Baldwin uses a review of films relating to race to deconstruct the current race situation (in the early 1970s). This is a fantastic book and not just Baldwin uses a review of films relating to race to deconstruct the current race situation (in the early 1970s). This is a fantastic book and not just for hyper fans of Baldwin. God this man is a treasure....more
“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.� � Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
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This book is essentially three lectures Toni Morrison gave at Harvard University (the William E Massey Sr. Lectures) on how race, the black body, and the presence and even absence (hint: there is no REAL absence) have impacted American literature. The essays begin by exploring how this "black presence" is central to any understanding of our national literature.
"These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature--individualism, masculinity, social engagement vs historical isolation,; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist* presence."
Our literature does this through codes and restrictions, contradictions, conflicts, so that even when a real Africanist presence is found in certain works of American fiction, it is used to prop up the idea of whiteness.
Morrison busts out some Hegelian synthesis, suggesting that replacing one hierarchy of literary criticism (Thesis::Eurocentric) with another (Antithesis::African-American Criticism) still leaves a lot of literary rooms unexplored. She isn't just interested in how America's primary conflict not only impacted the victim/the objects of racist policy and attitudes (and what kinda impact racism had on those who perpetrated), she is proposing examining "the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblack [writers] who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions."
In these essays/lectures she explores Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, & Ernest Hemingway.
I read this short book today. It took me only a few hours, but it really made me miss Toni Morrison. I can't imagine her response to the moral panic CRT has caused among a large segment of the American Experiment. A lot of what she wrote seemed both more hopeful than our current course anticipates, but also quite prophetic of the power that the blackness has achieved in helping white writers (and certainly politicians) to write their fiction, both good and bad.
* Morrison has her own working definition for these essays regarding Africanist. For her Africanist is an easy short-hand for American culture's understanding of the dark other, not only for the "not-free" but also the "not-me." A figure that haunts not just our history and our politics but our stories, our myths, and our understanding of ourselves....more
"Like the Nile she inundates and then brings forth a harvest of burgeoning vivaciousness. Metamorphic, yet she overcomes the changes through histrioni"Like the Nile she inundates and then brings forth a harvest of burgeoning vivaciousness. Metamorphic, yet she overcomes the changes through histrionic genius. She acts and is, and who can tell what in her is not theatrical?" - Harold Bloom, Cleopatra
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It was hard for me to get excited about Cleopatra or Bloom from this book. Not the worst piece in the series, but not the best (Falstaff). It was weak for the first 2/3 and finished a bit stronger. Like some other of the mediocre titles in this series, it feels like parts of the book were recycled, parts were put together by an RA phoning it in, and occasionally Bloom, his sharp focus dulling, would insert something new. Nothing revelatory here. Lots of diving for some mediocre pearls.
This is the second of the five books Bloom wrote directly about Shakespeare's big personalities. These are the books in his series Shakespeare's Personalities:
"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience." - Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
"If children abandon 'the s"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience." - Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
"If children abandon 'the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands', if 'children are not permitted...to be adventurers and explorers as children', then 'what will become of the world of adventure, stories, of literature itself?'" - Michael Chabon, The Wilderness of Childhood
"I was reminded, too, of Emerson's beautiful description of language as 'a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone.'" - Emerson, quoted by Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
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Inspired by the removal of several nature words in the Oxford Junior Dictionary: "acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup..." The list was tragic. The thesis of Robert Macfarlane's book is we love the things we name, and if we lose the name for things in our language, our ability to care for nature and wilderness diminished. This book is a signpost pointing to books where the language of nature is strong. Chapters are essentially essays where Robert Macfarlane is able to sing a love letter to fantastic books like Nan Shepherd's In the Cairngorms, Roger Deakon's Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, Richard Skelton's Landings, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, Richard Jefferies' Nature Near London, Clarince Ellis's The Pebbles On The Beach, and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra.
Macfarlane's love for these books and topics is so rich it is hard to not love them back. I finished this book and purchased three more. It was infective. Just like the glossaries that divide the chapters. In the glossary, Macfarlane include nature words in danger of being lost. The words mostly are focused on Great Britain, but when this book was first published it inspired readers to send in their own local lexicons of nature. It really is beautifully constructed and for a book organic, which structurally is nearly perfect....more
"But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion." -"But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion." - Iago in Othello, Act I, Scene 3
This is the fourth of the five books Bloom wrote directly about Shakespeare's big personalities. He wrote five books in his series:
I like Bloom. He's for sure problematic, but interesting. That is why I flirt (on and off) with his sometimes far-out criticisms. I enjoyed (within reason) his take on Falstaff in his Shakespeare Personalities series. This one? Meh.
I'm not sure Bloom is adding much of value, or much of a novel take here. Maybe one thing: his take that Desdemona died a virgin. But, I'm not sure that bloodless token is enough to give this three stars. It wasn't even Iago: the Banality of Evil. That Arendt approach would have at least been interesting. Anyway, I'll sleep on it and if my wife hasn't removed nor choked my meh conception, I shall groan withal....more
A really nice survey of the New Testament as literature. Nothing very new here, but spends a good amount of time discussing how the New Testament needA really nice survey of the New Testament as literature. Nothing very new here, but spends a good amount of time discussing how the New Testament needs to be view both as a complete work and as individual pieces. He uses the idea of a pictorial collage to discuss the cannon. Anyway, it was solid....more
"One fine ignorance is as good as another." - Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet
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Vol N° 49 of my Penguin Little Black Classics Box Set. This v"One fine ignorance is as good as another." - Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet
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Vol N° 49 of my Penguin Little Black Classics Box Set. This volume contains James's masterful short story "The Figure in the Carpet" published in 1896.
I could tell you what it all means, but I've spent my life trying to figure out Henry James. I finally, after a trip away, have him completely figured out. Just wait for my next review. James actually does a fantastic job of keeping the intention of the story itself a secret (from everyone but me dear reader). Is he mocking the whole industry of literary critic? Is he making fun of the pretention of some authors (himself included)? In many ways the story is built like a literary ouroboros. James is literally eating his own tail a bit. You can't trust the narrator, you can't trust Vereker, and you certainly shouldn't trust Henry James.
Sometimes, the best advice is the shortest and the hardest, don't chase the cheese and avoid the hook: "Give it up - give it up!" ...more
One of the best books about reading the Hebrew Bible I’ve read since finishing Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. Lovely. I’m a big fan of Alter�One of the best books about reading the Hebrew Bible I’ve read since finishing Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. Lovely. I’m a big fan of Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible and his commentary on his translations are worth the price of admission by themselves. ...more
"There may be truths on the side of life." - Saul Bellow, quoted in Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind
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I love Zadie Smith. But not in any of the Gree"There may be truths on the side of life." - Saul Bellow, quoted in Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind
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I love Zadie Smith. But not in any of the Greek formal ways. I love her in multiple ways, spilling over each other. I love her brain. I love her prose. I love how closely she reads. I love how different her perspectives are to mine and how similar AT THE SAME TIME. She reminds me why I love writing, movies, Nabokov, DFW, family and why I need to love all these things and more -- better. She began these essays with an essay about Zora Neal Hurston that bounced around the idea of her loving ZNH as only a black woman can and she ended these essays with a lengthy tribute to DFW and his collection of stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. She showed me how, even with reading almost all of DFW, I'm still a novice. That my reading skills lack and that Zadie Smith, is also (as cliched and ironic as this sounds in a post-Obama, Brexit/Trump era) almost post-racial (not really, but she is larger than most categories people would want to shove her into.
This collection is broken into the following sections:
READING 1. Their Eyes Were Watching God: What does Soulful Mean? - ✶✶✶✶� 2. E.M. Forster, Middle Manager - ✶✶✶✶� 3. Middlemarch and Everybody - ✶✶✶✶ 4. Rereading Barthes and Nabokov - ✶✶✶✶� 5. F. Kafka, Everyman - ✶✶✶✶ 6. Two Directions for the Novel - ✶✶✶✶�
BEING 7. That Crafty Feeling - ✶✶✶✶� 8. One Week in Liberia - ✶✶� 9. Speaking in Tongues - ✶✶✶✶�
SEEING 10. Hepburn and Garbo - ✶✶✶✶� 11. Notes on Visconti's Bellissima - ✶✶� 12. At the Multiplex - ✶✶✶✶� 13. Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend - ✶✶�
FEELING 14. Smith Family Christmas - ✶✶✶✶� 15. Accidental Hero - ✶✶✶✶� 16. Dead Man Laughing - ✶✶✶✶
REMEMBERING 17. Brief Interviews iwthh Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of DFW - ✶✶✶✶�...more
God. I've been aware of many of these stories, read several before, and floated around the center of the Borges space since I've started reading serioGod. I've been aware of many of these stories, read several before, and floated around the center of the Borges space since I've started reading serious fiction. Damn. Nearly a perfect book. The interconnectedness of these stories, essays and fragments ties these loose pieces into a whole that is greater than the parts (and the parts are pretty goddamned spectacular). There are books you read that tell the reader: go ahead and read another work by this writer and there are other books, like this one, that tell the reader: life isn't complete without reading all of the books by Borges, on all of the Borges shelves, in all of the Borges-inspired octagonal rooms. ...more
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