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donne piece contains a section of pure Empson, arguing a controversial textual reading via dramatising an imaginary but commonplace scene (he does this with Shakespeare a few times):
Whereas, if we look at the matter the other way round, every step is intelligible. One evening around 1600 Donneโs boss, the lord keeper, was giving a dinner party for some other top legal figures and invited his secretary to read them a few of his poems afterward, before the music. Donne felt that this poem, put among some more romantic ones, would suit the old buffers very well, so long as the point of it was left out; as a porner they would like it, but they would feel positively insulted if told that the affair was innocent. So, while dressing for dinner and considering what to read, he drew a line through due to and wrote โmuch lessโ over the top, merely to remind himself on the occasion. He could speak these words so as to sound encouraging and conniving, though they might look bad to a reader; he had no intention of altering his poem permanently. Maybe he crossed out the addition next morning, leaving a complete bafflement for the copyists.
it makes you gurgle at the effrontery and audacity of it, almost trolling, and the thing of it is, that i think his reading is (must be actually) the right one, which reverse engineering from that conclusion means he may well not be wrong in his scene (or if not the scene, the motivation for the emendation).
― Fizzles, Saturday, 24 October 2020 10:25 (three years ago) link
this was true of lots of people who wrote for the nyrb but most notable to me in dyson, perhaps because he lived so long -- the fucking ground they covered was just incredible. dyson would be like 'this one time i was having beers with niels bohr and enrico fermi . . .' yes please tell me everything about your personal interactions with a guy who won his nobel 90 years ago
― mookieproof, Saturday, 24 October 2020 21:58 (three years ago) link
Ha, I just dipped into his review of the James Gleick Newton biography and
โWe knew that the fat young man was second in command to Sir Oswald Moseley in the British Union of Fascists, and if his friend Adolf had successfully invaded England he would probably have been our Gauleiter. Being well-brought-up English children, we listened to the fat young man politely and never showed him our contempt.
When I was bringing in the harvest and listening to the fat young man, I did not know that he had been the owner of the Newton papers. I learned this two years later from the economist John Maynard Keynes.โ
― circles, Saturday, 24 October 2020 23:17 (three years ago) link
Even as a long-term fan, I was beginning to find Patricia Lockwood insufferable in the LRB, but her piece on Nabokov in the new issue is simply delightful.
― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, 28 October 2020 19:25 (three years ago) link
two weeks pass...
one year passes...
one year passes...
eleven months pass...