Conspicuous Consumption

Pursewarden, one of the novelists who appears as a character in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet , explains to Darley, another novelist who appears, an idea he has about how a novel might be written:  The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of t he future racing towards one. This is an apt description of what Durrell (not Darley), the novelist who has created these characters, has, over the four novels of the quartet, done. Pursewarden also notes that though the structure of the novel would be ambitious, the story need not be anything "very recherche  . . . . Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story." That, indee...

 Sakutaro Hagiwara was, translator Hiroaki Sato tells us, an "'inspirational' poet," not in the sense that he would inspire his readers (though he may have), but in that he depended upon inspiration to compose his poems, at least in his two most important collections,  Howling at the Moon and Blue Cat , both of which are included in this volume.  "Toward my own poems," Hagiwara writes, "at the time of creating them I am nearly blind and myself don't even know what kind of thing I am singing of. . . . I am merely catching a kind of rhythm that flows at the bottom of my heart and unconsciously pursuing the rhythm, therefore at the time of creation my own self is merely something like a half-conscious automatic machine." His work, however, is never simply unadulterated automatic writing: he did revise. He manages, though, to tap into something that cannot be paraphrased into anything less than it is (a message, an argument, a description . . . )....

I read Paradise Lost for the first time a little while ago and enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy the yarns told about the Greek gods, so I thought I'd do a little background reading to see what I had missed. For reasons now obscure to me (the kindle edition was cheap? I liked the Narnia tales when I was of an age to do so?) I turned to C.S. Lewis, a writer who in his religiosity was sure to be uncongenial to me. In these lectures his thinking is indeed uncongenial to me, but not in a way that raised my hackles and made me want to refute it. It is simply that he is arguing from premises foreign to me about things that have little connection to the world in which I live. Too many of the things he focuses on seem like disputes about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a discussion that might be interesting if angels were, you know, real. But of course some of these things were real for Milton and his contemporaries, so perhaps they do need to be addressed. But still . . ...

   Every so often it's good to give the brain a workout with some cutting-edge literary criticism. The Calamity of Form was, for me, good in that way. The argument, to the extent that I succeeded in following it, is that romantic poetry responded to the changing social conditions brought about by the industrial revolution by, in essence, not responding to it. That is, they used a variety of rhetorical moves—catachresis, obscurity, apostrophe—that rather than clarifying their response to the changes the industrial revolution brought about, obscured those changes. The poets achieved what Nersessian calls nescience , because the tools of the poet offered no plausible way to respond to the situation in which they lived. In the course of making her argument, which she does in clear lively prose, the author appeals not only to canonical romantic poets, but also to painters such as John Constable (his cloud paintings) and contemporary artists and musicians such as Kate Bush (clouds ...

 I enjoyed this book, but suspect I would have liked it even more when I was young person taking slow trains (Shout out to the Eurail pass!) around Europe. This is partly because it is a (lightly?) fictionalized account of just what it is like to be a young person wandering around Europe for no particular reason. While I did my wandering on my own or in the company of other temporarily rootless young people, de Terán's more sensational wanderings are in the company of a Venezuelan bank robber and two guerillas in exile who are his partners. She has married the bank robber on what can only be called a whim at the age of sixteen—he was about twenty years older—and follows in his wake for most of this novel. It's a pleasant ramble, mostly in Italy, but one does rather tire of the protagonist's almost complete lack of agency and her difficult to understand devotion to her not terribly pleasant husband. Apparently this is an early entry in the currently popular sub-genre that we...

Lauren Groff, in her excellent essay on Virginia Woolf's second novel,  Night and Day , compares it to the drawings Picasso did as a young man. Picasso's draftsmanship was not revolutionary; it was, however, superb: evidence that he had mastered the tradition. In much the same way, Woolf's novel is evidence that she was more than competent in the tradition that gave us the novels of Henry James and of Woolf's friend E.M. Forster. Like Picasso, she would go on to break the traditional mold. Night and Day is not as formally adventurous as her later work. It is, though, daring in its vision of English society moving from the Victorian era to the Edwardian, and especially what that might mean for women. The two women around whom the novel revolves, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, struggle to see how to live in the new world they are entering. Katherine, the granddaughter of a famous poet comes from a family that might now be called "bourgeois bohemian." They...

  Like most contemporary non-believers, I've always found Greek mythology more alluring than Christian mythology. John Milton has helped me to see that the Christian stories make for just as good reading as the adventures of Zeus and company. Of course, as many have noted—whether or not this is what Milton intended, and whether or not Milton's contemporaries would have read the character this way—for a modern reader, Satan is the most sympathetic character. He's ambitious and a lover of liberty: he doesn't want to be under the thumb of an autocratic god-the-father, and makes a valiant attempt to get out from under that thumb. It's hard, at least nowadays, to fault him for that. The main reason, though, that Milton's Satan is so attractive is that he is the most richly drawn of all the characters, and this depth makes him fascinating in ways the other characters are not. Adam and Eve, for example, seem of little account, mere pawns (for all the big guy's clai...