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Oct. 8th, 2006 08:25 pmWhat with all the books I've been unable to finish reading I started reading a few more. Bemusement's ever mother to perversity.
Beckett's short prose, around in it. I flat-out love the first two 'Stirrings Still'--the third you need to read aloud to make sense of, not sure I entirely follow the syntax still but it's impressive. Beckett is completely off my hate list, as is Hardy. It's basically just Chaucer on there now and, along the lines of the Twelve Angry Men finale, that prejudice is ready to surrender from loneliness.
Pilgrim's Progress. I'm a Spenser man and an atheist of teeth-gnashing intensity but it's interesting. Bunyan gets all kinds of strange effects out of how undescribed everything is...things are kept so blank that he can shuffle anything on or offstage at any time and you buy it. A bit like the white place in the Matrix. Funny how Spenser gives an almost opposite impression: a world of overlapping profusions of objects, words, incidents is unrolled like an endless royal carpet of demonic astroturf before you. Everything is already happening, and the everything happening means everything else. And yet off to the sides of the carpet, the same white space--or perhaps one of shifting reds and purples, cool dark greens, and turquoises and golds, for Spenser. For me The Faerie Queene takes place deep inside a Christmas tree, apparently.
Song of Myself, for both classes.
Wieland. Is this good? I can't yet tell if this is good.
Philip Pullman's Galatea I did finish, and was impressed. The celebration of the natural world in later books--and cleverly misleading clues in this one, I believe?--made me think he was going for the exact opposite message, something virtually Marxist, so I was knocked for a loop. But of course where he did go fits just as well with Kleist's doll essay.
Beckett's short prose, around in it. I flat-out love the first two 'Stirrings Still'--the third you need to read aloud to make sense of, not sure I entirely follow the syntax still but it's impressive. Beckett is completely off my hate list, as is Hardy. It's basically just Chaucer on there now and, along the lines of the Twelve Angry Men finale, that prejudice is ready to surrender from loneliness.
Pilgrim's Progress. I'm a Spenser man and an atheist of teeth-gnashing intensity but it's interesting. Bunyan gets all kinds of strange effects out of how undescribed everything is...things are kept so blank that he can shuffle anything on or offstage at any time and you buy it. A bit like the white place in the Matrix. Funny how Spenser gives an almost opposite impression: a world of overlapping profusions of objects, words, incidents is unrolled like an endless royal carpet of demonic astroturf before you. Everything is already happening, and the everything happening means everything else. And yet off to the sides of the carpet, the same white space--or perhaps one of shifting reds and purples, cool dark greens, and turquoises and golds, for Spenser. For me The Faerie Queene takes place deep inside a Christmas tree, apparently.
Song of Myself, for both classes.
Wieland. Is this good? I can't yet tell if this is good.
Philip Pullman's Galatea I did finish, and was impressed. The celebration of the natural world in later books--and cleverly misleading clues in this one, I believe?--made me think he was going for the exact opposite message, something virtually Marxist, so I was knocked for a loop. But of course where he did go fits just as well with Kleist's doll essay.
