August Update

I am a few days late this month because I had a couple of days off at the beginning of the week. If I cannot keep up with this, I can't keep up with anything...


A List: Coleridge--"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".........................................13/18
B List: Between books
C List: Bruce Chatwin--The Songlines...............................................................160/293


It seems remarkable that it took me nearly 23 years of working on the A list before it got to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", but sometimes it works out that way.


Other things read this month: Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas. Walt was a spirit ahead of his time and plenty of his visions of the form American art should take would not be out of keeping with the current mindset. Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry". Good essay about the distinction between titanic, universal, all time poets, merely excellent poets of a particular generation and country, and everybody else. The sorts of things I try to keep in mind when trying to evaluate contemporary writing and thought.


I had another very short book for the "B" or IWE list. Report hopefully to follow shortly.


Chatwin is, as I noted in a previous post, a much-praised writer, especially among global eco-minded traveling types, and I can see why. His style is very pared down, and to the point. I could never write like that because I feel obligated to explain my thought process and why I am choosing this point of emphasis and justify these approaches. But Chatwin doesn't have to do that, he assumes the validity of his perception to be self-evident. There are some things about him that I don't love. Having been born in 1940 in England in I guess somewhat favorable circumstances he received what is by current standards a pretty thoroughgoing classical European liberal arts education, English version--Latin, Greek, logic, reams of poetry, history, enough music to be able to hang in and take part in good company--in short the education I have always imagined I would have wanted to have enough of to be manifest in social and professional situations--yet he seems to take it for granted and be pretty ambivalent about its having any great universal value. I guess when you have it, and are past the point of always having to strain to try to get it, its limitations are apparent and you have the clarity and intellectual honesty to confront them. He also frequently writes with condescension towards white people who are not as articulate or intelligent or otherwise lacking in some way he deems significant--on one occasion a person is demeaned for having gotten an unattractive sunburn--and of course he never casts negative judgments on indigenous people. I suppose these people--the stupid white people--were more of an aggressive nuisance in his lifetime and needed to be combatted. But it isn't just the obviously stupid and obnoxiously racist, it is anybody who doesn't talk well and has failed to adequately systematize their modest collection of learning and thought to form any kind of cohesive mind, and in this of course I recognize myself.


No time to do pictures this time.