Literary Imagination

This interactive link to authors' doodles and inscriptions on their privately owned first editions (soon to be auctioned off by Sotheby's) inspires a child's sense of pure delight!

A beautiful account of the meeting of geniuses.

This cogent debate focuses on the question of viability of categories, in this case, of "national literature."  The panelists argue that the category is tenuous and porous, non-inclusive of important strains of voice that characterize people living together within a jurisdiction.  Reading the synopsis,  I wonder if concepts of spatiality would help to define some regularity in voices across space and place?  Here is what writer Hannah Lowe leave us with for mental fodder:

"The view of readers matters as much as the view of writers, and it might have been good to have heard more from that perspective – to have had a reader or critic on the panel. The idea of a national literature was by and large dismissed from the perspective of the panel and our own agency emphasised when we defended our freedom not to assert national literature. I believe that the inclusive approach that I would demand from a national literature, at least in England (a place I feel I can speak about) would push the defining brackets so far wide it would be pointless to have them. And here I return to a question raised in the debate – why do the various forces (state sponsored, educational, market-driven or individual) continue to want to investigate the question of a national literature?"

I have great memories of attending this festival last year, and in particular, spending a day with writer Olivia Laing under the white tent, followed by a long trek through the Sussex Downs in which we channelled Virginia.

THE GARDEN AT CHARLESTON

Now when I walk around at lunchtime

Leaving the Arabian Tent and sweet hours with Olivia

I have Frank O’Hara at my side

His low slung trousers harnessing wind from my syllables,

And forcing me headlong into a maelstrom

Of cow parsley and thyme, yellow flags and lavender,

And tentacles of green ivy lacing their way

Through the umber muck of an ancient pond. 

It’s twelve o’clock and they’ve assembled—

My stalwart muses all these blessed years.

Here’s Duncan with a red tea towel over his head

And Lytton’s sinewy hands fingering red beard

And Virginia—her Room of One’s Own

Shouldering its way through water lilies the size of dinner plates.

I see pots of geraniums standing like sentinels in clay

And I think of Angelica—Deceived by Kindness—

And, Oh God… I wish she were here.

…She may be, of course. 

Isn’t that her…standing in the right hand corner (you can see her smiling)

Of Annie Liebowitz’s mercurial portrait sequence

Of the Garden at Charleston?

This is an impressive short essay from a student who undertakes to understand the nexes of connection between Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud, vis-a-vis the uses of art as a successful measure of defense against the vicissitudes of existence.

My favourite is the sentence devoted to the amazing Willa Cather.

After nearly a hundred years, D. H. Lawrence's collection of WW1 poems entitled "All of Us" is to be published in its uncensored, original state by Cambridge University Press.  The 2-volume edition of critical verse contains 860 of the writer's poems, many of which have been previously read only in their censored versions.

Harold Bloom is not my favourite cultural critic, casting his weight a little too heavily, in my opinion, with the great patriarchal icons of the European/Western tradition, and ignoring grass-roots, indigenous, marginal, female, and non-white manifestations of literary genius.  Even so, this article interests me beause of what a team of Italian visual artists have done with his thinking on the anatomy of genius.  I am looking forward to following some of their links.  Tantalizing!  Read on:

"In their latest project, Italian visualization wizard Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visual history of the Nobel Prize, and a visualization of global brain drain inspired by Mondrian — explore the anatomy of genius, based on Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (public library) by literary titan Harold Bloom.

Playing off Bloom’s use of the Sefirot image — the ten emanations of the Kabbalah — to organize the taxonomy of the one hundred geniuses of language he identifies, from Shakespeare to Stendhal to Lewis Carroll to Ralph Ellison, the visualization depicts the geographic origin, time period, and field of each “genius,” correlated with visits to the respective Wikipedia page and connection to related historical figures."

As far as an introduction goes, this is as good as it gets.  I love Edna O'Brien.  And even more after reading this review of her latest work.

"On “a Saturday night in the late 1940s,” accompanied by her sister Eileen and two girlfriends, she made her way to Dublin, which she found “enthralling.” She got work at a pharmacy, but the urge to write had bitten her in Drewsboro — “I would go out to the fields to write. The words ran away with me. I would write imaginary stories, stories set in our bog and our kitchen garden, but it was not enough, because I wanted to get inside them” — and in Dublin the rich Irish literary tradition began to make itself known to her. She frequented the city’s bookstores and outdoor stalls: “Dublin was a more trusting town in 1950, and secondhand books would be left on trestle tables outside the shop, with canvas awning to keep off the downpours.” She found “a slim volume called ‘Introducing James Joyce,’ by T.S. Eliot,” from which “a sentence shot up at me: ‘All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.’ ” Suddenly her life changed."

There is something intriguing to me about a gifted and successful author keeping meticulous daily records (written in cursive pen in a large ledger) of his financial life and expenditures.  I wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald was a generous man.  Where's Zelda when we need her?

"In the ledger, Fitzgerald lists in carefully laid out columns his various pieces of writing, the location they were printed, and the income they produced. Fitzgerald's comments are sprinkled throughout. One describes the year 1919 — when his first novel was accepted for publication and Zelda Sayre agreed to marry him, as — "The most important year of life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success."

By the time Fitzgerald started the ledger, Sudduth said, "he probably knew what he was doing. He left a space for his remarks, and then the final disposition."

With a laugh, she noted: "We know he didn't spell very well. And his arithmetic wasn't much better,"

But the overall document, she said, "shows that he was far more on top of his affairs than people thought," given a reputation in later life as a heavy drinker.

"He was keeping a record of his work for the future," Suddeth said. "He kept it, he updated it."

How I would love an evening of Samuel Beckett, who "is widely considered one of the most gifted and influential writers of the 20th century. His prolific body of work – including drama, prose, poetry, and more – spans the 1930s through the 1980s, and includes Waiting For Godot, Endgame, Happy Days and Krapp’s Last Tape. Defying simple categorization, Beckett has been referred to as one of the last Modernists, one of the first Postmodernists, and one of the most important Absurdists. In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Literary imaginations take all forms, but this is the first time I have heard of the Miniature Book Society, with its thousands of members whose passions coincide around tiny books.  For example,

"Mr. Albert was born in 1937, grew up in Cambria Heights, Queens, and started collecting early. “I used to get miniature African violets,” he recalls. “Dozens of them. Fast forward a couple years and they’re all over the house. I’m in a club.”

He studied law at Yale and went on to become a prominent mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. But he was always collecting little things. In the cottage’s glass display: a fully operational golf-pencil-size fly fishing rod, complete with string, reel and case; and a walnut-size tool chest filled with functional tools. Mr. Albert’s previous obsessions included English brass tobacco boxes and walking sticks.

His book collection began in the early 1990s as an offshoot of his interest in meticulously detailed dollhouses. He had commissioned a model of Cliveden House in England, where he and his wife had spent a weekend. It required a library...."