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Mar. 18th, 2009 04:22 amLargely bored by the gaucho stories in the Aleph volume. Even some of the labyrinthine pieces are weak. Not bad, nowhere near bad, but not up to the standard set in Artifices, which in turn wasn't up there with The Garden of Forking Paths, which must be high on the list of best short fiction volumes ever published.
It's something that seems to come up in many writers, isn't it? Some amazing period of creativity happens, then a falling-off with scattered masterpieces - which are sometimes even their best work, as though those comebacks were just longer-meditated, further-flung products of that first inspiration. Perhaps their other publications are just to see if they can do it again by being who they are, or to meet their readers' demand that they continue to make something.
I think of Frost, whose late work is competent and interesting but only rarely as shattering as basically everything in his second through fourth books. There, as with Borges, though, you never know what was written much earlier (I don't think we know when "Directive" was even written, and "Design" dates back to c. 1900), or what reworks some much earlier idea.
I wonder if some writers' contributions are a bit more like math or philosophy, fields where it's notorious the great leaps will be made by someone still in their twenties, if ever. Makes sense with Borges - I think it does with Frost too, though perhaps because his three-layer black ironies bring him close to comedy, another youth-dominated intellectual discipline. Cleverness is what fades, perhaps because interest in cleverness fades; success and kids might inspire a love for the world that's destructive of one's need to dazzlingly replace or critique it. Does this also work with mystery writers?
Vendler and Bloom both think Stevens changed his mind very little, at least between 1916 and his death, but relentlessly developed how he embodied his thoughts in poems. Maybe the words come young, the punctuation after.
It's something that seems to come up in many writers, isn't it? Some amazing period of creativity happens, then a falling-off with scattered masterpieces - which are sometimes even their best work, as though those comebacks were just longer-meditated, further-flung products of that first inspiration. Perhaps their other publications are just to see if they can do it again by being who they are, or to meet their readers' demand that they continue to make something.
I think of Frost, whose late work is competent and interesting but only rarely as shattering as basically everything in his second through fourth books. There, as with Borges, though, you never know what was written much earlier (I don't think we know when "Directive" was even written, and "Design" dates back to c. 1900), or what reworks some much earlier idea.
I wonder if some writers' contributions are a bit more like math or philosophy, fields where it's notorious the great leaps will be made by someone still in their twenties, if ever. Makes sense with Borges - I think it does with Frost too, though perhaps because his three-layer black ironies bring him close to comedy, another youth-dominated intellectual discipline. Cleverness is what fades, perhaps because interest in cleverness fades; success and kids might inspire a love for the world that's destructive of one's need to dazzlingly replace or critique it. Does this also work with mystery writers?
Vendler and Bloom both think Stevens changed his mind very little, at least between 1916 and his death, but relentlessly developed how he embodied his thoughts in poems. Maybe the words come young, the punctuation after.
