Bros (I can imagine it) - they would have some fans but might they not be seen as narrow unless they worked to show its importance and invite a broader readership to understand it?

It's funny, then, that he is also seen as such a public poet - for good reason, to be sure.

But there simply isn't much Irish myth in Heaney.

There is tons of classical myth - especially in the last 20 years or so of his career, when he spent half his time producing translations of it.

If he had wanted to write about Cuchulain, Deirdre, Finn MacCool or the Sidhe, he could have. But he didn't, as far as I recall -- for one thing, he will have known how much it had been done, almost a century before.

The exception is Mad King Sweeney, which / who he did write about a lot -- seemingly in part because he liked the rhyme with his own name.

Station Island?

I'm actually relieved he didn't write about Cuchulain, etc.

I much prefer a long poem about Bros, though.

When Yeats wrote a key position-taking play for the Abbey and the Revival, it was (among others) Cathleen ni Houlihan.

When Heaney wrote one for Field Day, about 90 years later, it was The Cure at Troy.

I suspect (as my post from the other thread indicates) that you will never fully get the measure and pleasure of Heaney unless you are somewhat steeped in classical learning, tales and poems of ancient Greek, at least in translation, so that what he does with them and alters means something to you, as it generally doesn't to me.

The long poem 'Station Island' is based on an Irish Catholic pilgrimage. I'm happy to call Catholicism myth, if anyone else is, but it's not 'Irish mythology' in the way that phrase is usually understood.

The literary inspiration for the whole thing is, above all, Dante - whom I don't pretend to know well at all. Again, if you did, you might get much more out of Heaney. Catholic, mythic maybe, but not Irish.

The poem is full of Irish elements but they're not mythic: actual victims of recent violence; Carleton, Kavanagh and Joyce; other people Heaney knew, like a late priest.

Part III of the book STATION ISLAND, though, is the Sweeney section - I grant that that is properly an engagement with medieval Irish mythology.

I think the Bros poem idea is not even fanciful now -- there seem to be a ton of younger type poets who would do such a thing (or maybe more likely NKOTB, or even Spears / Timberlake, or something), and be reposted all over Instagram for it. I can definitely picture this being celebrated in some circles, and getting a Short Cuts feature in the LRB.

In a certain way, though, it wouldn't be viewed as equally serious as what Heaney did. Its defiant unseriousness would be part of the point [etc etc]. Which they wouldn't say about Heaney writing about the 1950s.

I'm also wary and weary of classical myths. A generation of formalist American poets (Hecht, Moss, Howard, etc) wrote in the '60s and '70s as if I still cared about Eurydice or whatever. Louise Gluck also has a weakness for it.

and, yeah, I meant the Sweeney section of SI. Also the title poem itself. Depends on how you regard the speaker bumping into the ghost of Joyce.

Larkin's statement was here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin

He says something like 'I'm not going to fall on my face just because you use the word "Faust" or "Judas"'.

I broadly agree with him.

Jesus Christ, I really regret replying here. Thanks so much, guys.

gyac, I really meant what I said about your post-- it was really lovely, and I'm glad to have read it. It did make me go back and re-read some Heaney, and while I don't gather the same enjoyment from it that you do, that's okay!

Talking of Dante: I only just learned that ALASDAIR GRAY has produced a version!

This might finally be the time for me to attempt to read a version of it properly.

t’s memory, isn’t it? Love in the most ordinary of places, the profound in the everyday. It makes sense in the context of the rest. Yeah, but seems deliberately to exclude some of what it might have more specifically meant to the narrator and/or his father on that day, which is a good reminder of the slipperiness of significance, especially as recalled, recast, across the years, in the midst of what could otherwise seem like a lovely set piece: overall, with this line, it reminds me of the way Turner could balance things in his paintings, with just the one daub.
Great post, yes, and thanx to Alfred as well for those lines and all yall for the rest of this conversation--will have to go back to that Heaney thread, and was already thinking of checking out my Mom's copy of the SH Beowulf, A New Verse Translation.

xps to table: didn’t mean you at all, your reply was very kind and it didn’t matter that we don’t agree on this

I kind of feel like poets are like bands, so I would never think of being confounded that a poet I like is not generally admired or that one who is generally admired is not liked by me. Also, like bands, I think most poets have a hot streak of a few great albums/books, when they're hitting on all cylinders, the drummer and bass player both are in the pocket and the singer had temporarily given up or taken up smoking; or in the case of the poet, has found the perfect subject matter or diction or is in the right emotional headspace for his current style, or has a hot hand which always seems to fall on the apropos word or phrase. I can enjoy a band without understanding or even listening to the words, and though I wouldn't take it that far with poetry, there is an element of it just sounding good that can transcend the occasional inscrutable or hermetic allusion.

I agree with that. I think I'd probably love a Heaney or Merrill book or two, if I revisited.

Along those lines, though, and perhaps to prove that I am able to be convinced, I will note that this year, I read a number of Barbara Guest books, and simply couldn't understand why she was so popular. Then someone recommended 'The Türler Losses,' and it is a masterpiece, just an incredible book.

For Merrill, I've not read 'Changing Light at Sandover' since an undergrad, but I found it masterful then. It's the rest of his work that I find lacking.

For Heaney, the bog poems will always reverberate in my memory. Everything else seems quite dull to me.

G K Chesterton - Robert Browning

I finished this short biography/critical appraisal by Chesterton and I very much enjoyed following his logic as he not only deal with Browning's life and work, but also his critics. At times it was a counterpart (of sorts) to what Janet Malcolm was doing to Sylvia Plath's many biographers.

I broke down and started a new WAYR thread:

Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

only post to it if it's 2021 in ur time zone please folks

I finished Lethem's THE ARREST.

It ends with quite a large climax, which rearranges key items and characters of the novel in a quite a vividly schematic and spatial way.

It may leave some loose ends and unexplained story elements.

I finished Dissipatio H.G.. It belongs to that special pantheon of books that were finished shortly before the author committed suicide (cf. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday). It's hard to read a book like that without looking for clues to the author's pathology. This books offers plenty of suggestive clues if that's what you're looking for. I don't want to completely conflate the author with the narrator, there are some obvious differences, such as their age, but also plenty of overlap. Both seem to be very well read, moderately-antisocial autodidacts, who live by choice in a remote mountain village, dislike cities, and distrust the bien pensant intellectual currents of their day. The book is short but chock full of obscure allusions. I was halfway through before I realized there were end notes, which helped quite a bit. The title is illustrative, in that it is putatively drawn from a Latin letter written by an obscure Neoplatonist philosopher. The philosopher is real, although the letter itself may have been a little joke of the author's. It seems that many of these little jokes were intended for a very select audience, possibly including only the author himself. I guess that fits with the book's imagined scenario, but can make for frustrating reading, if that's not your sort of thing. Now, I'm reading The A26 by Pascal Garnier.