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Oct. 10th, 2012 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionI think I've written before about how I actually value in hindsight some of my mindless prejudices against certain authors because they let me discover new things later on when I finally let my guard down - e.g. my wrong assumption, based on the plays and the scattered stories I'd read, that Chekhov was excellent but lacked a unifying vision, gave me a Chekhov windfall in my 30s.
A lot of these prejudices seem arbitrary, mere accidents of misexposure or due to quirks of my own that would bore even me to contemplate, but I do wonder about a) what texts might be Ph balanced for particular life stages (e.g. surely Dostoevsky for youth), and b) which ones are "advanced" in the sense that you'll appreciate them more only after thorough exposure to some trail of preparatory works by other authors.
It's hard to judge these based on personal experience because of those very quirks and accidents: I think of The Magic Mountain as something you can't not read when you're 23 and it's summer, and can't read at all any other time. I bounced off Roth at 19 and embraced him heartily at 27 or 28 - because of deidealizing doses of experience, or no reason whatever? Who the hell knows.
This is made more complicated by authors who offer surface or bunny slope pleasures long before you fully grasp the heart of them - in which category I'd place Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, Stevens but perhaps only because my own first encounters with them were cursory, my recent ones intense. I left an Ashbery book lying around a few years ago and Julie really liked it, despite presumably missing what I took to be incessant allusions to Stein, Stevens and Shelley and thickly veiled disgruntlement at Harold Bloom.
I think about this in classes a lot, especially when the professor has that moment of disappointment when some of the students reveal they're in over their heads with the assigned texts, and the professor should have provided some entry point or scaffolding earlier and now it's too late. Not that the sink or swim method isn't the best approach in some cases, but it helps to know when you're using it.
And of course a lot of the fun of literature is to pick up some one piece of it and then realize how much else it's connected to - getting sent on all those little lateral quests where texts help piece one another's vocabularies out, in rereadings or memory.
But even if we're mostly looking at chaos or continua there must be some extreme cases, where you shouldn't read book X till you've had sex on the moon and been shot over politics. Bloom nominates King Lear as something simply lost on undergraduates. I remember finding it devastating back then but presumably experience it much differently now - perhaps I better understand the depth and breadth of the damage? It's hard to compare impressions, since I almost never wrote mine down back then, on the assumption that I'd never forget them anyway. Which was accurate enough until c. 27. Clearly Roth sent me down a bad path.
Abridge the above and turn it into a question. What was lost on you once, became irreplaceable later? And what made for the change? Contrariwise, what did you once thrive on that you're now indifferent to? And why? I'll be fascinated even if we can't work out an a)-canon or b)-canon. And no need to stick with books. Whatever seems relevant.
A lot of these prejudices seem arbitrary, mere accidents of misexposure or due to quirks of my own that would bore even me to contemplate, but I do wonder about a) what texts might be Ph balanced for particular life stages (e.g. surely Dostoevsky for youth), and b) which ones are "advanced" in the sense that you'll appreciate them more only after thorough exposure to some trail of preparatory works by other authors.
It's hard to judge these based on personal experience because of those very quirks and accidents: I think of The Magic Mountain as something you can't not read when you're 23 and it's summer, and can't read at all any other time. I bounced off Roth at 19 and embraced him heartily at 27 or 28 - because of deidealizing doses of experience, or no reason whatever? Who the hell knows.
This is made more complicated by authors who offer surface or bunny slope pleasures long before you fully grasp the heart of them - in which category I'd place Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, Stevens but perhaps only because my own first encounters with them were cursory, my recent ones intense. I left an Ashbery book lying around a few years ago and Julie really liked it, despite presumably missing what I took to be incessant allusions to Stein, Stevens and Shelley and thickly veiled disgruntlement at Harold Bloom.
I think about this in classes a lot, especially when the professor has that moment of disappointment when some of the students reveal they're in over their heads with the assigned texts, and the professor should have provided some entry point or scaffolding earlier and now it's too late. Not that the sink or swim method isn't the best approach in some cases, but it helps to know when you're using it.
And of course a lot of the fun of literature is to pick up some one piece of it and then realize how much else it's connected to - getting sent on all those little lateral quests where texts help piece one another's vocabularies out, in rereadings or memory.
But even if we're mostly looking at chaos or continua there must be some extreme cases, where you shouldn't read book X till you've had sex on the moon and been shot over politics. Bloom nominates King Lear as something simply lost on undergraduates. I remember finding it devastating back then but presumably experience it much differently now - perhaps I better understand the depth and breadth of the damage? It's hard to compare impressions, since I almost never wrote mine down back then, on the assumption that I'd never forget them anyway. Which was accurate enough until c. 27. Clearly Roth sent me down a bad path.
Abridge the above and turn it into a question. What was lost on you once, became irreplaceable later? And what made for the change? Contrariwise, what did you once thrive on that you're now indifferent to? And why? I'll be fascinated even if we can't work out an a)-canon or b)-canon. And no need to stick with books. Whatever seems relevant.
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Date: 2012-10-10 01:08 pm (UTC)Patricia Highsmith
a Late Discoverie .. and it's a good thing too ! set off from the main body of work (by its show of Hand and Heart) is The Price of Salt. with some age we can better appreciate the circumstance/POV of Carol, the older lady / and SEE Therese, a young woman in the labyrinth of youth. i can think of nothing more effective, though, in calling up the particular atmosphere of (barely post-teen) romantic psychology. .. as for the Highsmith of popular understanding, she is another pancake entire. converting Strangers on a Train to screenplay brought vast frustration to Raymond Chandler, the unrelenting irrationality of the characters, the lack of anything Moviegoers might recognize as a "hero." although i might have, when younger, taken some perverse delight in Cry of the Owl or Those Who Walk Away, it is only through experience - the challenges of dealing with other people, with self - that i appreciate her keen documentation of human psychology: the .. machine-like "drives" would seem to presuppose some predictability, but nothing like sense or logic : characters inhabiting their own private boxcars, running like hey-go-mad down their individual tracks until they bash into someone or something (shades of Sam Lowry in Brazil:
"Don't you want to see my ID?"
"No need, sir."
"But I could be anybody."
"No you couldn't, sir.")
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Date: 2012-10-11 06:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-10 06:08 pm (UTC)Teaching helps: it's one of the great things about teaching, that you have to see what makes something work, and doing that makes it work.
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Date: 2012-10-11 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-10 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-11 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-10 07:33 pm (UTC)Whitman was strange to me until the fall of 2010, when I memorized four of his long poems. I think this is because I skipped around before then. It was definitely a sort of 'cursory encounter'--exposure a few times a year through textbook excerpts, etc. Same with Frost, about the same time. Dickinson I'm finding now. Late in high school I read Céline, Beckett, Henry Miller, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust, Emerson, and others in my spare time. I haven't read the first four since, but Emerson is a much more original writer now than he was then. E.g. I thought I understood 'Uriel' when I was 17, but then I read it again last month. Joyce and Proust I have to go back to.
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Date: 2012-10-11 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-11 09:08 am (UTC)Sayers Wimsey detective stories taught me whatever engrish (I also thought that England was like that) I am capable of and I still read her whenever ill. I have not read her translation of the Divine Comedy yet (Eco says, hers is the best he has encountered since she tries to keep up the original stanza) but wish to, for other reasons.
When my italian gets more fluent.
Chandler has kept me away from Hollywood for decades but Loos makes me want to cruise over for a spot of gentleman-spotting. Knowing that she was the only literature Joyce read when going blind is the best excuse and who wants to see Triest?
Nin´s diaries opened up the doors of the world (Paris! A houseboat!) outside the narrow range of a suburban Stockholm library, where I found them in english alongside Sayers, Waugh (whom I thought to be a woman due to his first name) and a translation of 1001 Nights. This was at the age of around nine because I had fallen off a pony, broken my shoulder and was trying to catch up on english by reading. Nin was the perfect party hostess at introducing people without forcing one to feel friendly. Having lately been instrumentalized in the same way as Plath does not make either worse but even my companion finds Durrell´s Alexandria Quartet impossible to read and that was only Justine. But I do want to see his Alexandria, as described in the first chapter but so far only was in Karnak.
Then,
Almqvist, Boye and Dagerman quickly followed Lindgren in swedish. I sternly refuse to read Strindberg whose prose I deeply resent(ed) for reasons of a serious hypocrisy allergy (with few exceptions I am prose-prone) but I may even go back there, one day. Boye wanders with Gandhi, Weil and Hesse, they are too intimately connected to a self-mumifying, vegan, want-to-be-buddhist teen state of mind to be anything I´d want to touch now. It would be like listening to Joy Division and shaving off my blue hair. I do, however, feel like reading absolutely everything on the Moomins in existence. I even want tea cups.-I couldn´t redo Dostoyevsky though I feel I should, not even his Doppelgänger but might revisit The Master and Margarita, like a cat after straying off in a Borges landscape.
The swim and dive method was as much a young person´s way of reading as also desperately trying to incorporate a foreign language into one I could call my own, that I can´t say, which it was more. Both, I suppose. German was heavy but mine.
Goethe made me hate him and the Fazerland with Wilhelm Meister´s Lehrjahre and then when his sicilian Mignon Almqvist had borrowed for his Kolmården Tintomara finally turns up, Mignon turns out to be such a terrible bore and that after thousands of excessively tiresome pages. Of course I can´t get past Goethe on other levels, but there he lost me once and for all. Sitting on an outdoor loo writing graffitti on the wooden wall never saved anyone´s bacon.
Mann never gave me what Zweig did, Grass missed on what Borchert said and with fewer words, too, Nietzsche´s sighs, weary from his walking up the steep hill to Eze for a better world-view, never made me laugh at human folly like Ringelnatz´ sailor Kutteldaddeldu does on any given day.
I guess my search is simplified by being Borg: I survey for certain signs of (human) warmth. I still adore Russell´s firm clarity and shrewd smile but can´t make myself get through his pupil´s writings because I feel he is too brilliant to be so impertinent.
Hugo made me impopular already at the same time I met Lord Peter Wimsey by catching my poor child heart at home but when class didn´t even let our teacher read Les Miserables to an end, although I had declared, how the excitement was still to come what with live burial of our Hero in Part II, I went home nursing my first depression. Maybe I should have tried it with Huysmans, who is more straightforward. But, at the moment I am trying to get through Perec in french and I can´t very well say, I have truly incorporated this language, yet though I live inside it now.
Jaques the Fatalist has guided my way through Thélème before now but I still feel, I need a dictionary to be able to follow and they are so cumbersome. Also, I need reading glasses.
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Date: 2012-10-11 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-11 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-12 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-12 03:08 pm (UTC)I love that.