(no subject)

[proximoception]

Hadn't thought of that before, how the end of the Border Trilogy is like that of Peer Gynt--itself following Faust 2 & followed by Joyce's "Ithaca" (rather ruined by the commaless Mollylogue, I still insist). All three of the latter being ripped off--and Catholicized? couldn't tell--in the film Pickpocket.

Can a circle be drawn around this kind of literature--what, speculative visionary autobiography (often male? always male?), w/ all three of those terms properly blurred or qualified?

I ask because it seems to encompass pretty neatly most of what I truly value. Shelley's right there in the center of that, and in some respects is its inaugurator. Spenser kept it too general, Milton's Satan was caged, Shakespeare's Hamlet lived upstairs; they're doing slightly different things. Wordsworth came to berry. Goethe often seems a tourist in his own life. But why quibble, they're all members.

Melville lives there with his chimney. Beckett too, but I'm still not comfortable with how he rearranges the furniture. Crane, can't deny it, annoyingly drunk. Frost visible from the window, out past the garden. Browning visits so often they gave him a key.

Crowley and McCarthy have their shops set up there as we speak, back to back unacquainted.

Tolstoy, Roth and Proust somehow keep vision alive in the recognized real. I love Tolstoy's dreams though. Somehow I think of Hazlitt along with these. Mann too. Woolf?

Dickinson? Bishop definitely, beautifully--& Carson! so not always male.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

And Merrill sort of orbits around Proust in this category.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm not succeeding at liking Merrill yet--I have a hard time taking the ghosts (the atheism thing) and chattiness. A few of his lyrics and translations are amazing though, so I'm clearly wrong about him, as I earlier was about Beckett and Hardy, who I now more often love--overstating life's gloom seems now almost like a covert optimism. Old Earth and Stirrings Still and Murphy's Mind, Hardy's snow cat poem and any time someone's alone in the wilderness in his novels--beautiful past anything.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

It's interesting - and I can't remember for the life of me where I read it - but Bloom says similar things somewhere about how he was a very late convert to Merrill. I like liking both Merrill and Stevens for different reasons. Clearly, the latter wouldn't fit in your group here, for example.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think that's true, Stevens goes the Emerson route and mostly excises himself from his work, though he does creep back in in some of the '50s lyrics. Bloom thinks Emerson's greatest work is his journals (tried to read them straight through myself a couple times and failed nearly immediately), maybe because it puts the man back in among the ideas.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

light and shadow those two, Crowley and McCarthy. Odd how it seems Crowley wants so much and McCarthy doesn't even want a little. Is there anything cyclical in McCarthy?

I mean they probably couldn't listen to each other if they tried but what if they were introduced?

[(Anonymous)]

Wants so much? Explain?

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I don't know, there's this unending hope in Crowley, hope tempered by disbeleif and immobility, which only seem to make the hope stronger or at least more important. And the hope is like a desire to change the world, or write one's name on it, or see in it one's name already written.

but just in terms of the personalities of the writers of the books (different from the writers themselves), he's much more inviting than McCarthy, who seems to view everyone with equal disdain. I think what Crowley has always wanted is to be a storyteller, and his stories are mostly about storytelling and himself as storyteller -- which is not to say they're not also very difficult and complex, but the approach is that of a parable, or a teacher, or a friend. It's a dialogue. While McCarthy is in the prophetic mode, Ezekiel to the other's Elijah (or John to Jesus). The prophetic really only rails against itself, the audience is only witness to this self-immolation. McCarthy writes to question and convince himself. John Crowley writes to question and convince other people about himself.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yeah--Crowley knows, or at least knew, and writes so that others will, though at times very cryptically because these are things you need to almost know anyway before you can be taught them. But why does McCarthy always sound more sure of himself? And why does what Crowley seeks to convince of feel like merely hope, at least post-L&S? Maybe knowledge is modest and questing is belligerently obsessed with seeming confident and right? Keats thought something like this, that the people who really knew what they were doing abandoned or never came near poetry. Perhaps you can see it in Shakespeare, the chainsaw on a roller coaster power of Hamlet versus the maybe settled wisdom of The Tempest.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Depends on what you mean by cyclicality--the recitations by Mexicans in APH and Crossing imply the same story repeats itself for conceivably everyone. And the CP Epilogue may get into something like that too.

No Country for Old Men has a different, lighter (how comparative this term is in McCarthy!) take on cycles--similar to the one in The Stone Mason, so not necessarily recent in him.