(no subject)

[proximoception]

Dumbest of my dumb lists are the ones where I try to whittle down the authors who matter. As if that didn't just mean the ones who matter to me - among those I've even read and was able to properly appreciate. But I come up with something like this a lot:

Shakespeare
Wordsworth
Shelley
Whitman
Dickinson
Emerson
Stevens

Somehow as a core Seven, with Shakespeare being perhaps as important as those others combined. He famously does all those things no one else had done, but somehow also incorporates most of the best things literature had done up to him, from the Bible and Greek drama down to Montaigne and Marlowe. And in addition to that starts to do the thing that those next six each took up in their different ways. He both inaugurates the kind of literature I find most important and somehow summarizes all the other, scarcely less important kinds.

But as soon as I write those names I write down in a list beside them, not below:

Tolstoy
Proust

And then hesitate a little, leave a space, and write just under them:

Goethe
Ibsen
Joyce

And then go back to the first column, leave another space, write:

Melville
Thoreau
Frost

And make a third column after even more hesitation, far, far from the others but starting a bit lower:

Dante
Spenser
Milton

And then add a fourth column, nearer the first two - here my indecision's about how high up to start it:

Kafka
Borges
Calvino
Abe

And then fill in others around. McCarthy sometimes comes in under Frost, Crowley sometimes under Stevens as an uncertain Eighth. Hazlitt and Bishop get put in the margin with a question mark, Mann near the Goethe-Ibsen-Joyce column, Roth and Carson together not far from him...

(And now I feel maybe I should add Chekhov somewhere. And Carpentier.)

And around then Literature starts to feel like a large block of plastic cheese, as they call it here, and even as an idle thing to do the list feels wrong.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I love this. I think you're registering, no?, that lists should feel wrong? That when you are in one place in the list, in your thinking, in your cathexis, the other places look all distorted as in a fun house mirror? That from the point of view where Roth shines back without distortion, Hazlitt looks like an epicene dwarf, and when he stands up in all his boxer's grace Bishop seems like an awkward may pole?

I'm interested in Abe's being there. And Crowley? Here our divers lists begin to part. I love Crowley, but not like that. I might put Marías or Bolaño where you put Crowley. And Merrill where you put Carson.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yes, having recently read a given person tends to enlarge them - and the different columns do have ways of throwing dust on the other ones when you focus on them. It's not like Melville is so much worse than Whitman, he just turned from doing the most direct thing. Mostly because of skepticism about that direct thing that might even be deserved. But I think not quite entirely.

Crowley I'll explain someday. But even there, yeah, something feels right and something feels wrong.

Abe completes the sequence and managed something pretty much perfect within it. Kafka's own novels are labyrinths, it was for Abe to write Kafka's novel. And Calvino's, in some ways. Calvino's novels become individual stories or meditations or flowcharts or very silly. All exquisitely, but there was room left for Abe.

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

no beckett, eh?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Beckett makes it on now and then. And many others. Lawrence was one of my favorites once, for example, and probably will be again - I just can't remember how good he is or quite where he fits.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Love this, too. I do this but not with writers (because I'm not loyal enough to them) but with books. What's your hesitation about Borges?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm just not sure how important the Kafka set is compared to the seven poets and two novelists I don't hesitate at all about. I love those four, and I think Borges in particular created some of Earth's most astonishingly original and perfect art. But what, say, Dickinson and Proust do is better than astonishment and perfection. Borges et al. leave the world some to see it better, and it usually entails dimming some of the more human intensities.

I love them as much (selectively, as with all these authors) but the idea with this list is what one should recommend to people as essential, as what they should zero in for the reading part of life. I always come up with those first seven and first two, then get a bit confused about the cosmological fantasist and (for lack of a better term) narcissistic self-dissection traditions. And quite conflicted about those three Christians.

But nine people we should all read. That's the part of the list that heartens me each time, that I am absolutely sure about them. Then the rest becomes impossible pretty shortly.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Share the current state of your list sometime.