proximoception | (no subject)

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.

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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.

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.

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.