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Aug. 3rd, 2013 12:27 pm1. Pure Pagan (Greek lyrics tr. Raffel)
2. Autobiography of Red (4th)
Holds up flawlessly every time. I tend to like the Argentina trip bits best, this time most especially the hill anecdote. Well, those and the medieval-smelling screen door. And the plane. And etc.
3. The Nick Adams Stories
4. In Our Time
5. The Omen (Galt)
He founded the town up the road. That is weird.
6. The Crossing
7. Blood Meridian
8. The Bear
9. All the Pretty Horses
10. Spotted Horses
McCarthy's sublimely nonsequitur criticism of the unnaturalness of the ponies in his NPR talk with Herzog and Krauss sent me to this, as it struck me as one of the most Bloom-vindicating things I'd ever heard, and I think productively: the unified, analysis-free existence of the horses in AtPH that John can only occasionally share is based both in collectivity and movement. Faulkner's not invested in his animals' wildness the way he is in Old Ben's - the point here is they're an unstable element, set free by Flem's mendacious capitalism, unballasted by any local or intellectual tradition. Ben is like McCarthy's wolf, a more predatory, individualistic gnostic totem, but his horses are misprised out of Faulkner's, which aren't enjoying themselves when they flow about hydraulically. They're like Shelleyan bat-fragments chipped from Conrad's universal darkness, inimical to consciousness rather than significantly conscious. McCarthy's attack on Faulkner's physiological accuracy responds to the dead man's imagined scorn at McCarthy's idealizing modifications to his own inventions.
11. A Lost Lady
I prefer My Antonia, but maybe only from having read it first. A beautiful book - hard to think of a writer who understood her own strengths and limits so well. What's needed to make you listen how she wants is there, what isn't isn't.
12. Invisible Man
Loved it all through, one of those few books where I'm glad I waited. One of the most surprising books all the way through, and not because it avoids tendentiousness - you figure that out pretty early but it keeps veering the whole way. Bloom links Ellison to Pynchon, which I think is true, but the madness in Ellison's world always stays plausible, never goes looney. It's like all the strangest days of your life stitched together. How he gets away with this I'll probably never know, but I noticed one of his tricks: he has people sometimes respond not to what one just said but some idiomatic equivalent, throwing the reader off subtly, while presumably underlining people's invisibility to one another, how we don't exactly listen even when attentively listening.
13. The Country of Pointed Firs
I assumed it would be all rock lobster but it turns out it's about growing old. It's only utopic in the sense that the life system depicted is one that supports that process. Better than I'd anticipated, though still took forever to get through.
14. Garbage
2nd book in a row about old age, though here that's mostly used as a metaphor quarry for what poetry is, could be - very much in the self-demonstrating ars poetica tradition of Whitman and Stevens (started to whatever degree ironically by Emerson's arch-poetic The Poet). Alternating great and more-than-great sections. Some of the transitions made intuitive sense, others came to in retrospect, the rest didn't.
15. red doc>
Would have liked this a lot more if it had featured a new set of characters - there's a lot of great Carson happenings in it, but also some bits that feel like self-repetition. No, she's repeated herself before but it's never felt that way, so I'm probably talking about some other sort of failing, like not distracting me from her repetitions by being amazing. Which is nothing I deserve and nuts to even expect except she once did it reflexively.
2. Autobiography of Red (4th)
Holds up flawlessly every time. I tend to like the Argentina trip bits best, this time most especially the hill anecdote. Well, those and the medieval-smelling screen door. And the plane. And etc.
3. The Nick Adams Stories
4. In Our Time
5. The Omen (Galt)
He founded the town up the road. That is weird.
6. The Crossing
7. Blood Meridian
8. The Bear
9. All the Pretty Horses
10. Spotted Horses
McCarthy's sublimely nonsequitur criticism of the unnaturalness of the ponies in his NPR talk with Herzog and Krauss sent me to this, as it struck me as one of the most Bloom-vindicating things I'd ever heard, and I think productively: the unified, analysis-free existence of the horses in AtPH that John can only occasionally share is based both in collectivity and movement. Faulkner's not invested in his animals' wildness the way he is in Old Ben's - the point here is they're an unstable element, set free by Flem's mendacious capitalism, unballasted by any local or intellectual tradition. Ben is like McCarthy's wolf, a more predatory, individualistic gnostic totem, but his horses are misprised out of Faulkner's, which aren't enjoying themselves when they flow about hydraulically. They're like Shelleyan bat-fragments chipped from Conrad's universal darkness, inimical to consciousness rather than significantly conscious. McCarthy's attack on Faulkner's physiological accuracy responds to the dead man's imagined scorn at McCarthy's idealizing modifications to his own inventions.
11. A Lost Lady
I prefer My Antonia, but maybe only from having read it first. A beautiful book - hard to think of a writer who understood her own strengths and limits so well. What's needed to make you listen how she wants is there, what isn't isn't.
12. Invisible Man
Loved it all through, one of those few books where I'm glad I waited. One of the most surprising books all the way through, and not because it avoids tendentiousness - you figure that out pretty early but it keeps veering the whole way. Bloom links Ellison to Pynchon, which I think is true, but the madness in Ellison's world always stays plausible, never goes looney. It's like all the strangest days of your life stitched together. How he gets away with this I'll probably never know, but I noticed one of his tricks: he has people sometimes respond not to what one just said but some idiomatic equivalent, throwing the reader off subtly, while presumably underlining people's invisibility to one another, how we don't exactly listen even when attentively listening.
13. The Country of Pointed Firs
I assumed it would be all rock lobster but it turns out it's about growing old. It's only utopic in the sense that the life system depicted is one that supports that process. Better than I'd anticipated, though still took forever to get through.
14. Garbage
2nd book in a row about old age, though here that's mostly used as a metaphor quarry for what poetry is, could be - very much in the self-demonstrating ars poetica tradition of Whitman and Stevens (started to whatever degree ironically by Emerson's arch-poetic The Poet). Alternating great and more-than-great sections. Some of the transitions made intuitive sense, others came to in retrospect, the rest didn't.
15. red doc>
Would have liked this a lot more if it had featured a new set of characters - there's a lot of great Carson happenings in it, but also some bits that feel like self-repetition. No, she's repeated herself before but it's never felt that way, so I'm probably talking about some other sort of failing, like not distracting me from her repetitions by being amazing. Which is nothing I deserve and nuts to even expect except she once did it reflexively.
