Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Prufrock

Memorizing poetry Writer tries to memorize a poem a week


"Except there was always the other path. Verse, unlike prose, could be instantly transformative. In summer 1962, Plath broadcast a fine essay on writing poetry and how it differs from writing fiction: ‘How shall I describe it? – a door opens, a door shuts. In between you have had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city. I think of those round glass Victorian paperweights … You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute.’"

https://booksandideas.net/The-Poor-of-the-Ancien-Regime French book about the French poor of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Sounds like a remarkable book but it is currently only available in French.

https://hudsonreview.com/2024/11/at-lady-violets/ On Anthony & Violet Powell. Anthony was a novelist - I just read a Christopher Hitchens essay about him & his work sounds interesting. He wrote a twelve-book novel. His wife Violet sharpened his work as iron sharpens iron.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a62962446/haruki-murakami-profile-2024/
"In April 1978, Murakami attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. An American player named Dave Hilton hit a double into left field, and when the ‘satisfying crack’ of Hilton’s bat arrived at Murakami’s ears, he thought to himself, apropos of nothing, I think I can write a novel. And he was right.”
https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/12/night-of-the-world Rilke/Holderlin

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/falling-in-love-with-fanny-and-robert-louis-stevenson/
"The strife was necessary for Stevenson, who believed “the spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest.” They fought with and for each other, but in comparing marriage to warfare, Stevenson meant something else. For him, “the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle,” because Stevenson saw both as a moral test—“an occasion for our virtues.” 
 
    "This [Wendell Berry statement] is effectively the conclusion that Lasch came to by the end of his book: that the conservation of the family is something that can only be achieved by politically and economically radical means. "
    "That argument is: The modern economic order simultaneously creates the need for family to be a haven and prevents it from serving as a haven. "

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/barry-malzberg-obituary-science-fiction/ Once wrote a novel in 27 hours. Sounds kind of interesting - PKD liked him. 
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-art-lost-its-way Re the death of art criticism. VG. 
https://freebeacon.com/culture/putting-the-thrill-back-in-the-spy-thriller/
https://freebeacon.com/culture/how-the-left-views-langley/

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/raymond-n.-mackenzie/i-m-ready-for-you 
"Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy 
by Éric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 20 pp., £15.99, June 2024, 978 1 83976 725 8
The Lily in the Valley 
by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Peter Bush.
NYRB, 263 pp., £16.99, July 2024, 978 1 68137 798 8"
"Balzac’s environment par excellence is Paris. He documents the hôtels, tenements and streets that later regimes would sweep away, and his work serves as a kind of history of the city. He compared himself more than once to Georges Cuvier, a founding figure in palaeontology, portraying his fiction as performing a similar excavation, exposing the layers that underlay the present."
    "In the 1842 preface he compares himself to a zoologist, and his Paris reads like a sort of bestiary, a record of places and ways of life that no longer exist, an intricate, endlessly compelling social, political and moral landscape populated by often bizarre, monomaniacal characters"

https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-death-of-scenius
"Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to refer to the collective genius that can emerge when a population of diverse and fertile talents living in geographical proximity form a loose community or ‘scene’. A scene consists of artists (from the same field and adjacent ones) and of collectors, entrepreneurs, curators, critics and theorists (akin to what the sociologist Howard Becker called an “art world”). Like a new brain being formed, these clustered nodes interact in wild and unpredictable ways, sparking new ideas and birthing movements.
    Scenius is primarily an urban phenomenon...."

    The city can provide a melting pot of ideas - meeting place of intellectuals - so iron can sharpen iron. Cafes. 
    Rise in cost of living & relative isolation of young people spells death of 'scenius.'
    "The Village had all the ingredients of a perfect urban ecosystem: charming old-world architecture, deep history, and a multiethnic character; affordable rent, a working-class Italian community that resisted rapid gentrification; ample public space (Washington Square Park), and a robust network of platforms for artistic expression. It resisted exploitation, mass demolition, and unchecked gentrification for much of the twentieth century. It had just enough charm and architectural dignity to be appealing, situated in Lower Manhattan, yet it remained a little too violent and working-class to draw the wealthiest mid-century elite."
    "Creative scenes are competitive and mimetic. Rivals are centrifugal engines that drive scenes faster and higher. When artists—in this case, musicians—are in close proximity, they push each other, and in turn push and provoke and excite their audience and fans. Something like this happened in Renaissance Florence, where each workshop dared the others to make something sublime. Proximity matters. Someone’s playing at the venue down the street."

https://modernagejournal.com/how-the-brutalist-brutalizes-history/247252/
https://modernagejournal.com/let-us-now-praise-famous-men-or-not/238007/
So many movies above great men - so many were bad. Notable exception: Oppenheimer


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