proximoception (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
proximoception) wrote2005-11-02 03:10 pm
proximoception) wrote2005-11-02 03:10 pm
(no subject)
Interesting what finds you and why.
Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Faulkner, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, HD etc., that whole generation or so, presumably not just artists too, seem to have fallen in love with the same literature at the same ages. Doubtless the primordial figures are Dickens, Scott and Shakespeare, but in early adolescence all discover (always discover) Byron, then Shelley and Keats, then Rossetti and Whitman and Swinburne, then turn twenty. Obviously they're reading other things as well but these become their ruling spirits, a season or two each. Enthusiasm falling becomes analysis and authorities are sought, Emerson and Pater and Nietzsche. Contemporary influences set in after this, for some reason it's these that you carve your voice out of. Here the youth poets are reappraised, usually disparaged, especially Shelley, Whitman and Swinburne. They demand that you meet their intensity with your own. For the young and the dumb, your Eliot says, therefore young and dumb themselves, and adds, to be forgotten, while never forgetting them.
I wonder how it is now? Most people aren't raised inside literature anymore, so to speak. You get charmed in by someone particularly amusing or easy or flattering or "romantic"; bunny slope figures seem to include comedy/romance-Shakespeare, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway, Frost, Cummings, Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Keats, Oscar Wilde (perhaps above all). If you're gay it's often people you hear are gay; Southern for Southern, women for women etc. What was it for me, atheism? Rebellion? I tore through Camus, Voltaire, Vidal and Shaw at 18 or 19. Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat got me into poetry at 20. Once in I was suddenly on that same escalator from 100 years ago. Telescoped the youth phases into a year or two, but had the same ones, same order. Probably ten thousand pages of verse, that first year.
Bloom became my authority, secondarily Paglia. Common ones today, no? Though Pound and Eliot are still going strong. Emerson or Nietzsche too. Still run into Yvor Winters fans occasionally. Do people in the theory wing get it so personally, adopt/are adopted by their particular Frenchman?
Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Faulkner, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, HD etc., that whole generation or so, presumably not just artists too, seem to have fallen in love with the same literature at the same ages. Doubtless the primordial figures are Dickens, Scott and Shakespeare, but in early adolescence all discover (always discover) Byron, then Shelley and Keats, then Rossetti and Whitman and Swinburne, then turn twenty. Obviously they're reading other things as well but these become their ruling spirits, a season or two each. Enthusiasm falling becomes analysis and authorities are sought, Emerson and Pater and Nietzsche. Contemporary influences set in after this, for some reason it's these that you carve your voice out of. Here the youth poets are reappraised, usually disparaged, especially Shelley, Whitman and Swinburne. They demand that you meet their intensity with your own. For the young and the dumb, your Eliot says, therefore young and dumb themselves, and adds, to be forgotten, while never forgetting them.
I wonder how it is now? Most people aren't raised inside literature anymore, so to speak. You get charmed in by someone particularly amusing or easy or flattering or "romantic"; bunny slope figures seem to include comedy/romance-Shakespeare, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway, Frost, Cummings, Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Keats, Oscar Wilde (perhaps above all). If you're gay it's often people you hear are gay; Southern for Southern, women for women etc. What was it for me, atheism? Rebellion? I tore through Camus, Voltaire, Vidal and Shaw at 18 or 19. Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat got me into poetry at 20. Once in I was suddenly on that same escalator from 100 years ago. Telescoped the youth phases into a year or two, but had the same ones, same order. Probably ten thousand pages of verse, that first year.
Bloom became my authority, secondarily Paglia. Common ones today, no? Though Pound and Eliot are still going strong. Emerson or Nietzsche too. Still run into Yvor Winters fans occasionally. Do people in the theory wing get it so personally, adopt/are adopted by their particular Frenchman?
no subject
Oh yes, moreso I think than anyone else. (Haven't you ever met a Lacanian at university?) Click around my blogroll and you'll see. Apparently, once you go Blanchot, you'll never go back.
Ha, I guess I'm still looking for my authority, or it's still looking for me. And that's the way I like it.
no subject
Doubt I'll ever dip more than a toe in the Blanchotian ocean, but he doesn't disgust me the way those others do. I hate the others so much it almost convinces me I must be in the wrong. But you know what? I'm not. (<--logocentrism)
Remind me to rant about them at length when I have time.
no subject
About the Lacanians, I meant the professors, not the students. Very devout people.