A Momentary Taste of Being

Foster and Ellis together again not for the last time I truly wish I could get through Foster's longer works.  I've managed two short stories--but I am so put off by post-modern games in literature that I find it impossible to read.  On the other hand Ellis created a sort of sick tour de force in Less than Zero and has not since equaled that early work. Of the two, I would like to like Foster and find Ellis unreadable, but for me, it is exactly the reverse.  And because Ellis is readable but had nothing of interest to say--I find that I cannot read either. By the way, the blogpost referenced above is an elegant consideration of the two writers well worth your attention if you are interested in either of them.

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry But after thinking of both of them for many years, I believe that the person to whom Williams can be most suggestively compared is his younger contemporary, William Faulkner. They are nothing alike in their ways of writing or in their subjects. They dealt with two distinct varieties of American disorder: Williams with the accumulating mass of detail in the rapidly industrializing New Jersey suburbs of New York City, Faulkner with (among other things) racial division both within individuals and among people who lived more or less together and sometimes were kin to one another.  Both dealt, in different ways, with the reduction of the country's original abundance to a sum of exploitable and deteriorating "resources" for industry. They seem to have been, if not similarly, then equally burdened by their subjects--not, as with many writers, subjects sought out or acquired, but subjects that they inherite...

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry The now-prevailing idea seems to be that poets occupy their designated place in the departmented structure of the arts and sciences, of which the increasingly industrialized modern university is the model. Poets, that is to say, are professional like other professionals and specialists like other specialists. Their business is to produce, ideally, perfect poems of lasting value individually, as objects of art or "high culture." This assumption seems to underlie the judgment of such dismissive critics as Donald Davie and Bruce Bawer. Precedent to them was Yvor Winters, who, admirable as he was in some ways, ranked individual poems as the greatest ever, greatest in English, etc. as if the art of poetry were a sort of contest. Increasingly, moreover, poets are attached to universities and are dependent upon them for a living. I have been at times so attached and so dependent myself, and thus I know somethi...

Good news in the form of a book: The Poetry of William Carlos Willims of Rutherford by Wendell Berry. For those who respect Berry's voice, thought, and approach, this is an unabashed tribute and appreciation the goal of which is succinctly stated in the prologue: from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry To the extent that a life can have an agenda, my life's agenda for a long time has included some sort of deliberative writing about the poetry of William Carlos Williams, not as an "objective academic endeavor, for which I had no need, but rather as a payment or at least an acknowledgement of a personal debt. I would need to do this late in my life, I thought, the better to understand both Williams' effort and my own, and therefore the character and size of my debt to him. Through most of my life as a writer, I have taken an increasingly familiar pleasure and an invaluable sustenance and reassurance from his poetry And there was a ...

I had read of Neil Gaiman's tribute to Diana Wynn Jones yesterday but had been unable to find it. Today, thanks to Happy Catholic, I'm pleased to make it available to all.

Beckett recalling Joyce through an interview And here, for my future edification and delight is the source of an anecdote that I had never truly trusted: He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegan's Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase 'Come in' in it, he said, 'Let it stand.'

Mailer v. Vidal For those who thought incivility in public was a relatively new phenomenon.  

Banville reads Kafka's The Trial

Joyce Carol Oates on Emily Dickinson Raymond Chandler chats with Ian Fleming

Hemingway writing Archibald MacLeish on Ezra Pound

Hempel on Lish and Hannah

What Philip K. Dick Learned about women from Ursula K. Leguin

Authors read Authors Pamuk reads Nabakov,  Theroux reads Borges, Oates reads Welty,  Pullman reads Chekhov, Boyd reads Ballard

Cynthia Ozick examines Anthony Trollope

Virginia Woolf, normally a very fine commentator showed herself wrong, egregiously wrong, in at least two instances: James Joyce, and now, I'm brought to remember, Henry James.   An author's criticism is too often based on their own writing preferences, and so they will see nothing in other authors from whom they have borrowed too much or read too little.  Woolf may not like James, but as with Joyce, much of what she writes is tremendously influenced by him.

Bellow's Letters reviewed by John Banville

An interesting quotation from T. S. Eliot about Baudelaire considering Baudelaire's life and all.

Two posts worth your attention--from a writer's point of view: "Don't Just Tell Stories--Ask for Them" Unleash All of Your Aspects In partial response to this latter, I would recommend as well spending some time to discover those aspects.  Who are you where?  In other words, does the environment change who you are and if so how and why?  But more importantly, what lies do you tell yourself to sustain a false image.  Look beneath that and discover aspects you've never wanted to look at--all the while remember that there is One who loves you regardless of what all of those aspects look like together.  Accept who you are and get on with living--everyone of us spends too much time in the closet.

"Blessedly unburdened by my education"  to quote the blogmaster

A James Wright reading in which Allen Ginsburg is considered