tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.comments2023-06-21T18:53:11.897+10:00PykkUmbagollahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comBlogger1571125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-47487725999509920482019-02-01T03:10:31.404+11:002019-02-01T03:10:31.404+11:00A complete Davis Proust would have been terrific t...A complete Davis Proust would have been terrific to read next to Moncrieff. You could put them next to one another and tell everybody to be amazed by the ventriloquism. Two voices, one mouth: watch that spectacle.<br /><br />I look forward to being recycled. Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-65150532725534119262019-01-26T03:58:39.370+11:002019-01-26T03:58:39.370+11:00It's a real pity she only translated one volum...It's a real pity she only translated one volume.<br /><br />"knocked years off his age" is good; I will probably steal that when I write my novel about a translator in a couple of years. I apologize in advance because I will believe, when I use that line, that it is my own invention (in this context of translation).scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-50678932610419727882019-01-26T01:54:11.833+11:002019-01-26T01:54:11.833+11:00"Coolest" as in "calm, has a low te..."Coolest" as in "calm, has a low temperature," not as in "fashionable."Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-82353579185754093492019-01-26T01:53:18.715+11:002019-01-26T01:53:18.715+11:00And yet her Proust is the coolest Proust of all th...And yet her Proust is the coolest Proust of all the English Prousts. He's the first one who sounds like a modernist. Davis knocked years off his age. Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-74451524565564234572019-01-15T08:09:21.772+11:002019-01-15T08:09:21.772+11:00This made me think of Lydia Davis translating Prou...This made me think of Lydia Davis translating Proust. Davis writes those countless aphoristic pieces, most of which trade heavily with clever wordplay. I think she must've been sorely tempted during the Proust project to be clever, to try her hand at turning phrases if she thought she could enliven passages that seemed too flat. "Why not?" she'd ask herself, giving her cat a scratch behind the ear. "Who's to say Proust wouldn't approve of the improvement?"<br /><br />I have done very little translation, but enough to claim that one feels a triumph at finding the English mot juste, sometimes even if it's at odds with the spirit of the original work. <i>Look what I've done. That's fine, yes.</i>scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-86726360235824999512018-12-26T09:39:50.105+11:002018-12-26T09:39:50.105+11:00He's practically daring his correspondent not ...He's practically daring his correspondent not to come back with, "But Samuel, you write like magic angel trumpets. No imagination? How can you say such a thing ..."Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-89869127228249284622018-12-25T04:18:58.283+11:002018-12-25T04:18:58.283+11:00The Coleridge is amusing. O Earth, ye have lost yo...The Coleridge is amusing. O Earth, ye have lost your poet etc. He writes it down in his most elevated prose to see how it feels, to test out the idea, to be reassured that he is wrong.<br /><br />Cixous is more direct but somehow seems less egotistical. I'm not sure why that is though I really admire it.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-67947055324370899552018-10-24T03:12:08.393+11:002018-10-24T03:12:08.393+11:00It's an overwhelming argument against intellec...It's an overwhelming argument against intellectual property rights. Lice will sue for the ownership of "Starry Night." Banksy will be revealed to be everyone and everything. Reactions to that will be mixed. "Starry Night" will countersue the lice.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-16097578659111454502018-10-23T16:13:47.096+11:002018-10-23T16:13:47.096+11:00I think if importance depends on context then the ...I think if importance depends on context then the poem is more important than the violence to <i>us</i>. <br /><br />If the claims over a poem don't end with the poet then you can go on almost infinitely, crediting the the person who gave Norwid his breakfast that morning and put him in the right mood to compose the poem, or, alternatively, the people who support the social structure that ensured he wouldn't have any breakfast, or, if he was feeling especially alive because he had a bad case of nits then what about the person who gave him the nits, do they get some credit; and do we credit the nits? Do you credit the nits as a group or does each nit get thanked separately? I like the idea that it never has to end. Pykkhttps://pykk.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-71647958029418002482018-10-19T03:25:50.472+11:002018-10-19T03:25:50.472+11:00This is an interesting question, no? A soldier des...This is an interesting question, no? A soldier destroys a work of art, and later a poet turns that act into another work of art. Does the poet owe anything to the soldier? Does the solider (or the Tsar, as you say) have any claim over the art? It's easy to say no, of course not, but is the poet and his poem then more important somehow than the original violence? I'm not quite sure what I mean by this, but the idea that the past has a claim on the present/future interests me. I'm working on a story about a poet who has begun to question the worth of poetry, and these ideas seem to work with that somehow.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-40086206526750946312018-08-21T02:48:02.716+10:002018-08-21T02:48:02.716+10:00"The plot is strong and the protagonist appea..."The plot is strong and the protagonist appealing, but there's not enough Phlegm at the end and the second chapter is way too short on μέλαινα χολή." I think this works. Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-6299764096262452162018-08-18T02:03:01.887+10:002018-08-18T02:03:01.887+10:00Strong and articulate! I am inspired to now locate...Strong and articulate! I am inspired to now locate all of my literary opinions within the realm of the four humors. I will be fierce and fearless and probably betake myself to twitter.<br /><br />I had also begun to write the following: "On the other hand, I sort of take Minto's point. Most people who write about anything don't really say anything, and a strongly held opinion is at least something to " and at that point I realized that no, wanting someone's opposing strong opinion to cast my own opinion at is merely pride, and not really worthwhile, and maybe Minto should just shut up about other people and realize that "new ways to be" is a fantasy, or a form of vanity tourism. I am becoming a Beckett character.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-91384472354169239142018-03-24T02:40:37.305+11:002018-03-24T02:40:37.305+11:00I read the last chapter or two on Project Gutenber...I read the last chapter or two on Project Gutenberg and was pleased by her grim fidelity to the idea that everybody is homesick and no one will ever be saved. "'Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I pretty near run away,’ he confessed with a little laugh." Ruthless.Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-76001023714814041872018-03-15T08:10:54.224+11:002018-03-15T08:10:54.224+11:00"Oh well," Cather says, surveying the ba..."Oh well," Cather says, surveying the battlefield. "That's life."<br /><br />This is a great post. And I do think something could be made with Kipling's "Burden" and the idea of stockyards.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-39058757947449752432018-03-09T02:51:56.677+11:002018-03-09T02:51:56.677+11:00I spent some time trying to work Kipling and the W...I spent some time trying to work Kipling and the White Man's Burden in there as well but that made everything a bit madly convoluted.Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-43152616985660575722018-03-08T19:16:56.955+11:002018-03-08T19:16:56.955+11:00I especially love the line about World War II.I especially love the line about World War II.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-54623369656806761582018-02-22T04:45:15.517+11:002018-02-22T04:45:15.517+11:00Cather takes predation and death for granted. Ther...Cather takes predation and death for granted. There's none of the internal conflict in her work like there is in the examples you quote above. The predator suffers, not the prey; the poor prey is fated to be relief for the predator, and there is only so far our sympathies should carry us. Cather, I think, believed in only one version of rightness.<br /><br />I was thinking this morning about Crevel's comment regarding Proust's hiding of Albert behind Albertine, and that someday someone will revise <i>Lost Time</i> and turn Albertine and the others into young men, to give us a "more honest" Marcel. I really believe that's going to happen, with narrator Marcel's sexuality replaced by someone's idea of author Marcel's sexuality, someone's idea of Proust's "truth" being more important that Proust's actual art.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-26537593754259898792018-02-22T03:29:46.567+11:002018-02-22T03:29:46.567+11:00Thank you. (I begin to think about the difference ...Thank you. (I begin to think about the difference or distance between Cather's "sigh" and the alarm, repulsion, disgust or satire of the other three.)Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-58445349738731211522018-02-16T08:57:02.745+11:002018-02-16T08:57:02.745+11:00While I was putting my horse away, I heard a roost...<i>While I was putting my horse away, I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him at six.</i> --Willa Cather, <i>My Antonia</i>scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-43862090184227799222017-12-22T05:50:54.025+11:002017-12-22T05:50:54.025+11:00I read Hadrian the Seventh so long ago that I no l...I read Hadrian the Seventh so long ago that I no longer remember details like that; I'll have to look at it again. I've been running across a lot of references to that book lately.<br /><br />I do understand the Cockney Romans thing, though. I've read examples of that sort of thing in mid-20th century American literature. The dialects were stereotypes of American Negro or Appalachian, so if you had a wealthy, powerful man say, "Well, he might could show up any day," you were sending a signal to the reader who shared your own social status. Etc. I'm not sure that's the same thing as pushing a reader into a state of disbelief. There's also the larger question of verisimilitude and fairy tales/myths, especially now that we live in a time where everything is simultaneously true and false, yes? We are all the Red Queen, believing impossible things. I've been thinking about verisimilitude a lot lately, for some reason, how we pretend a character in a book is more human than a pencil in a book, when neither of them is at all human, or real.<br /><br />I was raised in the American South and when my family moved to Colorado when I was a teenager, I too lost my accent as quickly as I could because I was assumed to be a halfwit.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-90979808512388570952017-12-21T17:48:29.493+11:002017-12-21T17:48:29.493+11:00I think this disbelief exists in her desire for it...I think this disbelief exists in her desire for it to exist more than it actually exists, especially when (as you suggest) the writer is describing something that might as well be a fairy tale. (Though could she argue back at me and say that this idea in the reader, "Oh all right, I'm reading a fairy tale now," is the effect of disbelief that she's looking for? She's dislodged you a little from the place where you were --).<br /><br />Her colleague Hejinian is a lot more concrete.<br /><br />When it comes to the Cockney Romans, I'm thinking back on some of the really anti-Cockney or anti-lower-class-accent books that were being written during Jones' lifetime (Baron Corvo's Hadrian the Seventh sticks out in my mind because it's so cruelly dismissive), or just the casual assumption by so many writers that giving your character one of those accents was enough to tell the reader (without any other information) that they were lesser, dimmer, nastier - and I honestly do believe it would have been a difficult moment for some people, who would have been very used to that casual identification of Cockneys with everything stupid, degenerate, urban, disruptive, and modern. I think that shock moment of forcing the reader to see that the distance between those two things (Cockney accents and near-mythical historical personages) is a construct of their own programmed assumptions, is part of Jones' strategy.<br /><br />(I think of Corvo sometimes here when I meet someone from the American South who tells me that they've suppressed their accent because other people kept reacting as if they were stupid as soon as they opened their mouths.)Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-28388075155907106232017-12-15T12:08:26.363+11:002017-12-15T12:08:26.363+11:00I keep thinking about this post, and the idea of d...I keep thinking about this post, and the idea of disbelief, of a writer deliberately trying to instill disbelief in a reader. I'm not sure it works like that, that a reader of Scalapino would necessarily feel any sort of nudge in any direction upon encountering the man-as-seal, or Jones' Cockney Romans. We're all brought up, are we not in this Western world, on fairy tales and science fiction films and myths of one sort or another anyway, that verisimilitude is just another flavor of entertainments, yes? I don't know. I don't see it as a powerful force, I guess is what I'm saying. In one of my many unpublished books, characters slip into Shakespearean dialogues, reality is permeable, dead men walk into dreams and then into 7-11s. All if it seems plausible and normal within a fiction, or a poem.<br /><br />I've been reading a lot of critical theory about detective stories, as it happens, about the breakdown of certain knowledge and the restoration (or not) of that certainty. I'm sure some readers expect to encounter the socially-constructed "reality" in poems and novels, but surely not anyone who's reading much modern poetry?scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-85329298162871977912017-11-05T02:38:28.210+11:002017-11-05T02:38:28.210+11:00Three books; people argue they should be called th...Three books; people argue they should be called the Titus books instead of the Gormenghast books because Titus is in all of them and Gormenghast is only remembered (not 'physically' there) in the last one but I dislike Titus (he's the one running around sulking: "I won't be abject! I'll leave!"). I must prefer people in despair to people complaining about their despair. (There's comedy in them but I'm not sure if it's ironic. He has a way of giving you things that, in other settings, would be played for humour - funny-sounding names, like Prunesquallor, or nonsense poetry about cake - but in this world they are not funny; they are just people's names, and people's poetry). Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-42585091244891379082017-10-27T10:29:11.001+11:002017-10-27T10:29:11.001+11:00That is funny. From now on, I'll say "att...That is funny. From now on, I'll say "attempting to please the owls" instead of "ritual." Maybe there's some other comic irony specific to <i>Gormenghast</i>, but I haven't read that book (those books?).scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-59134457472544722272017-10-02T11:19:30.087+11:002017-10-02T11:19:30.087+11:00Meghan O'Rourke at Slate said that his poems &...Meghan O'Rourke at Slate said that his poems "are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long" and though that makes him sound more solid than I think he does (it replaces the trembling, the iffyness with the idea of a full, comfortable, sensible bedrock of sentences existing just before and after the parts that you happen to hear) I think it gets at that notion of voices somehow unable (not unwilling but unknowing) to hear one another.Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.com