Literary Leavings (1)

Ø  In an elegant French film about female empowerment set on the isle of Corsica, one adult character gives the novel Martin Eden to another; and it’s later referenced in a conversation with a daughter. The protagonist is a person who improves his lot from his working-class background, and so there’s a rough parallel with character development in the film. But I was distracted because I couldn’t retrieve the author’s name from the senior sieve of memory, a minor pesterment throughout the viewing.  (I had two names in my head; at least one proved to be correct--Jack London.)  The film? Queen To Play.  And it’s a gem. Even if you’re not particularly interested in chess, your time is better spent watching this movie than reading anything by Jack London.

 

Ø  I will risk transgressing the proscription to speak no ill of the dead in order to counter the overpraising of two “celebrity writers” who died last year, Ray Bradbury and Gore Vidal.  Both were full of themselves.  They were their own best boosters.  Bradbury’s vaunted imagination fails to compel mature readers; and Vidal was a tendentious prig from the get-go.

Ø  “Tandem reading”—two volumes of two poets at the same time—is especially pleasurable with poetry.  I like to pair poets as different as night and day.  For example, Philip Larkin and Billy Collins. I popped awhile back for the pricey 2012 hardcover of Larkin’s The Complete Poems, and found myself chuckling over the minutia within the scholarly introduction; e.g., the new edition cites the need for its publication because the previous collection (1988) by a different editor “contains 72 errors of wording, 47 of punctuation, 8 of letter case, 5 of word-division, 4 of font, and three of format.” ⁸   I’ll spare you the gloss that the superscript points to lest you be led to stupefaction. Nonetheless, I would regard it as a point well taken that this is the price we pay for a reliable, clean copy text.  What the reader wants, however, is the poem itself, the sound and sense of it, the acerbity of “This Be The Verse,” with its famous opening lines, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to but they do.”  Or contrastingly, you may want to turn to the paradox of elegance with a mordant tone in “Church Going” and “Aubade.”  Moving from Larkin to Collins while you’re working on the same pot of coffee is more than stepping from darkness to light.  It requires the eye to refocus and the ear to tune to a completely different key.  There are those who turn up their nose at Billy Collins.  Such affectation is the stuff from which he crafts a counter-scold.  People who do not understand poetry’s play and fey prescience, Collins would contend, are those who have an unrestrained need to “tie the poem to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means.”  His “Workshop,” is a tour de force that critiques the limits of amateur creative writing by means of the teacher’s comments which are molded into a deft, skillful poem that is an exemplum of showing not telling.  Next on my agenda for tandem reading are Louise Gluck and Kay Ryan.  They seem to be akin to different species of poets.

 

Ø  If you can quickly name contrasting characteristics to distinguish among these pairs and trios . . . ,  

Eudora Welty, Edna Ferber, and Edith Wharton,

J.F. Powers and John R. Powers,

Russell Banks and Richard Russo

Mary Gordon and Caroline Gordon

Harold Brodkey and Joseph Brodsky

Frank O’Hara and John O’Hara

James T. Farrell and J. G. Farrell

Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, and Edwin O’Connor

Thomas Wolfe, Tobias Wolff, and Naomi Wolf

Philip Roth and Henry Roth

. . . you’re an English major or some other form of book nut.

 

Ø  I am now in the stage of life where I can freely decide who and what I do not want to read.  For so many years that is dictated.  But now the question is not “What do I read next?” but “who can I ignore and who can I forget without regret.”  That’s not just a reading question; it’s a people picker as well.