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proximoception) wrote2011-04-05 11:00 am
proximoception) wrote2011-04-05 11:00 am
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37. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
38. Purgatorio, tr. Merwin
I liked Altman's Short Cuts so much when it came out that I went to the library and read the book they'd put out collecting the Carver stories it was based on - and then found they had little resemblance, Altman's voice having flooded out Carver's in the film. And then I didn't think half a thought about Carver till I found that the three or four of his stories in the assigned 101 anthology were among the few pieces I was inclined to teach from it. My wife likes him and recommended the title story especially, and I was looking for something easy so I just read through the whole collection. He's good but in a way there's surprisingly little to say about; he's one of those writers with one setup they return to obsessively - in one of the stories he sums it up himself, something like 'where everything has happened so now anything will,' but by everything we're to understand a marriage destroyed by alcohol and other poisons from both ends. The anything that happens is alternately zany and tragic, but always both strange and convincing. They had a convincing feel before, but having lived through a sort of simulated version of a Carver marriage I can testify to the accuracy of those moments. I hope for his sake as both artist and suffering being that he was inventing most of them.
I first read Dante in Binyon's version, and remember chiefly my mounting awe and his many quirks. The Inferno I've been through a couple times since in other versions, but this is my first return to the second part. The last few cantos defy analysis, though I suppose we're supposed to analyze them, and the sources in scripture and medieval theology I'm of course familiar with. It's just I don't really care about those, whereas he does make me care about what's happening there by that crazy stream. Strange, seven centuries-defying overlap with some moments in late David Lynch. I'm not the one to talk about Dante, though - Borges is that one, for me. I don't remember Paradiso very well, past impressions of a lot of wheeling lights and tedious theology, but if Merwin, Heaney, Wilbur or Strand have enough life left in them to translate it I'll give it a try. Merwin is quite good here, enough that I'm inclined to finally take a real stab at his original poems.
There's something amazingly right about how Dante does what he's doing. The perfect book, when written, will probably not involve the afterlife or absurdly local Medieval political grievances, but it might feel something like this. Have a pace like this, relationships like these, these similes, this detail. Might reveal the way this reveals, just not what.
38. Purgatorio, tr. Merwin
I liked Altman's Short Cuts so much when it came out that I went to the library and read the book they'd put out collecting the Carver stories it was based on - and then found they had little resemblance, Altman's voice having flooded out Carver's in the film. And then I didn't think half a thought about Carver till I found that the three or four of his stories in the assigned 101 anthology were among the few pieces I was inclined to teach from it. My wife likes him and recommended the title story especially, and I was looking for something easy so I just read through the whole collection. He's good but in a way there's surprisingly little to say about; he's one of those writers with one setup they return to obsessively - in one of the stories he sums it up himself, something like 'where everything has happened so now anything will,' but by everything we're to understand a marriage destroyed by alcohol and other poisons from both ends. The anything that happens is alternately zany and tragic, but always both strange and convincing. They had a convincing feel before, but having lived through a sort of simulated version of a Carver marriage I can testify to the accuracy of those moments. I hope for his sake as both artist and suffering being that he was inventing most of them.
I first read Dante in Binyon's version, and remember chiefly my mounting awe and his many quirks. The Inferno I've been through a couple times since in other versions, but this is my first return to the second part. The last few cantos defy analysis, though I suppose we're supposed to analyze them, and the sources in scripture and medieval theology I'm of course familiar with. It's just I don't really care about those, whereas he does make me care about what's happening there by that crazy stream. Strange, seven centuries-defying overlap with some moments in late David Lynch. I'm not the one to talk about Dante, though - Borges is that one, for me. I don't remember Paradiso very well, past impressions of a lot of wheeling lights and tedious theology, but if Merwin, Heaney, Wilbur or Strand have enough life left in them to translate it I'll give it a try. Merwin is quite good here, enough that I'm inclined to finally take a real stab at his original poems.
There's something amazingly right about how Dante does what he's doing. The perfect book, when written, will probably not involve the afterlife or absurdly local Medieval political grievances, but it might feel something like this. Have a pace like this, relationships like these, these similes, this detail. Might reveal the way this reveals, just not what.