Private joke
As you may have noticed on my handy new list, I'm currently reading a couple of books about writers and writing. I was really excited about American Bloomsbury because it's about Louisa May Alcott and Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and how they all coexisted in Concord in the mid-19th century. But so far, I'm not impressed. It feels like she's trying to make it more of a soap opera than it probably was, and all of the chapters are about three pages long, which I find irritating. I didn't necessarily want heavy literary criticism, but my attention span is longer than three pages per topic.
So I put that one aside momentarily (although I'll finish it, because I can't not--I'm weird like that) when my copy of The Paris Review Interviews (vol. 1) came in. I don't know that I've ever read the Paris Review, although I really enjoyed The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms, which I read last year. But apparently a hallmark of the magazine is their interviews with famous writers on their craft. So far I've read the ones with Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, and Jorge Luis Borges, and they were all fascinating and made me want to go back and read all the stuff they were talking about, especially the Eliot.
I did pull out my copy of The Waste Land and Other Poems from college and reread "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which I've loved since high school. "The Waste Land" still eludes me completely, but I got such a kick out of the part of the interview where Eliot is talking about his earlier work being more obscure than the later stuff because he was still learning how to use language:
By the time of the Four Quartets, I couldn't have written in the style of The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.
This cracked me up in my living room. Then I looked around and M. Defarge and the dog were staring at me and I couldn't explain how funny it was, because neither of them has ever read Eliot, which made me sad. But I'm really enjoying the book.
So I put that one aside momentarily (although I'll finish it, because I can't not--I'm weird like that) when my copy of The Paris Review Interviews (vol. 1) came in. I don't know that I've ever read the Paris Review, although I really enjoyed The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms, which I read last year. But apparently a hallmark of the magazine is their interviews with famous writers on their craft. So far I've read the ones with Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, and Jorge Luis Borges, and they were all fascinating and made me want to go back and read all the stuff they were talking about, especially the Eliot.
I did pull out my copy of The Waste Land and Other Poems from college and reread "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which I've loved since high school. "The Waste Land" still eludes me completely, but I got such a kick out of the part of the interview where Eliot is talking about his earlier work being more obscure than the later stuff because he was still learning how to use language:
By the time of the Four Quartets, I couldn't have written in the style of The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.
This cracked me up in my living room. Then I looked around and M. Defarge and the dog were staring at me and I couldn't explain how funny it was, because neither of them has ever read Eliot, which made me sad. But I'm really enjoying the book.
posted by Madame Defarge at 1:24 PM
1 Comments:
I only remember bits of Prufrock from high school, but I do remember the trousers rolled. I have to teach it next quarter, though, so I'll be revisiting it myself soon. It's my dept head's favorite, and i'll have to be careful to do it justice. Her son used to manage a band that had an obscure Wasteland allusion for a name. Ever heard of the one hit wonder Stroke 9? Aparently that's in there somewhere.
Just finished reading an article on the Lowest Animal by Twain. Hilarious. He was quite the ironic bastage, warranting the Manette stamp of approval.
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