proximoception | (no subject)

What with all the books I've been unable to finish reading I started reading a few more. Bemusement's ever mother to perversity.

Beckett's short prose, around in it. I flat-out love the first two 'Stirrings Still'--the third you need to read aloud to make sense of, not sure I entirely follow the syntax still but it's impressive. Beckett is completely off my hate list, as is Hardy. It's basically just Chaucer on there now and, along the lines of the Twelve Angry Men finale, that prejudice is ready to surrender from loneliness.

Pilgrim's Progress. I'm a Spenser man and an atheist of teeth-gnashing intensity but it's interesting. Bunyan gets all kinds of strange effects out of how undescribed everything is...things are kept so blank that he can shuffle anything on or offstage at any time and you buy it. A bit like the white place in the Matrix. Funny how Spenser gives an almost opposite impression: a world of overlapping profusions of objects, words, incidents is unrolled like an endless royal carpet of demonic astroturf before you. Everything is already happening, and the everything happening means everything else. And yet off to the sides of the carpet, the same white space--or perhaps one of shifting reds and purples, cool dark greens, and turquoises and golds, for Spenser. For me The Faerie Queene takes place deep inside a Christmas tree, apparently.

Song of Myself, for both classes.

Wieland. Is this good? I can't yet tell if this is good.

Philip Pullman's Galatea I did finish, and was impressed. The celebration of the natural world in later books--and cleverly misleading clues in this one, I believe?--made me think he was going for the exact opposite message, something virtually Marxist, so I was knocked for a loop. But of course where he did go fits just as well with Kleist's doll essay.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wish I could respond to these posts with more thoughtfulness, but I'm swimming in papers (my own & students'). I think I know what you mean abotu Spenser and that's one thing I love about him. He develops so many repeated rhyme words--at ends of lines and internal rhyme--in certain situations (not quite along the lines of Pope's breeze and trees, but almost), such as "ground" and "drownd" and "drowsy", "swowne" etc. that one is invited to sort through these disparate situations while allowing them dizzily to blend into one. The brighter the merrier.

I've never read Wieland but feel like I've offended my Americanist colleagues by not having done so. I should get to it in the next few years.

I taught Galatea last spring. It was an amazing experience; students loved the role of the messenger, the weird sexuality, and I really liked teaching the last 10 pages or so.

Glad to hear about the Beckett!

I think I liked the demiurge figure best--not as in, liked the character, but I admire deft allegorization. To respect that kind of figure too much is to give him the world--as Cormac McCarthy keeps doing. The bad spirit in life isn't an evil genius, just gross and mean, and anxious that we all stay distracted and smeared.

How on earth did you find enough copies? Don't answer if it's incriminating.

So many of Spenser's effects seem to involve having things merge but stay separate--pass through each other but stay substantial and textured. Flaunting or underlining that basic freedom mental objects/words have, one totally defying material analogy (and description, apparently).