(no subject)
Apr. 9th, 2004 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionReturning to Ohio for one week Easter Sunday to take care of a dozen nagging financial matters.
I'm very stupid lately. My mind works again when jogged but so often drifts back into a blank, comfortable rest.
I'm getting A's of course; but that's in competition with the latest, stupidest crop of teenagers.
Haven't been exercising or cleaning. Same damn set of bad habits reasserting themselves across a lifetime.
In nooks at school yesterday I read Emerson's "Circles" and most of Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" and recommend both. Also read around in The Melville Log, a two-volume anthology of contemporary excerpts about Herman from various people's journals and letters and newspaper articles. His son killed himself at 18 for reasons unclear. Melville was very strict with him but surely that means little in itself? A professor of mine at OSU (who made the most annoying mouth noises at the end of every sentence) who's now head of the Women's Studies Library there wrote an article in the '80s suggesting he may have been a wife-beater or worse. There does seem room for this interpretation: his daughter refused to speak of him at all in the 1920s when interest in Moby-Dick revived; his wife seems worshipfully codependent; family letters whisper of mental problems; the patriarchs keep giving him money to go on long trips. Then that suicide.
Most fascinating are his annotations in others' books: Emerson, Shakespeare, Balzac, Shelley. Presumably he'd read plenty of things previously but it wasn't until at work on Moby-Dick that he's suddenly reading high literature nonstop and reacting passionately to it, Hawthorne (see the "Mosses" essay) and Shakespeare especially. He lived an exciting life, wrote financially and critically successful novels and -then- fell in love with literature! And wrote his and maybe America's great work over a year or two at c. 30 during/after his first immersion in Shakespeare & Co. This amazes and depresses me. It shows how fragile masterpieces are, how each barely happens. Not that great authors aren't well-read, but each has to have some remarkable drive independent of literature... and their exposure to literature has to be well-timed and well-placed or their own impulse will be mixed to nothing by those of the established great.
I've also been reading lots of Robinson. He shares Browning's and Melville(-as-Poet)'s characteristic opacity of diction--though all three are lucid when they like. Why don't they like? What is it poets get out of seemingly unnecessary difficulty anyway? Is it a way to hide, and if so from what? Melville turned to poetry after his prose career burnt out, the last productions of which were often about hiding, had a similar style and imagery of branching ambiguities, and were published in magazines under pseudonyms to boot. The best of these (all of the Piazza Tales, the Paradise/Tartarus sketches) are about as good as Moby-Dick, but they're the self-communings of a forgotten man, whereas Moby was a public challenge to Shakespeare and the sun. During his poetry phase Melville's annotations in others' works were almost confined to passages on failure, ingratitude, scorned artists and prophets, and despair.
Of course artistic despair and a difficult style don't always correlate. The end of Robinson's "The Man Against the Sky" is suddenly lucid:
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought,—-
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that,-—why live?
’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores
That look sheer down
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.
I'm very stupid lately. My mind works again when jogged but so often drifts back into a blank, comfortable rest.
I'm getting A's of course; but that's in competition with the latest, stupidest crop of teenagers.
Haven't been exercising or cleaning. Same damn set of bad habits reasserting themselves across a lifetime.
In nooks at school yesterday I read Emerson's "Circles" and most of Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" and recommend both. Also read around in The Melville Log, a two-volume anthology of contemporary excerpts about Herman from various people's journals and letters and newspaper articles. His son killed himself at 18 for reasons unclear. Melville was very strict with him but surely that means little in itself? A professor of mine at OSU (who made the most annoying mouth noises at the end of every sentence) who's now head of the Women's Studies Library there wrote an article in the '80s suggesting he may have been a wife-beater or worse. There does seem room for this interpretation: his daughter refused to speak of him at all in the 1920s when interest in Moby-Dick revived; his wife seems worshipfully codependent; family letters whisper of mental problems; the patriarchs keep giving him money to go on long trips. Then that suicide.
Most fascinating are his annotations in others' books: Emerson, Shakespeare, Balzac, Shelley. Presumably he'd read plenty of things previously but it wasn't until at work on Moby-Dick that he's suddenly reading high literature nonstop and reacting passionately to it, Hawthorne (see the "Mosses" essay) and Shakespeare especially. He lived an exciting life, wrote financially and critically successful novels and -then- fell in love with literature! And wrote his and maybe America's great work over a year or two at c. 30 during/after his first immersion in Shakespeare & Co. This amazes and depresses me. It shows how fragile masterpieces are, how each barely happens. Not that great authors aren't well-read, but each has to have some remarkable drive independent of literature... and their exposure to literature has to be well-timed and well-placed or their own impulse will be mixed to nothing by those of the established great.
I've also been reading lots of Robinson. He shares Browning's and Melville(-as-Poet)'s characteristic opacity of diction--though all three are lucid when they like. Why don't they like? What is it poets get out of seemingly unnecessary difficulty anyway? Is it a way to hide, and if so from what? Melville turned to poetry after his prose career burnt out, the last productions of which were often about hiding, had a similar style and imagery of branching ambiguities, and were published in magazines under pseudonyms to boot. The best of these (all of the Piazza Tales, the Paradise/Tartarus sketches) are about as good as Moby-Dick, but they're the self-communings of a forgotten man, whereas Moby was a public challenge to Shakespeare and the sun. During his poetry phase Melville's annotations in others' works were almost confined to passages on failure, ingratitude, scorned artists and prophets, and despair.
Of course artistic despair and a difficult style don't always correlate. The end of Robinson's "The Man Against the Sky" is suddenly lucid:
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought,—-
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that,-—why live?
’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores
That look sheer down
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-10 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-10 02:31 am (UTC)I find this worrisome because so much pressure is brought to bear on these writers...far too much. They write about you as if you are a performing monkey. And what if you don't measure up or don't fulfill your early promise ie Norman Mailer? Time will only tell.
Also, Cervantes published his first novel when he was 38 y.o.
And Cervantes was wonderful, wasn't he? Led a life full of intrigues, wars, prison escapes, and basically swash-buckingly adventures. God, how I love him!
I suppose real and great experiences that can color the plots of novels are lacking these days. Esp. in the so called young turks' writings. I look at Martin Amis and see him to be a great example of this. What's so important of what he has to say? Not much. He sounds like the great squaking of a yellow silly bird. Hmmm...that wasn't meant as a stupid and ill-wrought joke, ya know. :P
no subject
Date: 2004-04-12 09:20 am (UTC)scary.
happy non-denominational spring holiday.