Generally: notes on reading
tension
‘The mausoleum of a Russian nobleman, Petrograd, Russia’ (Keystone View Company, ca. 1914–1924, from the Library of Congress) It is nearly the end of the month and I have yet to finish Tynyanov’s The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, which I feel like I have been reading forever, which I feel like I could read forever. Seventy […]
applied economics
The tree service came today to do the brush chipping. It was rather a large pile of deadfall and branches trimmed in a haphazard attempt to meet fire safety standards. It took hours and hours (of good, healthy exercise, naturally) to gather everything together, and I imagined it would take hours and hours (or an […]
the other side
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (i.e., Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel) has a promising start – the patient narrator providing a disorienting sense of isolation/alienation at once physical, intellectual, and emotional – but I had to set it aside. As others have noted, the novella draws heavily on the work of […]
fundamentals
August Sander, Farmer (ca. 1925) Let us say that what separates the great book from the merely good (or interesting) is that a great book, however it innovates, whatever its oddities, will teach the reader how it is to be read.1 Grundrisse is not, then, a great book, but it is still in an interesting […]
beside oneself
Ecstatic experiences bring perception of perfection, not of hitherto unnoticed incongruity. Ecstatics find delight in proportion and harmony, not humour in what is awry. Nothing humorous is ever a trigger to ecstasy. In ecstasy there is no fun whatsoever. —Marghanita Laski (Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 270) When I put Marghanita Laski’s Ecstasy […]
moth-eaten notions
Minerva and Arachne, engraving by Johann Wilhelm Baur (1641) …a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house… —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 91) But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a […]
allerdings
…it’s a mistake to argue with a book that contains no arguments. —Becca Rothfeld (‘Nellie Bowles thinks you should outgrow progressivism’) It took me longer than I like to admit to realize that the diversity of topics in most modern essay collections was driven not by the author’s personal interest, but by the crass casualty […]
the lot of the faint heart
“Ich glaube, daß er kein Automat ist” hat, so ohne weiteres, noch gar keinen Sinn. “I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. —Wittgenstein (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, iv; trans. G.E.M. Anscombe et al.) An extract from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s ‘The Artist and His Model’ (1894) […]
a vexed question
That Hamann, the son of a barber-surgeon, does not ask the (im)patient reader: what ails thee?1But that begs the question of whom the text serves, which need not worry us here. [↩]
okey-dokey
…the field is open to conjecture, so long as conjecture does not soar in the air but follows the true tracks that survive and is in keeping with the character of the times and the persons involved. —Jacob Burckhardt (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, p. 237) One can spend a lot […]
roundabout
Far from being able to satisfy the yearning for immortality by trustfully throwing oneself upon the bosom of the Eternal by an immediate moral and religious act, the individual felt constrained to take a long and circuitous route. —Jacob Burckhardt (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, p. 154) My major reading project […]
counterfeit
Ein Umschwung. Lauernd, ängstlich, hoffend umschleicht die Antwort die Frage, sucht verzweifelt in ihrem unzugänglichen Gesicht, folgt ihr auf den sinnlosesten, d. h. von der Antwort möglichst webstrebenden Wegen. A swerve. Lurking, skittish, hopeful, the answer prowls around the question, peers desperately into its unapproachable face, follows it on the most senseless paths, that is, […]
de monstra demonstranda
Medea, bad mommy extraordinaire, engaging in a bit of light witchcraft, illustration by Johann Wilhelm Baur to Ovid (ca. 1640s) The school of Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings and the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing but an occasional roar of sarcastic laughter from […]
baggage
There is a bit in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments that I misremembered, misunderstood, or made up entirely, but the gist of it was that if one takes on one of a thinker’s ideas, one has to take on their entire system of thinking and being – the faults in their logic and the faults […]
addendum
The more they are instructed, the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders. An instructed and intelligent people, besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. —Adam Smith (…Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, p. 424) I […]
matutinal
This morning, the morning books were not working. They have grown in number, which is part of the problem. Really there should be only one morning book; perhaps two. The book should be both rigorous enough to require some attention (which helps one to wake up) but also interesting enough to provide a spark of […]
tracings
In the course of his travels, he generally acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects, he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, […]
biophagous
Erysichthon, engaging in some ill-judged arboriculture, cropped from Johann Wilhelm Baur’s illustrations to Ovid (ca. 1641) …soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory. Almost unbelievable how much can rush forward to fill an absolute blankness. —Mary […]
cleanly
Orpheus running into a spot of trouble, cropped from Johann Wilhelm Baur’s illustrations to Ovid (ca. 1641) The hand that desires to cleanse the sores of other men must itself be clean, or the last state of the soul it touches may be worse than the first. —Eleanor Shipley Duckett (The Gateway to the Middle […]
norming
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, one cannot judge or admire this particular society by assuming that the language it speaks to itself is necessarily true. —Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, §202) I am in a book group or class (I suppose […]
dotty
So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up, Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and […]
cathectical
We are constantly telling stories—about how we are, about every person we see, hear, hear about—and when we don’t know something, we fill in the gaps with parts of stories we’ve told or heard before. Stories are always only representations. […] to tell a story based on a character-driven plot or a moment of epiphany […]
regarding
Ms. Ludwig XV 7 (83.MR.177), fol. 64v, ca. 1405. Under the conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the system itself appears to be socially useless, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole. —Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, p. 4) Regard […]
canonical
Ms. Ludwig XV 7 (83.MR.177), fol. 124v, ca. 1405.1 In a sterling example of the law of unintended consequences, the more officials attempted to limit discretion by heaping up specific details, the more they inadvertently encouraged innovation and interpretation. —Lorraine Daston (Rules, p. 164, on sixteenth century sumptuary laws).This image appeared in Lorraine Daston’s delightful […]
cut to the chase
‘A doctryne of doctoris’ or ‘a example of maisteris’ Normally when I get an idea, I charge ahead and scribble about it, tangling words together in the hopes that I will net my quarry – that is, some sort of sense (even if it is nonsense). Usually it works (more or less), but sometimes it doesn’t. […]
in the dark
Quid, cum fictas fabulas, e quibus utilitas nulla elici potest, cum voluptate legimus? quid, cum volumus nomina eorum, qui quid gesserint, nota nobis esse, parentes, patriam, multa praeterea minime necessaria? But what of fiction, from which no utility can be extracted, that we read for pleasure? What of our eagerness to learn the names of […]
sense & sententiousness
Salome in the off hours. Die Frage nach dem Sinn. Vergleiche: “Dieser Satz hat Sinn.” – “Welchen?” “Dieser Wortreihe ist ein Satz.” – “Welcher?” Asking what the sense is. Compare: “This sentence has a sense.” – “What sense?” “This sequence of words is a sentence.” – “What sentence?” —Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe et al., […]
haven’t a clew
Like anyone who is capable of some introspection, I had early taken it for granted that the split in my personality was my own purely personal affair and responsibility. —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, p. 234) 1. Things that I liked about David Kishik’s Self Study: the form, the idiosyncratic […]
menagerie
A poet who writes in Romansch arrives for a day; we all listen to him read with his Dutch translator. The two of them sound like strange birds, chippering and swooping. I don’t need to understand a word to know I like the poems a lot. —Martha Cooley (Guesswork, ch. 11) I was reading along […]
antichachectick disposition
τὴν κορυφὴν τοῦ ὄρους μὴ ἀργῶς ἴδῃς, ἀλλʼ ἐκεῖ ἐπʼ αὐτῆς θεοὺς ὑπονόει περιωπὴν ἔχειν τοῦ ἀγῶνος· καὶ γάρ τι χρυσοῦν γέγραπται νέφος, ὑφʼ ᾧ, οἶμαι, σκηνοῦσι… Do not look carelessly at the top of the mountain, but assume that gods have there a place from which to view the contest; for, observe, a golden […]
a conceptual primer
One can say that the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges.—‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?’—Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp with one that is? Isn’t […]
invicta
There are always other eyes seeing what I see, and imagining that other angle, imagining what these senses that are not mine could make out through my own sense is, all things considered, the best definition of love that I know. Grief is the end of loneliness. —Cristina Rivera Garza (Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Part IV) […]
new regimen
ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερὴ, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή. Life is short; art is long; opportunity [the moment] fugitive; experience delusive; judgment difficult. —Hippocrates (Aphorisms, 1.1, trans. Thomas Coar, 1822) Reading some of the Hippocratic writings in the morning, I like to imagine the book […]
facta est lux
The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking, even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he participates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities, and prevents us from perceiving it. […]
friend of all frillies
It may have been a matter of poor timing that put me out of sympathy with the book. At another time I might have found it a diverting collection of essays and fragments, droll, witty, amusing, with a certain neurasthenic charm – as one would expect to find after looking at more nuanced review. Unfortunately, I […]
nihil differamus
Id quoque, quod tenetur, per manus exit et ipsam, quam premimus, horam casus incidit, volvitur tempus rata quidem lege, sed per obscurum; quid autem ad me, an naturae certum sit quod mihi incertum est? —Seneca (Epistulae Morales, 101.5)1 In the past, I haven’t been particularly strong on reading rules and systems for my yearly reading; […]
game trails and cow paths
Everything I set down has a source in prior song or the written record. Some poets don’t want to read first; some of us want to give the stories we know a longer life […] —Stephanie Burt (‘(frag. 612)’, After Callimachus, p. 79). Shortly after becoming acquainted with the dog, then a black puppy of […]
Lettuce now: tend to our garden
A partial and incomplete consideration of Latin words for crucifers.
punctuated equilibria
It is another round of desultory reading, a sort of weak waving of the hand at sturdy piles of thoughtful books that do not at the moment appeal. I’ve been in the sort of reading mood that cannot ignore failures of proofreading – the inconsistent use of straight and typographer’s quotation marks in the last […]
facticity
…for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light. —Ambrose Bierce, Write It Right In an effort to pay more attention to my work and to think more clearly about composition as such, I have been reading books on writing, which strike me (sitting outside the congregation) as banners of a […]
point d’appui
At Saint Sulpice. (Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me: I don’t notice, for example, that cars are parking) —Georges Perec (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal, p. 15) Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s […]
with abandon
— Is it OK, do you think, to stop reading a book without finishing it? — What do you mean by ‘finishing a book’? — Getting to the end of it. — So you think that if someone takes up a book and turns all of the pages until he (the exemplar is invariably a […]
a note on the translation
Книгу занимательную вы проглотите слишком скоро, она слишком врежется в вашу память и воображение; перечесть ее уже невозможно. Книга скучная, напротив, читается с расстановкою, с отдохновением — оставляет вам способность позабыться, мечтать; опомнившись, вы опять за нее принимаетесь, перечитываете места, вами пропущенные без внимания etc. Книга скучная представляет более развлечения. —Pushkin, ‘Thoughts on the Road/Journey […]
untold runes
The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse of these rescued somethings. In discussing literature one has to use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing experience. But even so, literature is preferable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can […]
implicated
Extract from Monet’s ‘Cliffs near Dieppe’ (1882), at the Carnegie Museum of Art — It’s a dialogue, of course. — What? — The book I was telling you about. — What book? — Paul Valéry’s Idée Fixe. — Oh? — I really liked it. It’s charming. — I thought it was a rush job for […]
in brief
Dear Professor ———, It was with great interest that I picked up a recent translation of one of your books, as I hoped that it would provide a fresh perspective on what could perhaps be called ‘the current moment’. Although your book failed to be helpful in this regard, it did provide food for thought. […]
stalking horses and other specters
Paul Nash, Stalking Horse (black and white negative, 1941), presented by the Paul Nash Trust to the Tate in 1970 CC-BY-NC-ND. The experience in which we meet specters or let them come visit us remains indestructible and undeniable. The most cultivated, the most reasonable, the most nonbelieving people easily reconcile a certain spiritualism with reason. […]
prosopopoeia
The question is, of course, whether a writer genuinely reveals anything, and whether a reader can discover what it is. —Philip Rousseau (‘Knowing Theodoret: Text and Self’, p. 277)1 It is difficult to know how to read books about psychosis. Unless one has also experienced abnormal mental states, sympathy – in the sense of feeling […]
khndzor-esque
It was the mention of baklava that made me dubious. It was mentioned as quintessentially Armenian, yet baklava is a pastry I don’t recall encountering once in three years – except in Yerevan (admittedly, I don’t recall many weddings). I read the book quickly, enjoying the familiar but disoriented by details – famines and December […]
whistling Lillabullero
What on earth does this Socrates of yours mean?
human kindness, curdled
‘A plan of the cities of London and Westminster’, etc., by Johns Roque, Pine, and Pinney (ca. 1746) We disputed about some poems. Sheridan said that a man should not be a poet except he were excellent; for that to be a mediocris poeta was but a poor thing. I said I differed from him. […]
coxcombry
I remember reading something about a chatterbox in a coach who left himself open to some devastating wit by asking his fellow passengers if he wasn’t a coxcomb and I have no idea where I read it but it was about a sixth of the way down a verso. I think. The witticism involved repeating […]
arche-tecton
There is a passage in the third chapter of Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgeinstein, Austin, and Cavell that drew my eye: In many cases, then it is useless to spend time and energy trying to produce a sharp concept. To avoid meaningless work, we need to understand the situation we […]
biblidion
The other morning I happened to finish reading a relatively recent translation of The Encheiridion by Epictetus (well, via Arrian), which is a text I almost always find to be a tonic (if not taken in excess). In addition to soothing my temper, though, the present reading also left me somewhat unsettled, not with the […]
strategic retreats
These are some of the latest things I haven’t read, with the excuses I made for abandoning them. Penguin classics edition of Epicurus. I had hoped for updated notes and bibliography, something that I could point students (should I ever get another course as adjunct) towards, but it was a reprint of a book published […]
parenchyma
A passage from Homo Ludens, chapter VIII. The small points when reading for a project (arbitrary or intentional), when discrete facts from disparate sources align to form, in another text, a constellation, the resonances of which exceed the harmonics intended by the author. So in reading Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as part of a broader […]
playing favorites
The other evening I was annoying myself by trying to think up answers to the question ‘what is your favorite book?’ It’s a silly question, because books are good for so many different things – one (generally) wants different things from a cookbook and a poetry chapbook; and it’s a different question from ‘what do you […]
new frontiers
It was around the time I was reading the first or second of a series of translations of Beowulf and I mentioned it in passing in an email. My correspondent replied that they thought they should probably read more fiction, but it was hard to find the time. This response surprised, not because I thought […]
on being seen
Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien. // J’ai tout vu. Tout. Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed. —Arthur Conan Doyle (‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, section 1) Had Marguerite Duras […]
a singular philosophy
The view from the ridge, circa late summer 2017. The path that I like to walk (and have for some years) is the beginning of a nine-mile trail that goes up to a Forest Service lookout (which I have not yet reached, and probably never will, by that route). The trail climbs a series of […]
iterate
To begin with how it is. Sun fallen behind the ridge to the south, the light fading in the valley, though still bright on the northern hills. Raking up after a frost, hoping to clear the drive and the edges of the road before the rain. For I can push a barrow as well as […]
at hasard
on dogs, walking, running, Mongolia and nature.
so to speak
A scene from Rousseau’s Confessions1 We were walking away from the bookstore, where we had just purchased a second copy (with a nicer cover) of Nabokov’s translation of and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and to pass the time before dinner we talked about Pushkin’s short stories. PF mentioned that Pushkin was noted for his […]
to fabulize
Illustration to ‘The Rose-bush’ from Fairy Tales for Workers Children The rose bush did not know where it had been born and where it had passed its early days: it is well known that flowers have a bad memory. —Hermynia zur Mühlen (‘The Rose Bush’ in The Castle of Truths and Other Revolutionary Tales) The […]
politesse
Despite a subscription to one of the noteworthy review periodicals, I have mostly given up reading book reviews. They never really manage to tell me what I want to know, the information that a blind, intuitive reaching for the shelves will provide – what do I want to read next? Indeed, looking at book reviews […]
interlocutrix
Cropped and edited version of Djuna Barnes’s caricature of Helen Westley. It was happenstance, the purchasing of a copy of Interviews by Djuna Barnes. I was looking for a book about Pushkin and somehow found the Interviews at a local bookstore that happens to be in the same building as my dentist, although I didn’t […]
de finibus
There is the sense that the book has an argument, that it wants some sort of artist’s statement to illumine its depths. I complained of this, and PF observed that experimental authors tend to fall into two camps – the Nabokovian and the Joycean. The Nabokovian camp will tell you in great detail all the […]
pedestrian
It is the small extraordinary things – the excitement of a new pair of pantaloons, the tragedy of a lost pair of gloves, the satisfaction of completing a fair copy to go to the publisher, the suggested tedium of training the maid to mark patterns – that stand out in reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. Although […]
exaltée
A view of a bridge, in watercolor, ca. 1820. All recollections are like shadows, & all shadows are dark, be the objects that cause them ever so bright. —Emily Foster (Journals, p. 64, ca. May 1822) It is always a little strange to read published journals or diaries. The ones that I’ve encountered – Virginia […]
lying-before-us
William Orpen, ‘Group associated with the New English Art Club’ What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. —Francis Bacon, ‘Of Truth’ There was an odd passage in a woodworking memoir I read because I was taking the long way ’round in trying to think about craftsmanship. The woodworker had […]
the cruelest way
On travel writing and leaving things behind.
the idleness ethic
Such virtues and vices as he may have possessed seem to have been of the passive sort, always a matter of omission.
a portrait
The difficulty of monthly meetings to discuss ‘The Portrait of a Lady’.
testimonia
Vladislav Khodasevich and Nina Berberova, Sorrento, 1925. We perceived everything that happened then as an omen. But of what? —Vladislav Khodasevich (‘Muni’ in Necropolis, p. 83) It is difficult to know how to start thinking about Necropolis. Before I finished the book, I was certainly inclined to be dismissive – just so much gossip about […]
regardez
What was most interesting was the sense and use of time – the few hours, days, weeks passing from the spur to the flight – and the haphazard visions of memory run headlong. It (sc. This Tilting World) echoed, in propinquity,1 the promise of the narrators of The Glass Eye or Heartberries to create a […]
transparent
The thing about The Fifth Child is that, for so slight a book, it does not seem to be quite sure what it wants to achieve. The first half or two-thirds focus on the parents of the eponymous child and the decisions they make to further their rather banal vision of the ideal life. The […]
unmoored
I inquired for a walk, and, mounting near two hundred steps made round a rock, walked up and down for about a hundred yards viewing the sea, to which I quickly descended by steps that cheated the declivity. The ocean and these tremendous bulwarks enclosed me on every side. I felt the confinement, and wished […]
solitudo
These are stories of desolation. Sometimes they are a voyage towards, and sometimes they are an attempt to escape from. No matter. The traveller ventures to modern ghost towns, ancients ruins, or the wreckage of their own lives, and never really finds any answers – because there are none, not to the questions worth asking. […]
qui lætificat iuventutem meam
In Joyce’s Voices Hugh Kenner does many appealing things. The chapter on ‘the Uncle Charles Principle’ – the narrator’s adoption of a character’s verbal tics to provide a savor of the character’s worldview – is a masterful piece of criticism, presented with aphoristic aplomb. It is a style, surefooted and strong and cavalierly sophisticated, to […]
cornered
A portion of Thomas Cole’s ‘The Oxbow’ (1836) This was supposed to be about Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe and how, as a reader, one reimagines poets, emblazoning them on banners for battles they could have had no part in, the moment for those contentions being – then – not yet at hand. The points […]
good, better, bested
Of the books I read in 2017, I would recommend the following: Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle – an engaging look at wealth and the early church. Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths – a better presentation of the limits of intellect than An American Tragedy. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination […]
hope against hope (5)
You have perhaps forgotten my monologue on the subject of Hope Mirrlees. I have for some years been vexed with her for encouraging the inspissation of Jane Ellen Harrison, for clotting the intellect into insipidity: there is only so much of bears and cooing that a person can take, particularly if one is not a […]
against the grain
One doesn’t quite know what to expect from In the American Grain – not if one comes to it expecting anything at all, because it upsets those expectations from the first page. I was expecting something about Emily Dickinson, because the only reason I picked up the book was because it was mentioned in Susan […]
acted upon
Engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’ historia naturale (1599)1 What undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. When power is not actualized, it passes away, and history […]
tender sensibilities
‘Ville Imaginaire II’, Erik Desmazieres (1999) I’ve stumbled into a course of reading where nearly everything resonates with each other, ideas reverberating from page to page and decade to decade, resulting in a common clarity rather than the expected bewilderment. Renee Gladman’s personal essays are enriched by reading them with Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural criticism; Greta […]
cunning & resourceful
A pity they don’t have name tags, isn’t it? Good thing you can tell them apart by their hats. Mimesis has been on my list of books to read for quite some time. The notion that it was written from memory, without access to a present library of familiar reference books appealed to me. So […]
an antique fashion shows
The cover was off-putting. A boy in a garden, glancing slyly back at an illicit meeting, in the unctuous watercolors so popular for mass market literary paperbacks of a certain age. I refer, of course, to a Penguin edition of First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin, which, as a book, rather reminded me (not to […]
marginal
Notes on reading Judith Butler as a tonic to Rousseau.
Montaigne 3.12
Four (of eight) heads of Socratesfrom Lavater’s Lectures on Physiognomy (p. 160) It is a great thing to have been able to put such order into ideas as pure as those of a child that, without altering or stretching them, he produced from them the finest results of our mind. The mind he shows us […]
Montaigne 3.11
Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye. I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a […]
the will to be peeved
Drawing (with self portrait) from one of William James’s notebooks I don’t quite remember what led me to read William James. It could have been PF talking about him, or the mention in The Dead Ladies Project, or it could have been something I’ve forgotten about entirely. In any case, I settled in and read […]
those unheard
…she was like a book without any pictures. In other words, the kind of person who, unless you brought your whole soul to bear in reading them, would remain forever unknowable (116). A fall through the ice shapes the story. It is dramatic, inexplicable – and unexplained. The narrator is walking a dog, and then, […]
savoir-faire
The novel is made up of a series of the sort of letters it is generally not prudent to send. Break-up letters: familiar, contradictory, unpleasant. I need you. I detest you. Thank you. How could you?
tautologous (2)
These are by no means all of the books I read this year that I found enjoyable or good, but they are the ones that, when thinking back over the year, stood out to me as some of the better ones – or at least the ones that were the right books for me at […]
cavilling
bears with swords
Plate with loversIn the same sense that The Need for Roots is primarily concerned with finding reasons for the fall of France and the Vichy government, Mavrogordato’s introduction to Digenes Akrites – while still an entertaining and enlightening excursion through the manuscript tradition and historical context of the poem – is less about Byzantine poetry […]
ennui ensues
Sunshine, from The Illustrated London News (1865) Peter Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History is a competent bit of work, hitting the key surface points of the topic, from Aristotle to Heidegger, with an obligatory early twenty-first-century excursus on neuroscience. It is, as the acknowledgements give away, a commissioned book – an editor’s idea of something […]
indulge me
No one is telling me that I must like this book, and that is just as well because I do not. This book, Marguerite Duras’ Yann Andréa Steiner is not a bad book, but it is a self-indulgent one, and it approaches the reader with the watery over-familiarity of acknowledged eminence and suffering, for which […]
tautologous
At this point it is unlikely I will finish reading any more books this year, so I might as well make a list of the books I most enjoyed reading in 2015: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby Anne Garréta, Sphinx Mary Lascelles, Jane […]
Montaigne 1.46
anachronism This vocal and auricular correction, and so full of devotion, strucke right unto his soule. This other following, of the same kind, insinuated it selfe by the corporall senses. Pythagoras being in companie with two young men, whom he heard complot and consult (being somewhat heated with feasting and drinking) to go and ravish […]
Montaigne 1.45
anachronism There is little one can take away from Montaigne’s account of the battle of Dreux other than being glad one was not there – and that quibbling about managerial decisions has been a (justified) habit from time immemorial.
Montaigne 1.44
anachronism What, then, is sleep? And what, if any, are its virtues? A sound sleep the sign of both exhaustion and courage. The knowledge we have of this mans unmated-haughty heart by the rest of his life, may make us judge with all securitie that it only proceeded from a spirit so far elevated above […]
Montaigne 1.43
anachronism The linking of sumptuary laws and fear of change, and the need for those in power, for those with influence, to teach ‘people’ how best to live. And albeit most men were apparreled alike, yet were there other sufficient apparant distinctions of mens qualities. How soone doe plaine chamoy-jerkins and greasie canvase doublets creepe […]
mistaken identity
Carlo Levi, Paesaggio con Capo Mele e valletta (1933) I have often wondered why there is such a feeling of desolation in English cafés. Perhaps it comes from their desolate social relationships. Every place where the English gather to chat to one another exudes melancholy. Indeed, nothing in the world is sadder than an English […]
Montaigne 1.42
anachronism It is clever how Montaigne works his way through an idea: the horse that is not rightly judged on its tack, the merit of the hawk not measured by its jesses. After making the common comparison with the judgement of humanity (why judge a man by his clothes?), he turns it around and points […]
Montaigne 1.41
anachronism For, as Cicero says, the very men who combat it [scil. the desire for honour] still desire that the books they write about it shall bear their names on their titles, and endeavour to derive glory from the contempt of glory. All other things become interchangeable: we lend our goods and our lives to […]
the art of ‘truthiness’
Well, if I forked over the cover price for nonfiction, I consider it my business. While it’s great she [Vivian Gornick] owned up to her deceits, it’s hard to lend credence to any after-the-fact confession, especially one as vague or self-justifying as this one. It’s as if after lunch the deli guy quipped, ‘I put […]
Montaigne 1.40
anachronism Well I wot that when I heare some give themselves to dwell on the phrase of my Essayes, I would rather have them hold their peace: They doe not so much raise the words as depresse the sense; so much the more sharply by how much more obliquely. Yet am I deceived if some […]
Montaigne 1.39
anachronism ‘Thales Milesius’ by Jacques de Gheyn (1616) A man must give to thriving husbandrie, to laborious study, to toilesome hunting, and to every other exercise, the utmost bounds of pleasure; and beware he engage himselfe no further, if once paine begin to intermeddle it selfe with her; we should reserve businesse and negotiations only […]
Montaigne 1.38
anachronism When I scold my valet I scold him with all my hear: my imprecations are real and not feigned; but when the fumes have passed over, let him but need my help, I willingly grant it him; I instantly turn the leaf. When I call him a silly fool, a calf, I have no […]
Montaigne 1.37
‘Death of Cato’ by Pietro Testa (1648) anachronism Loe, here are wonders, we have more Poets than judges and interpreters of poesie. It is an easier matter to frame it than to know it: Being base and humble, it may be judged by the precepts and art of it: But the good and loftie, the […]
Montaigne 1.36
Men in various clothes, ca. 1782, from the Wellcome Collection anachronism Now, all things being exactly furnished else-whence with all necessaries to maintaine this being, it is not to be imagined that we alone should be produced in a defective and indigent estate, yea, and in such a one as cannot be maintained without forrain […]
Montaigne 1.34
Illustration to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender Montaigne presents an odd selection of (mis)fortunes to illustrate the precarious role of fate in the lives of men (and women). A pope mistakenly poisoned; a bridegroom captured in a tourney before his wedding night; a father and son condemned to death, killing each other to cheat the executioner’s sword; […]
Montaigne 1.32
‘Contre les astrologues’, Gilles Corrozet, Hecatomgraphie (1540) We can neither understand the arbitrary and personal meaning of the stars, nor why Heliogabalus died in a privy.1 Montaigne seems to suggest that we should be content with not knowing and, while he would believe in a greater meaning for these things – a meaning perceptible only […]
Montaigne 1.31
America (1580), by by Theodor Galle after Jan van der Straet …but hold! they don’t wear trousers (215). Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’ covers a great deal of ground and, if it does not reach the heights of ‘Of Moderation’, nonetheless typifies his style. In the course of the essay he considers bravery, relative morality, difference […]
Montaigne 1.30
vos conturbemini. For to him whom fasting would make more healthful and more sprightly, and to him to whose palate fish were more acceptable than flesh, the prescription of these would have no curative effect; no more than in the other sort of physic, where drugs have no effect upon him who swallows them with […]
Montaigne 1.29
Medice, cura teipsum. And what are these essays but grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together of different members, without any definite shape, without any order, coherence, or proportion, except they be accidental? —‘Of Friendship’ (183) * * * These poems may be seen elsewhere. —Dedication of 29 sonnets (196)
Montaigne 1.28
I cannot allow those other common friendships to be placed in the same line with ours. I have as much knowledge of them as another, and of the most perfect of their kind, but I should not advise any one to measure them with the same rule; he would be much mistaken (190). anachronism –entry […]
Montaigne 1.27
Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The latter prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided (182). Doubt concerning the ‘miraculous’ spread of information – such one knowing the results of a battle three days away within the hour. Odd […]
Montaigne 1.26
Vanity & Vexation And besides, I do not compete wholesale with those old champions, and body to body; I do so by repetitions, by frequent and light attacks. I do not stubbornly grapple with them, but only try their strength, and if I try to keep pace with them, I do so hesitatingly. If I […]
Montaigne 1.25
We labour but to cram our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Even as the birds sometimes fly in search of grain, and bring it in their beaks without tasting it, to feed their young, so do our pedants go picking knowledge out of books, carrying it at the end of their […]
Montaigne 1.24
Now, I say that not only in medicine, but in several more certain arts, there is a good deal of luck. Why should we not attribute the poetic flights which ravish and transport their author out of himself to his good luck, since he himself confesses that they exceed his power and ability, and acknowledges […]
Montaigne 1.23
‘Philosophy and Christian Art’ (1868) by Daniel Huntington What can be more barbarous than to see a nation where, by lawful custom, the office of a judge is sold, and judgements are paid for in good ready money, and where justice is by law denied to him who has not the wherewithal to pay for […]
Montaigne 1.22
Hieronymus Brunschwig, Liber Pestilentialis de venenis epidemie The tradesman thrives only by the extravagance of youth, the husbandman by the dearness of grain, the architect by the ruin of houses, the officers of justice by lawsuits and men’s quarrels; even the honour and practice of ministers of religion depend on our death and our vices. […]
delirium
Rodin, ‘Assemblage: mask of Camille Claudel and left hand of Pierre de Wissant’ (1895?) Reading Fiona Templeton’s Delirium of Interpretation, I didn’t quite know what to make of it – I do not believe I have recently read a work that so forcefully put me, as a reader, at such a great cultural distance from the […]
Montaigne 1.21
Steel engraving by J.B. Bourgois, 1808, after ‘The Hermaphrodite’ in the Louvre. We sweat, we tremble, we turn pale and blush through the shock of our imagination and lying back in our feather-bed we feel our body agitated by its power… –Montaigne (Essays ‘Of the Power of Imagination’) The power of imagination – excesses of […]
Montaigne 1.19
Solon the Athenian, from the Nuremberg Chronicle But in this last act, where death and ourselves each play there part, there must be no more pretending: we must speak plainly, and disclose what there is of good and clean at the bottom of the pot. —Montaigne (Essays, ‘That we should not judge of our happiness […]
Montaigne 1.18
They who have had a good drubbing in a fight may be led back to the charge on the morrow, though still wounded and bleeding; but if they have been given a good fright by the enemy, you will not induce them even to look at them. —Montaigne (Essays, ‘Of Fear’) The consideration of fear […]
Montaigne 1.17
…when I read history, which is written by all sorts and conditions of men, I usually consider what kind of man the author is: if his profession is that of letters only, he teaches me principally style and language; if he is a physician, I am the more ready to believe what he says of […]
nepeta cataria
‘A Girl Walks Home Alone’ It moves slowly; indeed, the pacing is unsettling. It’s been quite a while, though, since I’ve enjoyed a movie as much as A Girl Walks Home Alone, which was a thoughtful bit of creativity, rather than a bombastic collection of marketing images. I cannot (and do not want to) say […]
Montaigne 1.16
The Gunpowder plot conspirators, Crispin de Passe the Elder 1605 via Giornale Nuovo (ca. 2007) The recurring theme of willfulness, and the conflation of cowardice and ignorance as two pernicious forms of weakness one can, in part, lay at the feet of Nature, but only in part: It is reasonable indeed to see difference between […]
Montaigne 1.15
The bombardment of the Acropolis in 1687 from at 1707 edition of Francesco Finelli’s Atene attica : descritta da suoi principii fino all’acquisto fatto dall’armi venete nel 1687 (originally available via the Ottoman Imperial Archives, but no longer) So above all things a man should take heed, if he can, against falling into the hands […]
Montaigne 1.14
I live from day to day, and am content with having sufficient for present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary all the provision in the world will not suffice. And it is madness to expect that Fortune could ever sufficiently arm us against herself. With our own arms must we fight her. —Montaigne (Essays, ‘That […]
Montaigne 1.13
An engraving by Matthäus Merian the Elder (1710) For my part, I often neglect both of these empty formalities, since I curtail all ceremony in my own house. If any take offence, what shall I do? Better to offend him once than myself every day; that would be a perpetual slavery. […] Not only every […]
Montaigne 1.12
I cannot deny that if the loud report of an arquebus suddenly strikes on my ear in a place where I have no reason to expect it, I am startled; which I have seen happen to others more valorous than I. —Montaigne (Essays, ‘On Steadfastness’) Is steadfastness then to apply only in those circumstances that […]
Montaigne 1.11
It is at this point in reading the Essays that I notice the running heads do not contain the titles of the essay but rather an arbitrary key point for the page – for the shorter essays this usually results in the title appearing as the running head, but the longer compositions generally have a […]
hope against hope (4)
A bit of Caravaggio’s painting of ‘Saint Jerome Writing’ It’s taken me a while to get through Hope Mirrlees’ Collected Poems, perhaps because it confounded my expectations (which were admittedly a bit confused). Eager readers of Mirrlees’ work or those interested in her life should, of course, pick up a copy, as it is contains […]
Montaigne 1.10
As we advise ladies to take up those games and bodily exercises which will show off their particular beauty to the best advantage, so I would give the same advice with regard to those advantages in eloquence (33) […] I know by experience that natural disposition which is impatience of earnest and laborious premeditation, and […]
Lost Horizons
A bit of light reading from Terry and the Pirates. I’ve been spending much of March reading Will Eisner’s The Spirit (as reprinted by DC Comics), and trying to put it in some sort of context, which involves more reading (of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy). It hasn’t been […]
Montaigne 1.9
From Pierre L’Estoile’s Les belles Figures et Drolleries de la Ligue We are human beings, and hold together, only by speech (30). When thinking back over the essay ‘On Liars’ I find myself thinking of it in terms of memory, for the first third of it is taken up with Montaigne’s concern about his own […]
Montaigne 1.8
When lately I withdrew to my own home, resolved, as far as in me lay, to think only of spending in rest and retirement the little time I still have to live, it seemed to me that I could do my mind no greater favour than to allow it, in idleness, to entertain itself, to […]
Montaigne 1.7
It is perhaps the result of reading too many detective stories, but Montaigne’s notes on the importance of intentions was full of possibilities: They do still worse who reserve for their last will the declaration of some spiteful intention against a neighbour after having concealed it during life; thereby manifesting little regard for their own […]
Montaigne 1.6
The dangers of conferring with the ‘enemy’ – both if one goes on one’s own or with one’s cohorts: dangers on all sides.1 Circumstances create their own consequence, and lead naturally to a certain course of action; the refrain from that action becomes difficult (specifically to do with the difficulty in restraining a conquering army […]
Montaigne 1.5
Aegidius Albertinus, Hirnschleiffer (1645), p. 94 As to ourselves, who, not being so overscrupulous, give the honour of the war to him who has the profit of it, and who say, with Lysander, that ‘when the lion’s skin is too short, we must eke it out with a bit from that of the fox’, the […]
Montaigne 1.4
But, in good sooth, when the hand is raised to strike we feel hurt if it misses its aim and falls on empty air; so also, if the sight is to have a pleasant prospect, it must not be lost and scattered on vacant space, but have an object to sustain it at a reasonable […]
Montaigne 1.3
from Albrecht Dürer’s Portrait of Maximilian I We are never at home with, but always beyond, ourselves. Fear, desire, and hope impel us into the future, and rob us of the sense and consideration of that which is, in order to keep us musing over that which will be, even when we shall cease to […]
stulta navis
in which culture achieves its apotheosis and history is denied
Montaigne 1.2
Roman fresco after Timanthes A passion which may be relished and digested is but a poor thing. Montaigne on sadness appears to be about excess of emotion rather than sadness as such – are the effects of emotion cumulative, is the inexpressible emotion stronger than that which may be vented with tears or sighs? It […]
the long road
Robert Adam, Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (1764) From time to time out of the text there emerged little black figures which postured on the white paper beside it, achieved a group which was magical, an incantation to death, and ran back again into the text, which carried […]
Montaigne 1.1
Achilles in exanimem Hectora saevit, Domenico Cunego after Gavin Hamilton, 1766 Having another go at Montaigne’s Essais,1 one of those books I always make a brave run at, but abandon a third of the way through, brushed away from the mindset of the book into arbitrary business. I’m not quite sure what to make of […]
under the look of fatigue
Auden at home.1 Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye. —Auden, from ‘At Last the […]
from that other place
If one grows up in Oregon, one hears a lot about William Stafford. Always being the sort of person to avoid what other people are talking about (with no regard for its merit or interest), I never read any of his work until just a few months ago – and I expected to sneer even […]
it would do beautifully
The inconstant reader. … I reminded him how often we had talked about my travels on the five continents and sixteen seas, and my inability to stay very long in one place. Although I was living peacefully in Pollensa, there was not guarantee it would be permanent. —Álvaro Mutis (Triptych on Sea and Land, p. […]
the arrow of time
An enlightened voyage: ‘The Vessel of the Constitution steered clear of the Rock of Democracy, and the Whirlpool of Arbitrary Power’ From antiquity to fascism, Homer has been criticised for garrulousness – both in the hero and in the narrator. —Theodor Adorno (Dialectic of Englightenment: ‘Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, p. 53) Nestor, […]
2666
‘Ejemplar Acontecimiento! Un Espiritu maligno en figura de mujer bonita’ (cf.) The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed on after another didn’t lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was […]
The Balkan Trilogy
From a series of postcards of Bucharest in the 1940s. Olivia Manning. Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy. New York: NYRB Classics, 2010 (1960–1965). This is an odd way to start a consideration of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, but I want to take a moment to think about Graham Greene. His novels inhabit a peculiar […]
terra incognita
Charles Reade, under the banner of imagination, departs from everyday life to parts unknown.1 Charles Reade shows up in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James: Her improving health allowed Alice to enjoy a greater range of intellectual life than before. She went to the theater […] and she was reading a great deal, particularly the […]
on biography (3)
After reading Didier Eribon’s biography of Foucault, I turned with some relief to Karl Popper’s memoir Unended Quest. The biography of Foucault was maddening because it did what good biographies should do, and didn’t speculate, especially where speculation was warranted. Popper, meanwhile, positively disinvites speculation. There’s nothing to speculate about; he grinds through ideas with […]
sssllyyynnxxx
a few remark’s on Tatyana Tolstaya’s dystopian novel, The Slynx.
substantiation
I was almost exactly halfway through Céleste Albaret’s recollections of Monsieur Proust when I realized I had erred in the matter of genre. I had supposed it was merely a servant’s memoir of her eccentric employer. Given the pains she takes to clarify her stances on her employer (not crazy, not malingering, not a bit […]
hope against hope (3)
a counter reformation.
hope against hope (2)
on Mirrlees and extravagant biographies; briefly.
hope against hope (1)
in which nothing much is said, especially about Hope Mirrlees.
Requiem
Antonio Tabucchi. Requiem: A Hallucination trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Harvill, 1994. Please, he said, don’t abandon me to all these people who are so certain about everything, they’re dreadful. You don’t need me, I said, don’t talk nonsense, the whole world admires you, I was the one who needed you, but now it’s time […]
on biography (2)
Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1996. I have little more to say. If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debateable land. —Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte […]
the doubtful guest
Mrs. Boswell reacts to a visitation by Samuel Johnson.
on biography (1)
Alexander Theroux. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2011. After much consideration of this point, I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others. —Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte Brontë, […]
the common reader
…or observations on using a digital reader.1 My brain hasn’t figured out the digital reader yet.2 It doesn’t know how to process the small swiping screen of text with the same efficiency as even the most crabbed, cramped printed page. Of course that efficiency is the product of decades of practice, which obviously haven’t been […]
edifying
Design for a chimneypiece (ca. 1762) A few months ago, I was reading Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1968 article on ‘The Architectural Setting of Jane Austen’s Novels’ and it got me to thinking. It must have, for here I am, still muddled by it months after the fact, which is not something that normally happens after my […]
Azerbaijan Diary
Thomas Goltz. Azerbaijan Diary. London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. You cannot persuade a party of frenzied nationalists that two blacks do not make a white; consequently, no day went by without a catalogue of complaints from both sides, Armenians and Tartars, of unprovoked attacks, murders, village burnings and the like… —C.E. Bechhofer (1920) (qtd. in De […]
Sodom and Gomorrah
Probably the most titillating volume, but certainly one of the most dull. One imagines the narrator as a carbuncular, crepuscular teenager, creeping at the edges of the shadows and undercurrents of desire, without actually entering into the depths he peers in. This is rendered more obnoxious when we are told that the fawning ladies at […]
The Guermantes Way
Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes them, and that they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful […]
Within a Budding Grove
Racine isn’t telling a story about love among the sea-urchins (185). Again, this does not aspire to the level of essay, and will be simply some notes from reading this particular volume. Within a Budding Grove is a more thoroughly conventional novel than Swann’s Way, and presents the late childhood and early adolescence of our […]
of an age
I find nothing objectionable in the fact that the young scholar, as may be observed even in my retelling, was flirting a bit with erudition. Later on, scholars began to flirt with illiteracy and achieved in this regard a suspiciously natural effect. —Fazil Iskander, ’The Story of the Prayer Tree’ (Sandro of Chegem, p. 162) […]
elusive taste
Muriel Barbery. The Elegance of the Hedgehog & Gourmet Rhapsody. trans. Alison Anderson. New York: Europa, 2008/2009. I’ve stayed in much richer ones than that. I’ve stayed in one so rich that when you pulled the lavatory-plug it played a tune… Rich people – you have to be sorry for them. They haven’t the slightest […]
Swann’s Way
A few notes on Swann’s Way:1 ‘Combray’ is high-modernist fancy, a lush novella of remembered childhood within the the clear framework of our narrator trying to fall asleep. Interesting in not being tied to a particular bout of insomnia – though still tightly bound with insomnia at Combray as a child. How is this going […]
Setting the East Ablaze
The main problem – and the reason why The Great Game is a superior book – is that the material does not seem fully digested. The tone changes from chapter to chapter depending on whose memoirs Hopkirk draws on…
Ho yuss! Vurry true.
Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand (55).1 Reading Pound’s Guide to Kulcher, I was perplexed; partially because it is an odd book, aimed at those who don’t mind attending the university of the brain of Ezra Pound […]
hold my coat and snicker
I remember being told by a teacher not to read Jane Eyre, because I would be reading it in her class in the fall. Of course I read it that summer. Propped in bed, or curled in a corner, but finally finishing peripatetic. That’s how I remember it, anyway. I walked the three miles from […]
all the baggage
So I was reading Paul Fussell’s book about travel, Abroad. Of course it’s not just about travel, though he does spend some thirty-odd (or more or less, I’ve returned it to the library and cannot refer to it now) pages lamenting the impossibility of true travel1 in this degraded age of tourism, it’s about literary […]
dialogue in solitude
Once again, why Spinoza? When I was talking to Dime T. from Ohrid, Macedonia, one afternoon about parapsychology, he asked me: ‘Why do you think you are writing about Spinoza?’ Had it been a conversation with a philosopher, I would have said something like: ‘Because of his unique philosophy, because of his divergence from Descartes’ […]
literary virtues
I ordered the book from the library after reading a quotation from it somewhere on the internet. I don’t remember my source, which is probably just as well; I had also heard the author mentioned favorably, and thought I might as well take a look. The book arrived and, as usual, I judged it by […]
optimist
Since selling off most of the books earlier this year, I’ve been trying to avoid purchasing more, which has led to increased, or perhaps simply more self-conscious library usage. The following are the books I have most recently checked out of the public and local university libraries (including three interlibrary loans): Aksakov: Years of Childhood […]
spoiler
The houses between which the action uncertainly scuttles have the ungenial impersonality of the re-used backdrop, and at the corner of the garden one feels the outlines of a gazebo, lattice white, meant to suggest gentility to less subtle minds. Finally, it is shocking – so to fall off as precisely to say that this […]
wild east
Boris Fishman, ed. Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier 2003 Now a reader is in a sense complicit in the making of a good book; without the reader’s empathy, wit, and understanding, be the book ever so finely written and ever so well put together, any book can be called rubbish. I myself remember […]
a pounding
https://www.eudaemonist.com/images/168.jpg
quite literally
snobbery
notes on reading: social
19th century London & medieval Iceland
lost illusions
& gout
east of Eden in the land of Nod
A sleepless night, drowsing over Samson Agonistes. Dalila dandled forth, almost more specious than Helen among the Trojan Women, and the blind man missing his apotheosis, but not heroization. And then there are certain beautiful infelicities; I hesitate to say Milton loses his tone, but perhaps he clings rather too fiercely: Chorus. But we had […]
commerce
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection. O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table: Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems: ibidem H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book: A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor: Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History: Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats: […]
Seinsverfassung
from the Cowley Image Archive All was sunshine and flowers until the library delivered the wrong book for an interlibrary loan. I don’t care what the critics say, Allen Mandelbaum is no Gavin Douglas.1Brief critical introduction to and biography of Douglas. He also has the dubious honor of being somewhere commended by Ezra Pound. [↩]
noted
Started reading The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić. The novel proper begins as follows: 1. ‘Ich bin müde,’ I say to Fred. His sorrowful, pale face stretches into a grin. Ich bin müde is the only German sentence I know at the moment (3).1 I note this only because ‘Ich bin müde’ was […]
The Sacred Font
and other puzzles
parrying poetics
At the end of March there was a puff piece about Anne Carson in the NY Times, occasioned by a staged reading of her translation of, I think, Euripides’ Hekabe.1 One short passage attracted my attention: For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. ‘Homer’s a poet,’ she said. ‘I would say […]
An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting
household exercises
Snow
a Turkish winter
Pnin
ars academica
Murphy
insidious
Love and Freindship (sic)
the perils of misspelling for young authors
Directions to Servants
lessons for masters
Street Sleeper
Volkswagens and other historical anecdotes
The Green Dwarf
a suggestion
Rasselas
a philosophical expedition to Abissinia
The Victim of Prejudice
or, the difficulties of being desired
A Sudden Liberating Thought
with no sudden crisis of conscience
de arte poetica liber
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.: Bagford the biblioclast. Illustrations torn from MSS. Title-pages torn from books. Rubens, his engraved titles. Colophons torn out of books. Lincoln Cathedral Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay. Theurdanck. Fragments of MSS. Some libraries almost useless. […] The care […]
the mind diseased
Modern Greece, in history and literature, has been viewed as a transitory moment squeezed between two larger and more important entities. Viewed chronologically, modern Greece rests between the glory of the classical Greek past and the hope of a resurrected Greek future, which in many Western minds ought to resemble the democracies of Western Europe […]
the world discovered
I seem to be collecting Theophrastian anthologies. By which I mean the text of John Earle’s Microcosmography (1628) is available here for the amusement and edification of all and sundry.1 Here’s an excerpt from ‘A Down-right Scholar’: The time has got a vein of making him ridiculous, and men laugh at him by tradition, and […]
splitted in the midst
Currently (and actively) reading (in no particular order): François Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel. trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955.1 J. Innes Miller. The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 BC to AD 641. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.2 Michel Foucault. The Archeology of Knowledge. trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1989 (1969).3 Goethe. Die […]
colonoscopy
As the abandonment of periodic arrangement really makes the colon useless, it would be well (though of course any one who still writes in formal periods should retain his rights over it) if ordinary writers would give it up altogether except in special uses, independent of its quantitative value, to which it is being more […]
de pumilis libellis
…by falsifying him into something monstrously charming and extraordinary they hope to be able to keep him alive forever. — Pär Lagerkvist (2002.47, p. 159) Owing to my best efforts to keep an open mind and my almost miraculous attempts to overcome my aversion for the word ‘snark’ and most people who use it, the […]
pedant
One of the strangest footnotes I have ever written: On the knee as a seat of power, see Deonna (1939); on the knee as a gathering place for seminal fluids, see Onians (1951): p. 173–86. This lends credence to the theory that one channels the powers beyond when writing, because really, I don’t think I […]
dedication
Although the new A. S. Byatt collection Little Black Book of Stories is something of a disappointment because three1 of the five stories have been published before, the last paragraph in the book book almost makes up for it: Finally, this book is dedicated to my German translator and to my Italian translators, all good […]
notify me
Powell’s promises to tell me when these books come back in stock: Indexing Books by Ruth Canedy Cross Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 volumes, by C. M. Doughty Garland of Philip, 2 Volumes, by A. S. F. Gow Book of Trances by Güneli Gün On the Road to Baghdad by Güneli Gün Alpha and Omega […]
a well lerned gentylwoman
Margaret More Roper (Holbein, ca. 1535, Met.) Erasmus wrote many epistels to her, and dedicated his commentaries on certaine hymnes of Prudentius to this gentlewomen, and calleth her the flower of all learned matrones of England. Nor was she meanlie learned. She compounded in Greeke and latyn both verse and prose, and that most eloquentlie. […]
Socrates Silenos
Began reading The Mask of Socrates: the Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, and was struck by the following passage: The earliest portrait of the philosopher originated about ten to twenty years after his death and shows him in the guise of Silenus. In flouting the High Classical standard of beauty so blatantly, this face […]
practical wisdom
Dickinson is not known to have met with the new and exciting novels by American women that dominated the market in the 1850s, many of them patterned after The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner: perhaps they were secured out by Amherst’s tastemakers. Whatever the explanation, most of the women’s books that crossed Dickinson’s path […]
‘could it be J— H— herself?’
Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928 Independent lecturer in London, later a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, Jane Harrison was author of (among other things): Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Relgion (1903) and Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). She is also one of the few women mentioned in the who’s […]
poena sine fine
After reading Donna Wilson’s Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the ‘Iliad’ (based on the dissertation she prepared for the University of Texas, Austin) the largest question I have for the author concerns her relationship with her father. Her discussion of the character of reparation in the Iliad emphasizes the role of the father in […]
diction
Wherefore, I beckoned to Gioffredo to take the ankles: but I myself took the hollow armpits; and terribly the head waggled between. In this manner we flung the dead slave from the balcony: but, after we had heard the splash of his fall in Tiber, we returned, expecting new events. (chapter xii) ‘Terribly the head […]
at the circumlocution office
How to evade the tendency to view an individual life as somehow symbolic or representative of the lives of an entire group of people (or subculture); for instance: repressed homosexuality (‘abnormal sexual desires’) the root of all Corvo’s problems according to
formicae
From a review (via A&L Daily) of a biography of Hans-Georg Gadamer (of whom I am as ignorant as a newborn): Was Gadamer really like Socrates? Or did he lack the courage that made the Greek drink poison rather than submit to the mob? Uh, Mr. Reviewer, sir? Socrates drinking the poison? Uh, that was […]
An Errant Academic
I mentioned Seth Lerer’s Error and the Academic Self more than a month ago and, having finally finished reading it, there are a few more comments I would like to make. To begin, though, with a summary: errô, errare, erravi, erratus – to wander, to go astray, to err. The record of scholarship, particularly of […]
Note
After reading Adam Bede and Paul Clifford I think it’s safe to say that Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a really good book.
revilement
It bodes no good to identify with the mother in Sons and Lovers.
errare humanum est
I picked up a copy of the book by chance the other day, and started reading it last night. Not that I’ve gotten very far enough to say anything about it, save that it is provoking: Being wrong is also about being displaced, about wandering, dissenting, emigrating, and alienating. The professionalization of the scholar, and, […]
Periplus
From Francis Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (p. 202): The years of peaceful life in his native country came to an end for Comenius with the defeat of Frederick at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 which meant, for Bohemia, the suppression of the national religion. The Bohemian Brethren were proscribed. In 1621 the […]
Qualitative
It was very weak of Harold Biffen to come so near perishing of hunger as he did in the days when he was completing his novel. But he would have vastly preferred to eat and be satisfied had any method of obtaining food presented itself to him. He did not starve for the pleasure of […]
Anxiety of Influence (i): Laurence Sterne
in which the author babbles about Tristram Shandy.
now that’s quality
Having finished reading Randall Jarrell’s1 first novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954),2 I now understand why people go ga-ga for Kerouac: general American fiction of the 1950s was rotten.3 Take offense if you will, but I stand by my statement. When seen against the backdrop of such insipid, feeble prose as Jarrell’s, where flashes of […]
the end of English letters
April 9 [1937]: VirginiaWoolf’s The Years and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pine to See the Peep Show read at once—what with rain and fairies and walloping bells at Oxford and Missie dying of love for Teacher with a dash of beans and fish with the lower middle class—impress one again with the constipation of English […]
Influential Books (ii)
addendum.
Epistulae Humaniores
A man who gets few letters does not open one lightly. He hefts it for weight, reads the name of the sender on the envelope and the address, looks at the handwriting, and studies the postmark and the date. —Steinbeck (East of Eden, p. 486) I’ve been reading a lot of letters lately; not that […]
Incomplete Associations (Greek)
The fragments of Sappho flutter like a silken ribbon caught in thorny centuries.1 Herodotus is the sound of nodding asleep amid the low murmur of unuttered secrets and improbable truths. The dialogues of Plato are a sly glance between clever friends. Thucydides marshals his words, setting them in trim, ordered lines, bristling and iron-edged. The […]
The Historicity of Peasants
Have been reading Michael Rostovtzeff’s A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century B.C. A Study in Economic History (Madison, WI: 1922), a short book in which the notorious Russian historian gives the Zenon archive his attention. Of course, in 1922 the Zenon archive, with early Ptolemaic documents numbering in the thousands, was bigger […]
Incomplete Associations (Latin)
The prose of Cicero is a ripened plum, the dusky purple austerity concealing a rich and summery sweetness. The lines of Ovid are a silver ring; of Horace, a poet’s faded crown, gone gray and dusty down the centuries. Yet Vergil’s lines are as a shepherd’s staff, for cudgeling foes or correcting friends. The works […]
Influential Books
I was and am an impressionable reader.
Historicity
History should have a sense of proportion—a human touch, if you please. From a biography of Petrarch (2003.8, p. 51): In Verona, and well before the middle of June, he made his greatest find. He discovered in the library of the cathedral a volume containing the sixteen Books of Cicero’s collection of his letters to […]
an Observation (2)
Somewhere in his letters to Atticus, Cicero says something to the effect of: I would rather fight with Pompey, and lose, than see him victorious. The death of Pompey signaled the end of the optimate cause, and the beginning of Caesar’s supremacy. Had Pompey won, though, the optimate cause, along with the Republic, would still […]
Sed Vitae Caesaris
Coin depicting the Emperor Augustus1 from A Visual Compendium of Roman Emperors. At last reading Ronald Syme’s famous book, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), a history of the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the principate. It begins slowly, with a grim overview of the career of C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (later […]
Update
Spent the morning reading articles on Cicero’s De Oratore, all of which seem to say exactly the same thing: it’s too long by far, and not philosophical enough; in fact, it’s just plain too rhetorical. Which is, apparently, unexpected in a rhetorical treatise. Fun stuff, though, and only two were in German. Afternoon reading What […]
a Peculiar Longing
Alexander the Great was shorter than average height, with blond hair and one eye blue, the other brown. His first teacher was a demanding man called Leonidas, like the Spartan king who died at Thermopylae, who searched his student’s room every day, overturning trunks and ruffling linens to be sure Alexander was not in danger […]
Mysteriosa Femina
In an abrupt change of pace, I set aside the works of Walter Burkert just as he was about to show once and for all how human behavior really works, and read a mystery novel until all hours of the night. I had given up on the entire ‘reading in bed’ thing—there never seemed to […]
Neither a borrower…
I have to remind myself it was only a book – mass-market paperback, pristine condition though bought used. I lent it to an acquaintance; I do not say she was a friend, because she was not. She was an acquaintance. At the time I would have compared her to a whirlwind, for wherever she went […]
Found Objects
England, 12 November, 7:24 a.m. When I remember something I would rather forget, or when some unpleasant action or unwitting stupidity of mine forces its way forward into the present from the past, I think I don’t feel well. Oh happy past, which can so disorder the present. A people that grows accustomed to sloppy […]
The Histories of Books
To write the much-lamented Cicero essay, I happened to check two small pamphlets out of the library, both Teubner editions of short works by Sallust (or an anonymous author in the style of Sallust). Both had been edited by A. Kurfess (who also edited the Teubner edition of Sallust’s other works [1956]) and had belonged […]
It was the Distance
For no good reason1 I’ve been reading The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (ed. W. Martin, CUP: 2002). It is somewhat refreshing to find books which do not concern Cicero. And it is interesting to step outside the charmed circle of academics and then to peer back in, as though through windows. For one can […]
In the Garden
Books take up space, and libraries, being confined by walls, must occasionally weed the shelves of injudicious pamphlets and books unborrowed through the centuries. That this should astonish or dismay comes as something of a surprise. That, however, is not my theme. I would like to return to the metaphor of libraries as gardens. It […]
The Topless Towers of Ilium
Archaeologists are a fiesty bunch. Take, for instance, this argument about Troy. How many people, really, would exchange insults about the size of ancient Troy? How big was Troy, really? Huge? Perhaps. Just the citadel? Maybe. Can we say? Depends about what era you’re talking about, I suppose. Like most cities, what once was Troy […]
Elenchus
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew. Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words. ‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’ How many a man has said that, in the course of […]
17.06.02 – Monday
The greatest pleasure I find in life is reading. In the past few weeks I have found much longed-for enrichment in such a quantity of books as I had thought myself unable to consume. Yet it is true that one hungry will, if possible, eat and the thirsty will, given the chance, drink – so […]
17.05.02 – Friday
Reading Halliwell’s book on Aristotle’s Poetics (University of Chicago Press, 1999): mimêsis, katharsis, etc. I paced across the deep red of the carpet, carefully keeping within the wool boundary, my attention buried in the book; to leave the rug would be to fall into the abyss of daily life – and also to risk running […]
5.05.02 – Sunday
Time passes with a measured and memorable wing during the first period of a sojourn in a new place, among new characters and new manners. Every person, every incident, every feeling touches and stirs the imagination. The restless mind creates and observes at the same time. Indeed there is scarcely any popular tenet more erroneous […]
31.03.02 – Sunday
Still reading Waley’s translation of Genji, with which we ‘are not best pleased,’ to borrow Waley’s idiom. (There are also several printers’ errors sprinkled liberally throughout the text, tho’ in our generous spirit we pretend not to mind them — but I hear there’s a new translation on the market…) However: A simple Chinese verse […]
28.03.02 – Thursday
Woke this morning to the chiding of the sun. One always knows that it shall be a bad – or, at the very least, trying – day when distant instances of extreme combustion seem to have gained the power of speech. Moving on, however, to other things. Why is it that, as I read some […]
4.02.02 – Monday
Granulated brain, vocabulary running free like an hour-glass’s sands. To study, to know a thing, is to internalize it and make it one’s own; in short, to memorize it. In a different age, the classical education required massive rote memorization of poetry, prose – you know, the classics. Everything then becomes allusive, words acquire a […]
30.01.02 – Wednesday
Just so you know, this post has been edited. Vergil is a hack.1 Homer (being collective) had it right; I don’t care if Iuno foments mishap for that man so blatantly remarkable for pietas (face it, Aeneas is a square – that’s what having a destiny does to people). I’d rather spend time with some […]
14.01.02 – Monday
Returned some few books to the library, thank heavens, and read a few articles I’d meant to peruse in November. Still feel vastly, horribly behind – only the cruelty of my own ambition forces me on (which can be a good or a bad thing, as you will). Speaking of ambition – St. Augustine: hmmm. […]
19.11.01 – Monday
Softly, softly. Malthakôs. The oak leaves are falling at last — air of unreality, setting a scene (tho’ not making one). Received two glorious letters – read them in the afternoon light while waiting for the bus. Invariably waiting for the inevitable bus. There really is something about reading Plato. I can’t explain it. The […]
29.10.01 – Monday
Reading Medea (γυνὴ γὰρ ὀξύθυμος, ὡς δ’ αὔτως ἀνήρ, // ῥάιων φυλάσσειν ἢ σιωπηλὸς σοφή. (319–20)). Ah, ionic elements! We are fond of our archaicisms – and might be in danger of descending to dactylic hexameters… give us a minute.
19.10.01 – Friday
compare Scrutinizing my recent reading and find that I’ve been spending far too much time ambling through modern literature – which would, I suppose, be acceptable if I were reading Proust or Eliot or some other frightfully clever & dreadfully important authors, but I’m not – I’m reading the squabblers, with personalities more interesting than […]
2.09.01
Again, up early. Restless. Still reading the Letters of Rupert Brooke. Aside from having a perfectly splendid name and being a tremendously handsome (in the English manner, if you like that sort of thing) minor poet, I find he even manages to write amusing letters, about such interesting things as, well, life – which is […]
11.03.01
Overcast toneless gray, neither warm nor cold. Reading The Ambassadors, then up, out and to coffee. Purchased litre of orange juice, email, return to room, where reading Hellenistic history, Sophocles & Antiphon whilst trying to organize my bibliography. Dull and stupid, partook of tea & more Henry James, then tired at last, to bed.
24.02.01
Up, coffee, bath, Love in a Cold Climate (it troubles me somewhat, being clever and charming and not especially brilliant, the characters remain, as intended I suppose, card-board cut-outs — Cedric, for instance, is an insult to one’s intelligence — though it is entertaining to ponder the actual schedule of the narrator), library (Greek Religion, […]