More specifically concerning: literature
03.06.01
3 June 2001, around 8.15.
People sat or sprawled on the lawns, soaking in the sunshine or lolling in the shade. I, meanwhile, was content to walk along the river bank and admire the scene, the hum of bees, &c. The rest of the morning passed amid thoughts of the ancient Greek aristocracy, kaloikagathoi, the beautiful and the good. Have […]
19.10.01 – Friday
19 October 2001, around 16.36.
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 […]
Incomplete Associations (Latin)
27 February 2003, around 9.32.
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 […]
Incomplete Associations (Greek)
16 March 2003, around 7.02.
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 end of English letters
15 April 2003, around 8.10.
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 […]
now that’s quality
16 April 2003, around 8.18.
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 […]
Citation (7)
27 April 2003, around 11.06.
T.E. Hulme pontificates…
Anxiety of Influence (i): Laurence Sterne
1 May 2003, around 8.07.
in which the author babbles about Tristram Shandy.
pseudaphoristica (1)
6 June 2003, around 8.26.
darkness.
revilement
15 June 2003, around 9.15.
It bodes no good to identify with the mother in Sons and Lovers.
Note
7 July 2003, around 14.00.
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.
An Errant Academic
10 July 2003, around 13.44.
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 […]
at the circumlocution office
31 July 2003, around 8.07.
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
poena sine fine
6 August 2003, around 8.05.
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 […]
heptaphyllon
20 August 2003, around 17.08.
By way of explanation.
de pumilis libellis
20 January 2004, around 19.16.
…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 […]
Citation (16)
1 February 2004, around 8.32.
the author disinterested in finances…
the mind diseased
6 March 2004, around 13.14.
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 Sacred Font
26 June 2004, around 18.48.
and other puzzles
literary virtues
9 December 2007, around 0.58.
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 […]
dialogue in solitude
16 December 2007, around 20.47.
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’ […]
Citation (34)
21 July 2008, around 5.09.
on waste paper…
substantiation
22 November 2012, around 19.22.
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 […]
2666
17 April 2013, around 5.07.
‘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 […]
in a style to endure
1 June 2014, around 11.42.
In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson had gone; Cowper was not yet much known; the most prominent poets were Hayley and Darwin; the most distinguished prose-writer, Gibbon. […] Miss Burney, afterwards Madame D’Arblay, surprised the reading world with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels; and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and […]
against the grain
15 October 2017, around 15.59.
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 […]
the nerve
25 August 2023, around 12.28.
All our criticism consists of reproaching others with not having the qualities that we believe ourselves to have. —Jules Renard (Journals, trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget, July 1895) It also consists of reproaching others with having those qualities that we would like to have, but don’t.