Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Catching up with things I should have read 40 years ago, or having a better look, Dickens is a better writer than I gave him credit for, never having spent much time on him, being more a George Eliot admirer. Halfway through this, it's a thronging gallery of cartoon characters with unlikely names and I'm not sure quite where it's going but with plenty more Dickens, Balzac, Zola and maybe even Tolstoy unread, it will be sometime before I can say that I have nothing to read.
Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe)
It's not as if I have a shortage of Elizabeth Bishop books but Anne Stevenson is such a pleasure to read. There's nothing quite as good as a fine commentator writing about a consummate poet.
In the preface she says,
My object has been to suggest ways of reading Bishop uncategorically,
i.e. not as a 'woman poet', 'lesbian poet', 'feminist poet', American, Modernist or anything else. That is surely something Anne inherits from Elizabeth in the first place, or knew already, but it's a shame it even needs saying.
There is such a thing as the 'Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry'. How absurd. How limiting is it for poetry, or anything else, to be categorized in such a way. Like Mozart was 'Classical'. No, he was Mozart. The artists that need labels like those are those that aren't anything more than the labels they need.
I'm looking forward to Anne's account of EB. She knows what she's talking about.
James Joyce, Ulysses
Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge)
I sat in front of Ulysses, dutifully rather than diligently, 40-odd years ago. At University, we were offered a lecture on Joyce if we wanted it and we (gratifyingly) very much did but were warned not to attempt to write about Ulysses, never mind Finnegans Wake, at under-graduate level so I did an essay on Dubliners. Prof. Sherry seemed to think it was called The Dubliners but I don't think it is.
Now, apparently with world enough and time, I'll have a better look and see how much further I can get with Joyce whose easier stuff is The. Best. Prose. Fiction. In the language.
Looking at the helpful guide provided by Harry Blamires many years ago, the shortcut seems to be just to read that but that, obviously, wouldn't be the point.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.
