You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.-- the opening.
Some authors imprint better than others on damaged neurons. Henry James, whose list serv I miss but remain off of because I would prefer to contribute intelligibly and lack confidence to tango with a group of catty overburdened teachers whom I annoy, at the end of the day, relieved to be gone as well. The dwarf female who precipitated my departure did not intend these consequences, but my pique remains. Should I email Dr. Hathaway? Perhaps. He was a favorite, even with his cataracts. One of my first scholars.
David Foster Wallace. I am still evaluating how much genius Wallace had, in contrast to pretension, but his narrative voice is stitched into my self-hating faculties.
These are two examples. Those that slip away might surprise you: Dickens, Lawrence. Shelley is among them, not due to her flaws so much as she writes in such a fashion as to anticipate screen plays, and I can barely remember her epistolary novel. Her sympathy is far, far ahead of its time, especially when her voice is compared to Maupassant, Henry's contemporary, whose lucidity fails when tackling blind family members left to starve. Mary's blind man is the creature's educator, ironically, its humanist who doesn't judge.
Jerry once conveyed to class that he hated the Enlightenment and refused to teach it, in a charming moment of Celtic petulance; following in that vein, I disdain the Romantic Movement as much overwrought-- not to say Keats doesn't melt the heart -- but this was a very imprecise literary generation, who made drug dependency seem exotic, and left us with the eternal argument over what Romanticism means, god-fucking-dam-it-to-hell-sounding off as a joke, don't be alarmed,
but this morning they're banned! The Renaissance makes sense. Even the Medieval period makes sense. The Victorians are guilty of collapsing into Modernism but even they make a perfectly sound argument for knowing one's place. The Romantics wanted to dance and space out in poppy fields. Fuck that.
No comments:
Post a Comment