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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 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-11 05:25 pm (UTC)