“I would advocate for more use of an anthology. And more memorisation. You may also find that, to begin with, you do not want take such a critical approach and would prefer to follow your nose rather than doing what Hazlitt tells you (although you should read Hazlitt at some point, he is among the greats). Still, I hope some of you find this of some use. It is taken from Literary Taste and How to Form It.”
–Arnold Bennett’s Ten Step Plan for Learning to Appreciate Poetry
Tag: literature
Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey
“…I always resist the “classics is impractical” line that people love to come up with when they are critical of the higher study of these fields. You can study accounting. It’s authentically practical in one way. But when your father dies, your accounting degree is not going to help you at all to process that experience. Homer will help you. The Odyssey will help you. Great literature will help you think about mortality and losing loved ones. That seems very practical to me.
A broad education in which you’re deeply read in literature, and history, and philosophy, and mathematics, and science: this teaches us how to be human beings and it teaches us also how to be citizens. I know that sounds very idealistic, but if the current social and political situation in this country is in any way a marker of what a generation spent focusing on STEM does, then I think clearly we need a different answer. The crude preoccupation with moneymaking as the only goal of a college education is giving us a citizenry that is extremely degraded, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s only the crudest and least interesting practicality that has no time for the humanities.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, “Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey.” The Octavian Report. August 12, 2022
Of course, an important question is which Odyssey do you read, Emily Wilson’s, Richmond Lattimore’s or someone else’s? Another think that I found interesting is how they talked about life being tragedy and comedy modes of viewing the world mentioned a few days ago.
RedditReads.com
“I processed billions of comments to find the books most mentioned on reddit. Browse by subreddit or check out some popular results below.
Including comments up to 30 Nov 2021.
https://www.redditreads.com–
Zuihitsu: What Is It?
“The Japanese describe the genre as “a running brush” as it does not lie so much in the subjects it deals with but rather in the movement of the wind. The style consists of personal interconnected essays or fragmented ideas that respond to the author’s surroundings; however, these “essays” jump from one to the other by association, as the mind does as it distractedly meditates and memories, abstractions, extracts of other texts, lists, opinions, dreams and poems crop up. It gathers all of the inventory that we are, Calvino would say.
In zuihitsu we feel the writing process and touch the textures of the author’s mind more than the themes or subjects referred to, which is why it is often translated as “miscellany” or “miscellaneous essay;” there is no central point but rather parts that interact with each other. There could be, for example, parts in verse, and which is perhaps the best vehicle for an idea, and parts in prose, whose function is to absorb the sentimentalism in a way that verse cannot. Reading or writing zuihitsu is, in short, to see how the form changes the content.”
-“Zuihitsu: The Literary Genre In Which The Text Can Drift Like A Cloud.” faena.com
I liked this definition and included in my about page:
“[S]he writes personally and casually, for the joy of it, about anything that comes to mind, providing that what she thinks might impress readers…excluding anything completely fictional.”
-Stephen Carter, ed. Introduction to The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century. Washington, D.C: Columbia University Press, 2014.
How to Read Big Books
“…it is a principal task of a successful modern university to teach people how to read [big, difficult, flawed, incredibly insightful, genius books]. Indeed, it might be said that one of the few key competencies we here at the university have to teach—our counterpart or the medieval triad of rhetoric, logic, grammar and then quadriad of arithmetic, geometry, music and astrology—is how to read and absorb a theoretical argument made by a hard, worthwhile, flawed book. People need to understand what an argument is, and the only way to do that is actually go through an argument—to read the argument and try to make sense of it. People need to be able to tell the difference between an argument and an assertion. People need to be able to do more than just say whether they liked the conclusion or not: they need to be able to specify whether the argument hangs together given the premises, and where it is the premises, and where it is the premises themselves that need to be challenged. People need to learn that while you can disagree, you need to be able to specify why and how you disagree.
The first order task is to teach people how to read difficult books…Teaching them how to read difficult books will stick with them over the years. Knowing what to do with a book that makes an important, an interesting, but also a flawed argument—that is a key skill.
…we urge you to focus on the “meta” to the extent that you can: it is not so much the ability to answer the question “what does Marx think about X?” that we want you to grasp, but rather “how do I figure out what Marx thinks about X?” that is the big goal here…
We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:
1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.”
-Brad Delong, “A Note on Reading Big, Difficult Books…” Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality. December 28, 2019
Book Marks: The Book Review Aggregator
“Every day, the Book Marks staff scours the most important and active outlets of literary journalism in the US—from established national broadsheets to regional weeklies and alternative litblogs—and logs their book reviews. When a book is reviewed by at least three outlets, each of those reviews is assigned an individual rating (Rave, Positive, Mixed or Pan). These ratings are then averaged into a result and the book becomes part of our Book Marks database.
Each book’s cumulative rating functions as both a general critical assessment, and, more significantly, as an introduction to the range of voices and opinions that make up the world of American literary criticism. These opinions are accompanied by pull quotes representative of the overall stance of
each individual review, and readers can click through to the full review at its source.Readers can express their own opinions alongside those of the critics in each book page’s What Did You Think Of… comments section.
Book Marks exists to serve as a consolidated information resource for the reading public and a link between the worlds of literary creation, criticism and consumption. We hope it will bring more attention to great books and great criticism.”
Why Should You Read “The Master and Margarita”? – Alex Gendler
The Translation Database
“The only resource of its kind, the Translation Database was founded in 2008 by Three Percent and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester to track all original publications of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in English translation.”
Who Cares About The Great American Novel?
“A question from the New York Times’ Bookends, “Where is the great American novel by a woman?,” got an interesting answer from the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid…
[Ursula’s answer, in short:]
But there’s something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward. I’d answer it with a question: Where is the great American novel by anybody? And I’d answer that: Who cares?…
…Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Who Cares About The Great American Novel?” Literary Hub. December 6, 2017.
Love Ursula.
Taste of Loneliness and Love
“I believe there is a reason certain tastes, scents, sounds, and sights move me the way they do; part of it is conditioning, the other is deeper. For instance, I have no connection to the church, but I have grown to love gospel music and feel myself moved by the passion. I’m a Jew, but I listen to Kanye West’s ‘Ultralight Beam’ every morning just to get to Kirk Franklin’s verse, his prayer ‘for everybody that feels like they’re too messed up,’ and who ‘feels they’ve said ‘I’m sorry’ too many times.’ I’ve learned to understand what’s so beautiful about another person’s devotion; I grow by learning to love and appreciate new things.”
—Jason Diamond, “Judging Books by Their Covers.” Longreads.com. October 2017.
Enjoyable essay throughout.
cafebedouin.org 