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What Are We Reading? 5 July 2021
message 51:
by
Bill
(new)
Jul 08, 2021 08:31AM
I enjoyed hearing Marlon James and Jake Morrissey talking trash. It probably helped having a passing familiarity (and often more) with most of the books they mentioned. I will definitely check out more of their podcasts.
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Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "If I remember correctly you have an equally low opinion of poetry or does that rank even lower…….."Regarding poetry, I’m OK with narrative poems and humorous verse, but when it c..."
In truth Bill, I think most people are the same, some poetry speaks to you, much doesn’t. Some modern poetry leaves me rather bewildered for I usually ask myself ‘what is the poet trying to say’ and if I do not know then that ones not for me.
I like the adventure of writing poetry, finding the right word or phrase to fit for it gives much satisfaction, often even more than writing a piece of prose; it’s a very personal thing.
Good news from the optician yesterday. had been told I had amd but he told me it was drusen which is not the same thing and, in my case no need to worry. Helpfully showed me photos to explain. Also he didn't think the catarats would need surgery for at least 5 years. So I came away much relieved and happy.
The Hemmingway documentary by Ken Burns has come to the BBC, i hope to watch the first episode over the weekend, tonight its Das Boot Series 2(need to catch up after all the football evenings)I'm proud that the BBC can get such great cultural studies from the USA and give them a prominent place in the schedule on BBC4
Sadly BBC4, which has always been a gem, is under threat due to the remorseless tory pressure on anything which hasnt been privatised. With the BBC, they just keep fiddling with the funds raised from the licence fee, causing a well funded national broadcaster, to constantly have to cut shows and breadth to stay within budget.
John Whittingdale, a portly Thatcherite joke, has been on the BBC case since 1990 and remains a shocking example of the tory monomania towards the BBC. (On the Guardian, almost 99% of my BBC related posts were removed....odd)
Mod
That's good to hear!
giveusaclue wrote: "Good news from the optician yesterday. had been told I had amd but he told me it was drusen which is not the same thing and, in my case no need to worry. Helpfully showed me photos to explain. Also..."good news!
MK wrote: "Somehow I don't see Harry Bosch being happy as part of a universe, given that I see him as - socially shy!"I’ve been thinking about series books and the various “universes” that readers and viewers get involved in. It seems to me a type of writing designed to create and nurture “fans” of a specific writer; my problem is that I seldom, if ever, think of myself as a “fan” of something, a term which seems to involve a certain level of uncritical devotion. I guess I come close to being a Sherlock Holmes fan, though I probably don’t really qualify: I only like the original stories and have no interest in adaptations, the secondary literature, or nonsense like the Baker Street Irregulars; I despise things like the “Annotated” Sherlock Holmes which treat the stories as if they were factual.
I think the “universe” concept has been used for some time in genre fiction: I think of the canon of fictional “forbidden” texts that Lovecraft used in a number of his stories and that was added to and appropriated by other Weird Tales authors. While reading 11/22/63, I became aware that one section of the novel shared characters and setting with another King novel. I’d never read or seen It (the novel in question), but something about the writing – a kind of sense that King was intentionally treading familiar territory – indicated a cross-reference; perhaps it was the sense that there was a certain level of detail in this particular section that was obviously thoroughly thought out but far from necessary for the story at hand.
I have the sense that the “universe” concept is being used more widely recently. Reviews alerted me to the fact that, in Olive, Again Elizabeth Strout uses characters from her other books beyond Olive Kitteridge, to which it was nominally a sequel. I wonder if authors are using these kind of self-references to give their texts a kind of depth and resonance which older authors used to achieve through allusions to a cultural heritage – religion, history, mythology, the arts – in which they could assume their readers shared, an assumption modern authors may be hesitant to make, or even actively discouraged from doing so by editors and publishers.
MK wrote: "Bill wrote: "I was curious about Julian Symons and Josephine Tey; I thought The Daughter of Time one of the worst books I’ve read, but it is a work particularly venerated among mystery..."Tey's The Franchise Affair was quite enjoyable. My late wife, an avid mystery reader, gave Julian Symons' The Plot Against Roger Ryder the highest compliment; she went back to page one, leafed through the book, and said "Yep. He gave me the clue right there."
giveusaclue wrote: "Good news from the optician yesterday. had been told I had amd but he told me it was drusen which is not the same thing and, in my case no need to worry. Helpfully showed me photos to explain. Also..."Happy for you. I didn’t know what drusen were and had to look them up.
CCCubbon wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Good news from the optician yesterday. had been told I had amd but he told me it was drusen which is not the same thing and, in my case no need to worry. Helpfully showed me pho..."Thank you, me too. thanks to everyone who responded to my post
AB76 wrote: "The Hemmingway documentary by Ken Burns has come to the BBC, i hope to watch the first episode over the weekend, tonight its Das Boot Series 2(need to catch up after all the football evenings)I'm..."
Please see my earlier note about expanding BBC's availability further afield by creating a paying customer base. It could be like the on-line subscription to my local paper. I bet us furriners would flood the coffers and help keep the BBC afloat without the dreaded 'privatization' that has worked so well with the railways.
giveusaclue wrote: "Good news from the optician yesterday. had been told I had amd but he told me it was drusen which is not the same thing and, in my case no need to worry. Helpfully showed me photos to explain. Also..."At some point (not to be a wet blanket) remember to be careful driving at night. Before I had my cataract surgery (which was a breeze), I had to give up night driving - too many halos around lights which made me a menace.
Otherwise, good news. I won't even go into any of the other joys of 'getting on'.
Well, it's the 8th of July and I had decided not, I repeat not, to buy any books this month. In fact, I am in the process of going through one bookcase in hopes of creating space when I get an email from John Sandoe with their summer catalog. I haven't looked at it yet and am hoping I can just pass it by as I can always find several 'I want to haves' among the books.It's torture!
MK wrote: "Well, it's the 8th of July and I had decided not, I repeat not, to buy any books this month. In fact, I am in the process of going through one bookcase in hopes of creating space when I get an emai..."i'm trying(badly) a similar policy in July...purchase no books!
MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "The Hemmingway documentary by Ken Burns has come to the BBC, i hope to watch the first episode over the weekend, tonight its Das Boot Series 2(need to catch up after all the football e..."i think the tories are working on the "endgame" for the BBC, although first Channel 4 will be finally privatised. These red faced, libertarian morons are good at the long game, they remember what they failed to do in the 1990s and are coming back for whats left!
AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "The Hemmingway documentary by Ken Burns has come to the BBC, i hope to watch the first episode over the weekend, tonight its Das Boot Series 2(need to catch up after all the..."Such a bunch of a..holes! And with no imagination, either.
MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "MK wrote: "AB76 wrote: "The Hemmingway documentary by Ken Burns has come to the BBC, i hope to watch the first episode over the weekend, tonight its Das Boot Series 2(need to catch up ..."and a locked in majority.
1997 seems a long time ago in terms of a tory party almost destroyed electorally.
AB76 wrote: "Reen wrote: "AB76 wrote: "SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Irish author Liam O'Flaherty."I've been waiting for a good collection of his stories to turn up. I read a collection of Irish short stories ..."
John Francis Phelan is not so much a "real" name (nor is it fake) as the English translation of the Irish Seán (John) Proinsias (Francis) Ó Faoláin (Whelan) but I think you knew that. Some people go straight in, no kissing for a real Irish name. Would you credit it? Cromwell turns in his grave.
AB76 wrote: "Reen wrote: "AB76 wrote: "SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Irish author Liam O'Flaherty."I've been waiting for a good collection of his stories to turn up. I read a collection of Irish short stories ..."
P.S. You should read Stoner, it's good.
I read a sentence in The dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams which made me stop and think particularly as Swinburne, the Poet of the Week, seems so preoccupied by death. The sentence was‘ words are the tools of resurrection’.
If I tell someone about my father whom I didn’t know very well, he died over sixty years ago, how he loved powerful motor bikes and still I see him in my mind’s eye revving one up, pushing down on a pedal while standing astride the bike as if a mighty horse waited between his legs, to kick start the machine into life. How he would take me for rides on the back, me clutching fiercely to his waist, my hair streaming out behind me for there were no crash helmets then, how we seemed to be flying through the air, I am, in a way, resurrecting him with words as he was then.
I suppose that this would only really be true if the resurrected was someone that you had known. If it was a person that you had simply read about, only vaguely knew then the resurrected might be untrue. I am thinking of biographies or a study of an historical figure such as Napoleon or Florence Nightingale; we may judge them by knowing their actions but that is not quite the same as resurrecting them, maybe. Food for thought.
I would be interested to know what others think.
MK wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Good news from the optician yesterday. had been told I had amd but he told me it was drusen which is not the same thing and, in my case no need to worry. Helpfully showed me pho..."I already know some if them, 29 year old mind 73 yead old body!
FranHunny wrote: "Hi gang, yeah, still alive and kicking, have a link from the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Bu..."
The answer is: they haven't ...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Though I could do without the snobism of:
"Margaret Atwood, a writer who should be on the bookshelves of anyone who cares about literary fiction"
Sorry, Ms Sieghart, you do not get to dictate me what I have to think worthy of reading! I am not wildly into rape-literature - and the heroine of The Handmaide's Tale is not only raped but even worse used as a breeding device.
So no, I do not think that I need to have Ms Atwood on my bookshelves. Thank you very much [not]
CCCubbon wrote: "I read a sentence in The dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams which made me stop and think particularly as Swinburne, the Poet of the Week, seems so preoccupied by death. The sentence was‘ wo..."
I know my grandfathers more through oral tradition than anything else. I know that my father's father worked in the bacteriology lab at the University of California (Berkeley), and that he was one of the volunteers for a hospital the university sent to France in World War One. I know that he was always a man looking for and often finding work during the Great Depression, and that he brought food home to his family, even if it was a bag of doughnuts, at the end of day.
I know that my mother's father was a court clerk who became an officer in the US Army, and that once he was dropped on the wrong beach in Italy, and simply shouted to the men near him "You're mine!" and led them to a position inland.
But these anecdotes are shaped by my own parents' interest in things military. I know my father's father as a quiet man who liked to play cards- he died when I was a boy-- and my mother's father who loved hunting and fishing, and who took me to his office at the courthouse where he worked as Justice of the Peace. But I look at a photograph of my mother and her father standing on steps, both laughing and at ease, both wearing Army boots, in Japan after the war, and know that there was a phase of their lives that I know so little about.
I know that my mother and my grandmother went into Japanese stores, my sharp-eyed grandmother looking for art and furniture, and my wide-eyed mother, always quiet and serious around her mother, in tow.
There's much I don't know about my grandmother, either....
Reen wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Reen wrote: "AB76 wrote: "SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Irish author Liam O'Flaherty."I've been waiting for a good collection of his stories to turn up. I read a collection of Irish s..."
I've read a book on Irish names whose author knew of six graves, all members of the same family, and no two of them with the same spelling of the family name.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...Two of them caught my eye:
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
and
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple
Dorothy Whipple has been described as a 20th century Jane Austen, and her books can generally be summarised in a sentence. In this case: “The rise and fall of a family whose lives intertwine with a rich and unscrupulous financier.” But this is very much the small tip of the very large iceberg, and while slow to start, her books will have you staying awake into the small hours as you get to know and care about the characters. Nothing much happens – Whipple’s books are all set within comfortably middle class families in northern England in the middle of last century – but her knowledge of people, their motivations and actions is unparalleled. –
Reminds me of The Fortnight in September, while those protagonists were about 20 years earlier, and more lower middle-class, the "nothing much happens" very much rings a bell.
I’ve finished Legends of the Fall, a collection of three novellas by Whatshisface – Jim Harrison - whose titles tend to be no more memorable than his name. But the work is excellent. When I read Juan Rulfo’s story collection El Llano in Flames, I characterized it as ‘Mexican Gothic’, which is probably appropriate for the first novella “Revenge”, in which the protagonist has an affair with the wife of a gangster. In the second, a businessman casts off the trappings of success to do exactly what he wants, a sort of American Beauty from long before the film. The title novella follows the life of Tristan, the wildest son in an American family, from the trenches of the first World War to whisky smuggling on the West Coast of the United States. The most obvious comparisons with Harrison would be Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, but Harrison is a more delicate stylist. I will definitely read more by Harrison, my next will probably be Woman Lit by Fireflies. For now, I’m going to finish off my Sherlock Holmes journey with The Last Bow by Conan Doyle.
Sandya wrote: "Stone Cold Trouble. Amer AnwarBeing Indian, I’ve been reading thrillers set in India and am enjoying 2 series of novels, one set in 1920s Calcutta and the Perveen Mistry series, set in Mumbai at ..."
I read Amer Anwar's Brothers in Blood a year or two ago, as I was hoping to gain some insight into the British Asian experience within an easy-to-read genre novel. It was OK, but I was not too impressed - I think you sum up the weaknesses very well in your review of Anwar's (second?) novel featuring the same characters.
Robert wrote: "Reen wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Reen wrote: "AB76 wrote: "SydneyH wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Irish author Liam O'Flaherty."I've been waiting for a good collection of his stories to turn up. I read a collecti..."
yes Ireland has a complicated surname history. you have the aincient original surnames, then the Norman and Saxon surnames that arrived from the english invasion(though all catholic), followed by the scots and english surnames from the settlement of Ulster and the following english administration post 1688
the old catholics are an interesting group, mostly of non-Irish stock but sharing less with the post Cromwellian settlers than many would think.
Family history turn up yesterday, my father found his maternal great uncles medal from WW1. i checked the service number and found he was killed on the Somme in September 1916. While on that same battlefield, his younger sisters soon to be husband was winning a medal for "bravery under fire" . at that point they would never have known each other and they never would, my GGF married my GGM in 1918The sheer numbers involved on the Somme make this less impressive a coincidence maybe but it felt sad to see my Great Great Uncle had fallen at the Somme.
Mod
Fixed - thanks.
Bill wrote: "In regard to mystery series:I am very fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and though they are in their way embroideries of Poe’s Dupin trio, I feel Conan Doyle pretty much did both the detective..."
I see that you are mainly referring to the puzzle-type mystery stories - is that right? I also have a limited interest in that sub-genre nowadays, though read an enormous quantity in my early teens (Christie, Sayers, Ngaio Marsh etc.). If a book's attraction lies mainly in that puzzle element, then I can no longer be bothered.
However, crime books can offer a great deal more, from some excellent writing (in terms of style), to interesting characters and (over a series) character development. Each author offers a different mix, and some become favourites whereas others do not.
You refer to readers becoming 'fans' of certain authors or characters - I don't identify with that at all. Authors who have pleased in the past may be given more slack, but I have abandoned certain series, and become less satisfied with others. Ian Rankin's Rebus series, for example, is a bit inconsistent and the most recent stories - with Rebus as an old codger - are less fun than the earlier ones.
All the same - we all have different reasons for reading (to gain information or illumination, to challenge the old noggin, or just for entertainment...) and these can vary from time to time. I've mentioned before how it's a good idea (for me) to read a 'banker' after some disappointments, and I'm in that position ATM, having just started
by Andrea Camilleri and passing p.100 in no time at all. This is not a 'serious' book - the plot is improbable, the humour doesn't work that well in Stephen Sartarelli's otherwise decent translation, but it's fun! And after two or three very demanding weeks, it's just what I need.(As for Holmes - I read those too long ago to remember much about them. The pastiches I have read since were all disappointing - even those written by decent writers such as Michael Dibdin and Anthony Horowitz.)
scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "In regard to mystery series:I am very fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and though they are in their way embroideries of Poe’s Dupin trio, I feel Conan Doyle pretty much did both ..."
I am not a huge fan of crime or mystery novels but some are really well put together and offer more than genre novels do.
Right now both the Carafiglio and O'Flaherty novels i'm reading could be loosely defined as "crime" novels but deal with the complex lives and cultures of their characters
scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "In regard to mystery series:I am very fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and though they are in their way embroideries of Poe’s Dupin trio, I feel Conan Doyle pretty much did both ..."
I admit to being a fan of some crime writers and loving some of their characters. I have lost interest in one because two consecutive books were quite poor imo. Why should being a fan interfere with critical reasoning?
Good crime writers tend to do characters as well as the story/plot,
@Bill: "Harry Bosch's Universe" is just silly. Bosch is one of four protagonists. As far as I am concerned Connelly could have a different one in every book. I read him because he is a reliably good crime writer (even the best of them occasionally have a dud)
Georg wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "In regard to mystery series:I am very fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and though they are in their way embroideries of Poe’s Dupin trio, I feel Conan Doyle p..."
the sheer volume of crime novels, since the Scando boom is remarkable, if i liked crime novels more i could be sorted for books for the next decade
Bill wrote: "One source for hatchet-job reviews (which seem to be an endangered species in the current rah-rah literary culture) is LitHub’s Book Marks section."Thanks for that. The site could be more user-friendly in terms of searchability, but I have bookmarked it for future reference. I was hoping to enjoy a few scathing reviews of Martin Amis, but either there aren't any of his novels 'Money' and 'London Fields', or I couldn't find them! Perhaps the site has not been up and running long enough to delve into the past.
Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "If I remember correctly you have an equally low opinion of poetry or does that rank even lower…….."Regarding poetry, I’m OK with narrative poems and humorous verse, but when it comes to modern poetry (20th century and beyond, and some earlier works as well) I guess I’m pretty much tone deaf to the vast majority of it. Nine times out of ten I’ll look at a poem and it will just sit there, being and not meaning."
I have to confess that my reaction to poetry is similar to Bill's. It's not that I 'don't like' poetry, but I can't read it... faced with words that instantly require interpretation, my eyes and brain glaze over... I'd find it much easier to re-read the 900+ pages of The Brothers Karamazov than a 90-line poem (say).
Paradoxically (I suppose) I often - though not always - like 'poetic prose', as written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or Bruce Chatwin (say).
I do wonder if this is due to a cultural background in Wales where the sound of a poem is as important as its content, so that poems are declaimed or performed at eisteddfodau - I much prefer poetry in live performance, as opposed to reading it off the page. In a parallel fashion, I tend to react to melody far more than to the lyrics of a song, though there are a few exceptions.
Mod
Thanks to MK (I think?) and CCC for the recommendation of Orchestrated Death.Hard though it was to tear myself away from The Mirror & the Light, I started reading and enjoyed this e-book while I was out over the past few days. Hilary Mantel's fine conclusion to her Cromwell trilogy is too big to carry around.
@giveus a clue, if you haven't encountered Bill Slider yet, I think you would like it too.
scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "In regard to mystery series:I am very fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and though they are in their way embroideries of Poe’s Dupin trio, I feel Conan Doyle pretty much did both ..."
Have you ever thought of audio when it comes to Camilleri? Grover Gardner does a superb job. Of course I know they are light, but I don't care. I am #4 in line at the library for
scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "If I remember correctly you have an equally low opinion of poetry or does that rank even lower…….."Regarding poetry, I’m OK with narrative poems and humorous verse, ..."
im not a big poetry fan either, NYRB had an article on Edmund Spenser and his epic "The Fairie Queene", noting that it was a poem that few people actually read, while professing to have done so
David Hume remarked " Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves of our english classics; but he is seldom seen on the table"
AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "If I remember correctly you have an equally low opinion of poetry or does that rank even lower…….."Regarding poetry, I’m OK with narrative poems ..."
I never read poetry after leaving school, working in an office, being a young mother and so on, then, one day I read the beginning of Eliot’s Burnt Norton and it knocked me for six, spoke to me about how I felt about time and life and I have been hooked since.
It may be that one day you will hear or read a poem that ‘knocks you for six’ if you are lucky and you will know just how powerful it can be. I hope so.
I guess I read a fair amount of crime fiction, though very seldom in the form of detective novels (broadly defined to include the various varieties of amateur sleuths, PIs and police). Most of those I read feature criminal protagonists, as in Patricia Highsmith and Nightmare Alley. I’ve said in the past that I think books about criminal enterprises such as Thieves Like Us and The Asphalt Jungle have more in common with the labor novel than they do with the detective stories among which they’re typically shelved. Most novels featuring criminals tend to devolve into chaos and death, the opposite of the progress toward order and justice that the detective story supposedly embodies. Still, what are the limits of the “crime novel”? The vast majority of novels feature, at some point, the depiction of acts which are technically crimes. A crime is at the core of many Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, with never a policeman or detective in sight. I’ve argued that, in the first chapter of his eponymous novel, William Stoner embezzles his father’s life savings to get a BA in English – not the typical expenditure criminals indulge in with their ill-gotten gains but it nonetheless “bears bitter fruit” as the Shadow used to claim of “the weed of crime”.
AB76 wrote: "NYRB had an article on Edmund Spenser and his epic "The Fairie Queene""Justine used to encourage me to read The Faerie Queene (as it's a narrative poem, it escapes my general avoidance of poetry), especially as opposed to something like The Romance of the Rose, another allegorical work. The NYRB article certainly didn't dissuade me, but did little to encourage me either, though it had positive things to say about the posthumously published ending even while casting some doubt on Spenser's authorship of it.
Earlier this year I read and enjoyed two verse translations of Gerusalemme liberata, which was supposedly an influence on Spencer.
Bill wrote: "I guess I read a fair amount of crime fiction, though very seldom in the form of detective novels (broadly defined to include the various varieties of amateur sleuths, PIs and police). Most of thos..."Australian classic The Refuge by Kenneth Mckenzie, a 1950s novel set in Sydney, has the interesting plot idea,where from page one the identity of the murderer is known to the reader. The novel is much more than a crime novel in many ways, i see it as an exploration of WW2 Sydney and the motives of jealousy.
Bill wrote: "AB76 wrote: "NYRB had an article on Edmund Spenser and his epic "The Fairie Queene""Justine used to encourage me to read The Faerie Queene (as it's a narrative poem, it escapes my g..."
You are a music buff. What about Schubert's Lieder?
FranHunny wrote: "Sorry, Ms Sieghart, you do not get to dictate me what I have to think worthy of reading! I am not wildly into rape-literature - and the heroine of The Handmaide's Tale is not only raped but even worse used as a breeding device.So no, I do not think that I need to have Ms Atwood on my bookshelves. Thank you very much [not]
"
Totally agree Fran,I don't need to be reading books which keep me awake at night - I have enough trouble with that as it is!
I also, will read what I want to read too.
CCCubbon wrote: "AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "If I remember correctly you have an equally low opinion of poetry or does that rank even lower…….."Regarding poetry, I’m OK with nar..."
i am a fan of Alexander Pope, i used to work nearby to where he lived in Twickenham and many an Xmas do was at the pub named after him
Georg wrote: "You are a music buff. What about Schubert's Lieder?"As I suggested, musical settings can often serve me as a kind of non-verbal Explication de Texte for poetry – and if the music is attractive enough, also give me repeated exposure to a poem.
I would also say that most lyric poetry from the early 19th century (Schubert’s era) and before doesn’t arouse the same resistance as later, for me, more obscure works. (I note that Schubert also set a number of narrative poems, perhaps Erlkönig being the most popular: tell me a story, whether in prose or verse, and I’m willing to lend an ear.) On the other hand, I don’t know that I’d have spent as much time getting familiar with and developing an understanding of Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte” without Schoenberg’s setting. With modern poetry, William Bolcom’s Open House provided me with an opportunity of appreciating Theodore Roethke that I wouldn’t have had the patience to achieve with the printed text alone.
I thought at one time that listening to modern verse being read might give me the kind of insight that musical settings often provide, but repeated listening to Eliot reading Four Quartets didn’t bring me anywhere close to the kind of insight @CCCubbon achieved reading “Burnt Norton” (the first of the “Quartets”).
I’d also say that, though I find much earlier lyric poetry unproblematic, I just don’t know how to read it the way I read books. That is to say, I can read a poem in about a minute or two, read it again in the same time, and then what? Stare off into space thinking about it? My mind doesn’t really work that way. Read the next poem in the collection and then the next? They soon begin to blur together and any sense of individual poems gets lost: I begin to lose my whole reason for reading – which is furnishing my mind with ideas, stories, and images for future recollection. Narratives with their “this happened, then that, and as a result, this other thing occurred” create a frame for retention of the book in my memory: perhaps a book’s most important quality for me; I guess music, which I often hear as a kind of narrative, can serve this function for me with some poetry.
AB76 wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "If I remember correctly you have an equally low opinion of poetry or does that rank even lower…….."Regarding poetry..."
He’s not for me, cannot get on with his works.
Bill wrote: "Georg wrote: "You are a music buff. What about Schubert's Lieder?"As I suggested, musical settings can often serve me as a kind of non-verbal Explication de Texte for poetry – and if the music is..."
It may sound rather odd to you but I feel that there is a strong link between, poetry, music and mathematics.
I believe that it has to do with pattern in various forms, the sounds and stresses that a poem makes when read aloud, the rhymes, repeated words and so on in poetry, the melody patterning in music that pleases our ears and there is a vast amount of patterning in mathematics that makes it so beautiful if one can see it. It is always sad for me when someone says how much they dislike mathematics for, to me, they are telling me that they have never seen the patterns and cannot appreciate the beauty.
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