One of the real benefits of living on East First Street in Manhattan is that it is within walking distance of ST MARK'S BOOKSHOP.
It is the BEST bookshop in the United States.
I have not been to Denver or to Portland so until I have seen the bookstores there I am willing to admit that possibly there is a better bookshop than St. Mark's in the US.
One quick test of your local bookshop would be: go in and see if they have up front a copy of the new selection of essays by Raymond Queneau LETTERS NUMBERS FORMS from the University of Illinois Press as did St Mark's on Sunday night.
Of course you know the work of Raymond Queneau: Zazi, The Bark Tree, We Always Treat Women Too Well, The Sunday of Life, Children of Clay
Sunday night I noticed that Queneau has a teasing sort of essay about the diary of Julian Green...
(I always write his first name Julian since I approach him always as an American writer who happens to write in French; I well know that in France he is Julien Green)
And while it will be another day before I write about the necessity of reading Julian Green--- I wanted to acknowledge one of the genuine good reasons to be living on East First Street.
If you can not WALK to a good bookstore--- and I have just defined one above--- you are not living a civilized life. As to why this is true I am going to avoid answering that question beyond saying: as you continue to read these lines if you do so you will come to understand in a way superior to that easy simple answer I could well construct for my question.
Finally further substantiation of the above: a week ago I discovered not up front but on the ordinary shelves at St Mark's Bookshop ENERGY OF DELUSION by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive)--- written in Shklovsky's 88th year--- is the best critical book to be published this year for those who like to think in such terms: concerned with the idea of plot in novels... but that title: Shklovsky quotes a letter from Tolstoy who is consoling a friend who has been experiencing difficulty,
"I know this feeling very well-- even now, I have been experiencing it lately; everything seems to be ready for writing--- for the fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that's impossible to invent. and it's impossible to begin without it."
Shklovsky is the great formalist critic who makes us aware of novels as novels, stories as stories. He takes them apart and shows how they work as if they were machines made of words and words made into sentences arranged in a particular way. His writing is crystal clear, unburdened by jargon and his authority comes from his own literary works separate from his critical work: ZOO OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE and A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY: MEMOIRS, 1917-1922--- just as the authority of T.S. Eliot as a critic comes from THE WASTE LAND and FOUR QUARTETS, just as the authority of Ezra Pound as critic comes from his poetry and THE CANTOS...
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Monday, November 5, 2007
KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGHUE, UCD, NYU
Tomorrow I am going along to listen to Denis Donoghue lecture in his Introduction to British Literature class at NYU. He will be talking about KING LEAR.
In 1964-65 Donoghue was a lecturer at University College, Dublin.
I heard him lecture on KING LEAR then and his theme was as I remember how Shakespeare tried to find language for feelings.
He quoted Cordelia's great reply in Act One Scene One: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less.
I might have it all wrong from back then but I have over all these years used Cordelia's sentence as part of my own refusal to reach for the ready made phrases after my parents died... and it allowed for many a tortured moment with this or that person...
On Thursday as Donoghue was finishing up his second lecture on TWELVE NIGHT he indicated that he was now interested in Shakespeare's use of the word "bond."
I learned from Donoghue the use of the phrase, "to tease out."
I am not very good at "teasing out" much of anything but I can admire someone who does it with the skill that Donoghue bring to this near lost art.
I sit in the back of the theatre where he is talking and notice the students hard at work shopping, messengering, annotating work for other classes, reading The NewYorker, and some are even taking notes with no text in front of them. To be honest there are many who do have the textbooks along with them and read along as Donoghue reads long selections from the various texts and shows how those words work and no other word is possible...
In 1964-65 he lectured in the old Physics theater at UCD there on Earlsford Terrace.
In the front row was the celluloid curtain of nuns and priests while ranged up to the rafters were the hundreds of other students...
Today as then Donoghue lectures from no notes and with only the text in hand speaks out perfectly balanced sentences that remind me of my own failures as a college teacher but also of all that is being thrown away as students are constantly directed away from the reading of the actual words in front of them by the far more fashionable ideologues of gender, class, race who would much prefer to harangue upon the racist, class and gender issues implicit in the yellow pages of the local phone company...
Donoghue began last Tuesday's class by asking if students had seen that film LAST TANGO IN PARIS which featured at that time the depiction of a controversial and unhealthy sexual act involving the use of butter. Only two or three students raised their hands as having seen the film. Donoghue reminded the audience that the Marlon Brando character is saying in the other famous secene in the film in the tango palace, "If music be the food of love, play on,"
Donoghue mentioned that the Brando character should have realized that this was a bit of foreshadowing of his death later in the film because of what comes later in that passage in TWELVE NIGHT...
In January YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS will publish Donoghue's ON ELOQUENCE. In the book he recounts--- among other things--- his own student days at UCD and how he came to lecture there and how inadvertently Donoghue would bring to a close the glory days of UCD by promoting the inclusion of modern writers in the syllabus. It had been the glory of UCD that they did not lecture on any writer from after 1900. It was thought that such writing could be talked about in the pubs... as indeed it was in McDaid's, O'Dwyer's, The Bailey...
that is all for another day
In 1964-65 Donoghue was a lecturer at University College, Dublin.
I heard him lecture on KING LEAR then and his theme was as I remember how Shakespeare tried to find language for feelings.
He quoted Cordelia's great reply in Act One Scene One: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less.
I might have it all wrong from back then but I have over all these years used Cordelia's sentence as part of my own refusal to reach for the ready made phrases after my parents died... and it allowed for many a tortured moment with this or that person...
On Thursday as Donoghue was finishing up his second lecture on TWELVE NIGHT he indicated that he was now interested in Shakespeare's use of the word "bond."
I learned from Donoghue the use of the phrase, "to tease out."
I am not very good at "teasing out" much of anything but I can admire someone who does it with the skill that Donoghue bring to this near lost art.
I sit in the back of the theatre where he is talking and notice the students hard at work shopping, messengering, annotating work for other classes, reading The NewYorker, and some are even taking notes with no text in front of them. To be honest there are many who do have the textbooks along with them and read along as Donoghue reads long selections from the various texts and shows how those words work and no other word is possible...
In 1964-65 he lectured in the old Physics theater at UCD there on Earlsford Terrace.
In the front row was the celluloid curtain of nuns and priests while ranged up to the rafters were the hundreds of other students...
Today as then Donoghue lectures from no notes and with only the text in hand speaks out perfectly balanced sentences that remind me of my own failures as a college teacher but also of all that is being thrown away as students are constantly directed away from the reading of the actual words in front of them by the far more fashionable ideologues of gender, class, race who would much prefer to harangue upon the racist, class and gender issues implicit in the yellow pages of the local phone company...
Donoghue began last Tuesday's class by asking if students had seen that film LAST TANGO IN PARIS which featured at that time the depiction of a controversial and unhealthy sexual act involving the use of butter. Only two or three students raised their hands as having seen the film. Donoghue reminded the audience that the Marlon Brando character is saying in the other famous secene in the film in the tango palace, "If music be the food of love, play on,"
Donoghue mentioned that the Brando character should have realized that this was a bit of foreshadowing of his death later in the film because of what comes later in that passage in TWELVE NIGHT...
In January YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS will publish Donoghue's ON ELOQUENCE. In the book he recounts--- among other things--- his own student days at UCD and how he came to lecture there and how inadvertently Donoghue would bring to a close the glory days of UCD by promoting the inclusion of modern writers in the syllabus. It had been the glory of UCD that they did not lecture on any writer from after 1900. It was thought that such writing could be talked about in the pubs... as indeed it was in McDaid's, O'Dwyer's, The Bailey...
that is all for another day
Sunday, November 4, 2007
HOUND OF ACCURACY, FRANZ FANON< JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN EDWARD DAHLBERG
Before the hounds of accuracy track me down: I went looking for Ezra Pound in the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
Since torn down.
What went on in the Royal Hibernian Hotel will have to wait for another time involving as it does drinking and taxis...
Out for a constitutional and so to The Strand Bookstore to look at the bound galleys.
FANON by John Edgar Wideman... you know Wideman I am sure--- or as Edward Dahlberg would have said you having heard of him and that is sufficient.
This new "novel" is not due out until next February.
I am sure it will, as they say, be talked about.
A novel celebrating a mostly forgotten guy whose message boiled down to: the most productive thing a black man could do in this life is to kill a white man.
Professor Wideman I am sure is an authority on murder. His brother is a convicted murderer and Mr Wideman's son is a convicted murderer.
Mr Wideman teaches writing--- what else--- at Brown University--- where else?--- the dumbest of the Ivy League schools and his students are probably the dumbest of the lot.
Mr Wideman's first few novels were actually interesting: A Glance Away, Hurry Home, Damballah.. but then he became a voice of something or other...
Also at the Strand the bound galleys of Joyce Carol Oates' The Journals.. when I glanced through the pages.. I have no one to talk to.. sunburn on legs....
Gore Vidal will be remembered for only one line: what are the three saddest words in the English lanaguge: Joyce Carol Oates...
Since torn down.
What went on in the Royal Hibernian Hotel will have to wait for another time involving as it does drinking and taxis...
Out for a constitutional and so to The Strand Bookstore to look at the bound galleys.
FANON by John Edgar Wideman... you know Wideman I am sure--- or as Edward Dahlberg would have said you having heard of him and that is sufficient.
This new "novel" is not due out until next February.
I am sure it will, as they say, be talked about.
A novel celebrating a mostly forgotten guy whose message boiled down to: the most productive thing a black man could do in this life is to kill a white man.
Professor Wideman I am sure is an authority on murder. His brother is a convicted murderer and Mr Wideman's son is a convicted murderer.
Mr Wideman teaches writing--- what else--- at Brown University--- where else?--- the dumbest of the Ivy League schools and his students are probably the dumbest of the lot.
Mr Wideman's first few novels were actually interesting: A Glance Away, Hurry Home, Damballah.. but then he became a voice of something or other...
Also at the Strand the bound galleys of Joyce Carol Oates' The Journals.. when I glanced through the pages.. I have no one to talk to.. sunburn on legs....
Gore Vidal will be remembered for only one line: what are the three saddest words in the English lanaguge: Joyce Carol Oates...
Where to Begin?
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resusitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start---
No hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date...............
Of course I begin with Ezra Pound... having missed seeing him in early 1965 when he came over to Dublin after the memorial service for T.S.Eliot in London... how long ago all that seems: the going to the Hibernia Hotel and the asking for Mr Pound... is it even possible to imagine ever again such a moment of a seeking out in such a way...
Of course there was another time of going to the cemetery in Meudon looking for the grave of Louis Ferdinand Celine...
Of course there was visiting Julian Green in Paris in his 90th year...
Of course there was being told by Jorges Luis Borges that he himself preferred James Joyce's poetry: those other books are just so much gossip...
And then there was Francis Stuart and Ernst Junger...
But what about Anthony Burgess and Hannah Green and John Jordan and Denis Donoghue and Juan Carlos Onetti and James Liddy and Jack Spicer and T.S.Eliot and David Jones and Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard and Jean Genet and Curzio Malaparte and
you gotta start someplace or no place and that is probably where I am at the moment: finally to quote :
The enemy--- he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
---from Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers (from the library of Father Flye, James Agee's friend)
He strove to resusitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start---
No hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date...............
Of course I begin with Ezra Pound... having missed seeing him in early 1965 when he came over to Dublin after the memorial service for T.S.Eliot in London... how long ago all that seems: the going to the Hibernia Hotel and the asking for Mr Pound... is it even possible to imagine ever again such a moment of a seeking out in such a way...
Of course there was another time of going to the cemetery in Meudon looking for the grave of Louis Ferdinand Celine...
Of course there was visiting Julian Green in Paris in his 90th year...
Of course there was being told by Jorges Luis Borges that he himself preferred James Joyce's poetry: those other books are just so much gossip...
And then there was Francis Stuart and Ernst Junger...
But what about Anthony Burgess and Hannah Green and John Jordan and Denis Donoghue and Juan Carlos Onetti and James Liddy and Jack Spicer and T.S.Eliot and David Jones and Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard and Jean Genet and Curzio Malaparte and
you gotta start someplace or no place and that is probably where I am at the moment: finally to quote :
The enemy--- he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
---from Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers (from the library of Father Flye, James Agee's friend)
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