Wo(o)lf- ish reading

tonytobecasual:

Some more to add to my Jigsaw Puzzle - chewing a few pieces to make them fit

***

(Appetizer)

“-Today, she asked me what “Genius” meant? I told her none had known-“ Dickinson

(main coarse)

"Wonderful to relate, poets have found religion in nature; people live in the country to learn virtue from plants. It is in their indifference that they are comforting. That snowfield of the mind, where man has not trodden, is visited by the cloud, kissed by the falling petal, as, in another sphere, it is the great [white, male] artists, the [Melville’s] and the [Spicer’s], who console not by their thought of us by by their forgetfulness.”

“Rashness is one of the properties of illness-outlaws that we are- and it is rashness that we need in reading [Spicer]. It is not that we should dose in reading him, but that, fully conscious and aware, his fame intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the critics dull in us that thunder-clap of conviction which, if an illusion, is still so helpful an illusion…With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, in its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but [Spicer] and oneself. What with his overweening power and our overweening arrogance, the barriers go down, the knots run smooth, the brain rings and resounds….” – both quotes from Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

(Dessert)

Re: previous on reading & unanticipated/uninvited audiences + as reader who writes etc.: what if, rather than (or in addition to?) a future-ly “ideal reader”, one’s reader is already dead? I see this concern squirming around in Spicer’s work, particularly in Textbook - where writer/reader positions freely mix -particularly in dictation - …A readerwriter coagulation that obscures - and is an obfuscation of- a wound.

(Mint)

Which leaves me to chew on Woolf’s kingly + wound & reading particularly as (unproductive [as]) illness ….I am not yet full….