proximoception | (no subject)

School over = I actually read things. Still can't get over that paradox.

Read Keats' Odes and Eve of St. Agnes and some other poems, then Clare, then Calvino's Origin of the Birds, which is becoming my favorite story. Calvino wins against both, at least for me and today. I would not have expected that. He also wins with both--he's set down in my books as Romantic. (I'd also neglected Dry River, in Numbers in the Dark, when I made that list a while back--that's a subtle but great nature-gnostic story.)

But wow, Clare and the latter half of Eve of St Agnes... I had an annoying evangelical (from Bob Jones!) instructor when I was finishing my Bachelor's here who taught the poem for the sole purpose of arguing that Keats condoned date rape. Maybe he was annoyed at Keats' palpable disgust with vulgar superstition, his argument via the Beadman and Angela that the Christian consolation's for the old. For the young there's happy art, hot love, fresh fruit, escape. Or could or should be. Quite a poem. How many times have I read it, read the Odes? I like that I forget enough each time.

I liked the music being like a God in pain.

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So - what is it about Calvino?

Is most of his work like If on a winter's night...?

What's Calvino who is he that prxmcpshn commends 'im?

Thought you'd read at least Argentine Ant? Winter's in his most comic vein, and of course inevitably a bit of a departure because of the schematically fragmentary stories and extremely silly and exhaustive main, reading-treatise narrative. His works are unlike but also like each other, is all I can really say. His less comic/essayistic vein is usually gnostic--something has gone wrong and we're lost amid deadly beauty, thirsting for traces of where we should be if we could only remember it and there only still were such a place. Not that those stories can't be amusing too, but he's usually funnier, and in a safer way, when explaining how complicated the present world is than when yearning for a lost one. Blech, he's indescribable, I'll just post my present favorite Invisible City.

I've read that one title story from Argentine Ant. I found it in a collection called Foreign Fictions like 10 years ago. And of course the novel we've been talking about. And he's near the top of my list to continue reading, but I don't own any others yet.

You need to beg, steal or intuit a copy of Invisible Cities at once for pressing health reasons.

Your teacher was parroting the very tired Jack Stillinger article "The Hoodwinking of Madeline."

Ah! Thanks--he didn't seem like the type likely to have an idea of his own, even a bad one.