(no subject)

[proximoception]

I've calculated I did my main Borges readings at c. 17, c. 20, 24, c. 28 and now 32. Might be room for even spacing there, depending on which months. Strange how he becomes a habit, like junk food, or perhaps a passion (as witness the diagrams strewn around notebooks here) - strange also how you do burn out on him. I think I leave him more fondly each time.

Not that I've left him yet, just onto the prose. Bloom relies on Borges' points, phrases, anecdotes even more extensively, and less consciously, than on Eliot's - which he's mostly internalized to destroy. The note of personal disappointment, maybe even ambivalence, comes up when he writes of Borges sometimes, too. Can't think where else it ever does.

Bloom should absolutely do something like Borges' Personal Library project. Though that would take some cachet. How amazing that Borges once had that cachet.

My father handed me Labyrinths when either he'd gone into a bit of a posthumous eclipse or the telegraphy of the literary world eschewed my braces. Felt like a personal discovery, like the Beatles did a year or so later (hard to believe now, but they were played absolutely never in my childhood - I knew McCartney only as the Ivory guy). But pretty much everything is a personal discovery at that point. No matter what the source, you don't have enough context on you for the gift to be anything but itself at that age.

My apathy toward school and fairly consistent avoidance of lit. classes, then dropping out entirely, meant almost everything was a pure discovery. The authors sent me to each other, or the movies sent me to them, or they were next to each other in the Nortons or smaller anthologies. Ignored introductions and footnotes too, on fierce principle. No wonder I fell so hard. I've resolved to ignore the official course descriptions next year and largely teach literature, but worry that I'll never be able to reproduce that.

And Bloom ruined it! With him came context - what he provided, what I now didn't mind reading because I had his running start, what was needed to try to fight him. And inevitably I started to open books where I had some notion of what they were supposed to be. (Either that or I turned 24, just as bad.) And now what books do I not have notions of? Doesn't always matter, but often enough does - why read this when I'd read those? I've run to other sources, in reaction, but they're wrong. Take me somewhere okay, sure, fun, sure. But limited, derivative, drab. Closest thing to wrong Bloom's ever been is somewhat confused about Engine Summer.

I'm what you get with Bloom in place of college, you could maybe say, but that couldn't have happened if I hadn't gone native in the books already.

---

I was very annoyed with Borges at first but couldn't stop. Like with Stevens. Like with who else? Dickinson, though it amazes me to say so. I was hostile to her till one day when I read her for hours and she did those things to my head she'd explained she would. I think the resistance was about rhyme or something amazingly inconsequential like that - not to Stevens or Borges, that was their attitude, how they were slanting my world. Haughty contempt was my default approach to new books, or anyway poems. I'm not sure that's indefensible, depending on porosity. Plays I gave myself up to, tv-trained.

But like with who else? Or, rather, who else has won through to where I can't even criticize, just contemplate what they might know still beyond me. Bloom, Stevens, Borges with four year demurrals, Dickinson. Shelley I never fought for one second (is my story). Blake I was skeptical about until full immersion. Once dry, I was again skeptical. Maybe Whitman...surely Emerson. I was initially annoyed by Faulkner and Joyce (never Woolf), but the walls came down in time. Beckett has earned my respect and attention against tough odds. Hardy I think I could love - if I read some more.

Comments

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

I envy you your time reading actual books. In my experience, grad school seemed bound and determined to squeeze that time into nonexistence.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Too true.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Do you like Hart Crane?

I think Bloom can be wrong if he hasn't spent enough time with a writer, especially prose writers. For example, he seems to rank Conrad's work as a whole higher than Fitzgerald's (and maybe other critics do the same), but to me that's absurd. That being said, I really trust his taste.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I love Hart Crane but reading him requires a gear shift, a bit like Blake's longer works do. I'm not a native speaker. I imagine that's why Bloom likes him so much, even rereading him is like reading him for the first time. Stevens has some of that too but...I don't know, the words come back faster for me. And I'm more often drawn to them for advice.

You see in his work over the years where something has just been extinguished for Bloom by overexposure. A certain kind of work that truly is something but that you can barely say what it is, where when you say what it is one year and try again the next you're inevitably saying something very different without either description being wrong, must be...well, paradoxically, the only non-Aleph, the only thing on which your mind can rest, without zapping along among other over-easy associations. I have nothing like Bloom's share of the overplus, but can't read most books at all, because to even glance at them is to know far too well what they are and why they are it, to be tossed back into the trashheap of things far too easy to read for their patterns of intention (Danielle Steele's text) and too hard to read for their unintentional ones (what a half-omniscient alien might get about the whole universe from a page of Steele).

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Might also explain his relative intolerance for less difficult writers - Conrad is a weirder mind, with a more labyrinthine manner of expression to try to fathom than Fitzgerald. Not to say Fitzgerald's uncomplex, but he did often deliberately shoot for something not just universal but normative. Salinger hatches from him pretty naturally.

But it's been forever since I read much of him at once. I remember annoying my whole high school AP class, teacher included, by arguing that Gatsby must have been responsible for getting Carraway onto Long Island, since he's the most essential part of his very elaborate plan. They thought I had the conspiracy crazies. I cited page numbers though, there were clues in there.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I've always searched out introductions and footnotes and essays, I enjoy reading them more than the poems most of the times. Maybe because what I'd always been searching for was the context, how it fits, what it says, what it says about what can be said. starting from that youthful notion that words can be important, which gets harder and harder to hold onto. it's the wrong reason to read anything, I know, and probably why I still can't love very much (and i seem to love those things that ever so delicately resist my attempts to understand them). But you don't have to live in a house for a year to understand its architecture, even though a house was designed to be lived in. and contexts gets you aerial views and blueprints and maps of its shadow, very important when you're primarily concerned with how and why it was made.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

It's a rare introduction that helps you understand anything. They're mostly just cross-referencing systems. Strings of adjectives.