(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

[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.