i promise there is less poetry this week
I. Just Kidding
From "The Beautiful Changes" by Richard Wilbur:
...the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
(via Poetry Foundation's daily poem missive)
II. I'm Becoming So Old
This sounds like a great idea, dadgummit:
Among the most beneficial departures from standard college fare at the University of Chicago was the brilliant idea of eliminating textbooks from undergraduate study. This meant that instead of reading, in a thick textbook, “In his Politics Aristotle held . . . ,” or “In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud argued . . . ,” or “In On Liberty John Stuart Mill asserted . . . ,” students read the Politics, Civilization and Its Discontents, On Liberty, and a good deal else. Not only read them, but, if they were like me, became excited by them. Heady stuff, all this, for a nineteen-year-old semi-literate who, on first encountering their names, was uncertain how to pronounce Proust or Thucydides.
That's from a pretty good essay on reading by Joseph Epstein. If I have anything useful to add about reading - which is sort of the consistent preoccupation of this newsletter - it's that reading is best defended as a pleasure, an alternative to watching TV or a movie or being on Facebook. (That's cribbed a bit from the scholar Alan Jacobs.)
What becomes difficult is that most people (in my life, at least) only defend reading paternalistically - reading is better for you than such and such and such. This is especially difficult because it might be true. How do you defend a pleasurable thing as better without sucking the pleasure from your description? I've got lots of little strategies, but the best remains testimony. "Read this book. I couldn't put it down."
III. I'm Still Doing a Podcast
I'm also still embarrassed by my extemporaneous asshatery being recorded for all time. And yet, the project remains fruitful to me personally, and to my friendship with Bill Coberly (who is always better prepared, more succinct, and has a beautiful voice). If the podcast is doing anything else, it's concretizing our own bookish testimonies.
The latest episode was on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. We both think the book's dynamite - though I might slightly prefer We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her later novel. Come for our enthusiasm thereof, but stay for Bill's scorning of the Netflix "adaptation's" final episode. We both might need to let our hatchet instincts out a little more. It's fun to rant.
Our next Big Read will be about: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Basically everyone who's read it insists it's one of the greatest texts of the 20th century, which just brings us back to the problem of pleasure because that sounds important, but does it sound fun? Uh, yeah, actually, it does sound kind of fun. If books are better diversions than TV et al, then wonderful big books are a prolonged suspension of disenchantment, IMO.
IV. Opinion
P.G. Wodehouse is probably the funniest writer I've ever read. Muriel Spark's also got the goods, and even though her humor is more often witty than rollicking, she can land a joke with the best of them. Other funny writers? Man, they're everywhere. George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, etc. The only funny writer that I've read, besides James Joyce I guess, who wrote a very long book is Joseph Heller (the book being Something Happened). There's funny old books that are very long (Tristam Shandy, Tom Jones), but most funny writers in the present age produce slimmer volumes, it seems. One witty writer no one talks about having wit is Toni Morrison. You'd think Beloved, a defining tome on slavery, couldn't get the jokes out, but you'd be wrong. "Witty" and "comic" aren't the same, but a skill for humor helps every book, is my thinking. If it can help slavery, just think what being funny could do for your sad-people-getting-a-sad-divorce story!
Happy Autumn Weather; may there be much snow in the mountains.