This is for just one semester. Makes your college reading list look downright kindergarten-esque, doesn’t it?
And yes, that’s THE Auden, we’re talking about, not just ‘some dude with a similar name’ Auden.
David Brooks Is The Thomas Kinkade Of Columnists
I just read his latest column. I couldn’t make myself finish it. Somehow he segued from how the haters be criticizing his work (‘David, your facts are all wrong, ‘David, that’s a totally ridiculous analogy,’ ‘David, you’re an arrogant, stupid ass’) to something about people being beheaded. I couldn’t even read far enough to see how he made this leap. But I feel certain it is stupid.
What Is Best In Life?
‘Drama & Verse: Simon Armitage & Peter Oswald’
The other night, the Folger’s poetry reading was titled, Drama & Verse: Simon Armitage and Peter Oswald.
It was a wonderful night, except that both men took oddly exceptional steps to distance themselves from poetry and towards drama.
Oswald performed a reading of an verse adaptation/translation of an Italian folktale. It was a wonderful experience, done in a mixture of modern and timeless (not timeless, in a cheesy, ‘this is eternal’ sense, but rather in lacking in major, time-sensitive stylistic signifiers beyond ‘modern, post-Austen English) language and also in iambic pentameter.
The iambic part was cool, because earlier that evening, I had been talking about iambic pentameter with my mother and how much of Moby Dick is written in – or in something close – to iambic pentameter. Another reminder that that meter doesn’t have to stick out like an attention-seeking anachronism.
Oswald also did the adaption of Mary Stuart that I’m seeing on February 11. I bought a copy and had him sign it to my mother. She’s been wanting read about figures from Elizabeth I’s time who aren’t actually Elizabeth I. However, I can’t give it to her until I read it and while I started reading it, I decided that I don’t want to finish it until I see the play. But I like it so far.
I’d read Armitage’s translation of Gawain & the Green Knight earlier and enjoyed it thoroughly. So I splurged and bought his translation of The Death of Arthur. Not to be confused with the Malory one. Apparently, this one is known at the AMA or Alliterative Morte d’Arthur. You learn something new every day.
I just wish either man had been more willing to step forward from their roles as translators and (verse) dramaturgists and say, ‘I am a poet and this is poetry.’ I would have been quite happy with that.
The moderator was somebody named Smith from the British Embassy, serving in some cultural capacity. He had a that longish, semi-leonine mane of white hair that only the English and French seem to ever adopt. He looked rather like someone who could have played Doctor Who (a bit of the Third Doctor, Pertwee, in his look; and Armitage looked a bit like a more dour Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton).
‘Last Of The Mohicans’ By James Fenimore Cooper Was Published On This Day In 1826
To this day, his novels are still read by tens of people every decade. Just kidding. No one reads his novels anymore because they are so bad. Really, just terrible.
If You’re Under Thirty Or Forty Or Whatever, This Is Not James Franco
‘The Dangerous Logic Of Wooing’ By Ernesto Neto
This isn’t a book, it’s large-ish art installation at the Hirshhorn Museum that particularly struck me a week or two ago.
Without knowing the title or reading the blurb, you could see that this was… not sexual, but reproductive. Organic. The words and images that come to mind make it sound horribly unappealing and almost grotesque – pendulous testicles and breasts. But the work is not. It’s more primal, like an ancient fertility goddess with unnaturally wide hips and large, sagging breasts which is not intended to be a modern depiction of beauty, but rather of a certain kind of immortality of the human race, the ability to continue the species.
Forgive my terrible photography.
‘The Red Lily’ By Anatole France
It’s been a while since I was hardcore about it, but I used to have a thing for nineteenth century French novels. There was a time in my teens when I was gobbling up doorstops by Dumas, Hugo, Stendahl, and Flaubert. I fell of the wagon a bit, but maybe reading Balzac around Christmas got me back on it.
I found this book at the Strand in NYC. He’s a little later than those other writers and at 250 odd pages, I wouldn’t categorize it as a doorstop. But we’re looking for trends, people, so let’s not pry too deeply.
The story is simple – Thérèse, the Countess Martin gets angry at one lover (Robert) and meets another man (Jacques), a sculptor, while visiting a friend in Italy, and takes him as a lover. She tries to hide the fact that she had this other fellow as a lover until very recently, but the new love can’t handle the jealousy eating at him and ends it and she’s now very lonely.
Though done in the third person, it is third person limited from Thérèse’s point of view.
There is an odd invulnerability about her. Her husband is a fast rising politician (he is appointed Minister of Finance towards the book’s end) and she doesn’t dislike him, but it was a match made for practical reasons. So, for her ego/sense of self worth, as well as for physical pleasure, she takes lovers. Never does she seem very worried about being caught, even as her husband becomes more and more prominent in French politics. Yes, there is a line where she becomes marginally more circumspect when he notes that she is coming home late a lot, but not that circumspect. She also cuts short her vacation in Italy (where most of the novel takes place) in order to dodge some of the rumors and suspicions that may or may not be circulating. Thérèse also never asks where her husband goes for sex in the apparent absence of a sex life with his wife. And what if she got pregnant? Is she using some kind of pre-modern prophylactic? Does she have ‘safety sex’ with her husband so that he wouldn’t get suspicious if she suddenly became pregnant, despite presumed marital celibacy?
These are some of the things I think about (prurient mind!) that never cross her mind.
I wouldn’t call this a feminist novel, but France never presumes to judge his protagonist.
At some point, France suddenly became confident in his writing’s sensualism, its eroticisms. Countess Martin, with her new lover, having just told her former lover that she had met another:
She was flushed with pride in the comeliness of the body she offering upon the altar of love. For she had discarded her clothes save for one thin rose-hued garment, and this had slipped scarfwise from her shoulder, laying bare one breast, whilst the warmer tinted tip of the other glowed through the rosy gossamery that veiled it.
So I’m a little romantic, a little cheesy. Whatever, I like it. I think that stuff is sexy (at least within the confines of the printed word; if a woman said this to me, I might throw up).
The scenes, particularly in Italy, but also in general, are described in a wonderfully sensual way. Not over the top, but he could have done a darn fine travel book, had he been so inclined (and maybe he was; I don’t know – this is the first book I’ve ever read by him).
the coffee philosopher 