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bookshelves: currently-reading
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Some thoughts on one of the poems from this book on my blog - http://swimswam.wordpress.com
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Tim
read and liked
Ryan's
review of Falling Man: A Novel:
"Stylistically this is what I would expect from Delillo, clinical prose used to scrutinize the ((post) modern) human condition. At times, such as during the writing class or when the children searching for 'Bill Lawton' it works. I didn't find it co...more "
"Stylistically this is what I would expect from Delillo, clinical prose used to scrutinize the ((post) modern) human condition. At times, such as during the writing class or when the children searching for 'Bill Lawton' it works. I didn't find it co...more "
by Don DeLillo
I quite liked this novel. An interesting comment about being 'in a Delillo relationship'. The Body Artist is still my favourite Delillo novel, and one of my favourite novels. I think there is a lot of tenderness between the characters in it, but it is fraught or arrested somehow. ]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
'Of course it did. That is exactly what occurred to me: yes, I am seeing you for the last time; this, in fact is what I always think, about everything, about everyone. My life is a perpetual good-bye to objects and people, that often do not pay the least attention to my bitter, brief, insane salutation.'
'In Memory of L.I. Shigaev'. p. 374
The kind of book you can pick random paragraphs from, and often they are as good as this. ]]>
This has expanded my idea of Ashbery's oeuvre and given me a sense of how his poetry has changed from book to book, starting with a long chapter about 'Some Trees' and going through to the later (what DuBois calls) 'dotages'. I feel it's more a guide and an appraisal of Ashbery's work in terms of attention (inattention, fractured attention) than a critical thesis pushing it's own line, and in this it's careful and nuanced, leading you through the work and criticism of it (which DuBois obviously knows backwards). There's no hagiography, DuBois does use words like nonsense and senile quite a few times in relation to Ashbery's poems, but it's never pejorative, and actually seems to allow him to reach a place from where he can talk about Ashbery's work in more interesting ways than a more, er, doting, critic might be able to. The last chapter on Ashbery's 'dotages' - his last five or six books - seemed to be suggesting that in some of this work Ashbery is performing a kind of senility -- though that's an incredibly cursory reading of a long chapter - you'll have to read it to get the idea. I scrawled down lots of quotes and ideas in my notebook as I was reading this. ]]>
I wrote a review, of sorts, of this book on my blog, here: http://swimswam.wordpress.com/2008/09/29... ]]>