I hear William James is bringing nitrous oxide. And be sure to use the secret handshake at the door. One must be so careful these days…
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Also, I sort of do think that history is a tea party thrown by Gertrude Stein.
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Is this a reflection of our culture or simply unconscious male bias on my part?
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2. Here’s my favorite Updike [non] poem (reproduced, I’m afraid, imperfectly):

LOVE SONNET
John Updike

In Love’s rubber armor I come to you;
b
oo
b.
c,
d
c
d:
e
f –
e
f.
g
g.
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I read Woolf’s novels a long time ago. I found them really odd. Frankly, she sounded like a nutter, if you want to know the truth. Brilliant and sensitve, yes. But bonkers, that’s all.

I noticed the comments that Dylan’s sense of the ‘truth’ was deeper than Lennon’s. “Gimme Some Truth” was written during John’s political Yoko phase; you can’t go entirely by that. I agree Dylan is subtle and brilliant, but Lennon certainly is his equal, especially if you listen to outake recordings in which Lennon deliberately imitates Dylan–he gets him absolutely spot on, and I’m sure you’ve heard Lennon’s satire of Dylan’s “Serve somebody.”

Thank you for sharing Woolf’s actual words. We can argue all day about her worth, but it’s really helpful to look at her actual writings and attempt a judgment which people seem so cowardly about making–it seems they’d rather believe in some well-placed authority, so I REALLY appreciate you linking to her work. We do not have to agree here; that’s not my aim, I’m OK with disagreement, and I welcome it, because I can’t ‘rhetoric’ very well with agreement; Disagreement had a baby and they called it speech.

OK… Take it away, my dear lady…

Ladies and Gentlemen, Virginia Woolf:

Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation.

“Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.”

Is this meant to be funny? I find it funny; inane, really.

“Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window.”

I had to read this sentence over a number of times before I grasped it. She is comparing the man’s ‘wife and son, in the window’ to ‘children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived…’ I’m not sure why she needs this comparison–figures in a window cannot be occupied with trifles at their feet, because you don’t see figures in a window so preoccupied since you tend to see only the upper body of someone in a window. Secondly, isn’t the innocence of ‘wife and son’ enough? Why do we need the ‘children picking up shells?’ This is milk-and-water type composing. The good writer will reject this at once. ‘defenceless against a doom which he perceived’ also strikes me as vague and hyperbolic.

“After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation.”

Finally, is she seriously pursuing this sequential idea as a symbol of great thought? I find this faintly ridiculous. And why is the end “glimmering red?” This seems absolutely mad. Are we supposed to get from this that the “end” of “knowledge” is “hell?” Yet she doesn’t seem to be using irony; she seems to be really trying to convince us of this man’s intelligence and humanity, but in such an odd way. And finally this: “Z is only reached once by one man in a generation” seems painfully blinkered and elitist.

Do you feel this is a sample of her best writing?

Tell me if I am being unfair, because this is my sincere impression.

Perhaps we can look at something else. I don’t wish to rush to judgment.

Thomas
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Plato didn’t think the world was flat. Read “The Timaeus.”
Read Plato, in fact. It sounds to me like that’s what you need. Aristotle’s fun, but Plato is far more grounded, far more interesting.

Nothing sinks a literary discussion faster than shallow politics and religious prejudice.

“Ranking is relative.”

Precisely.

Thomas
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Not true, but even if it were, it would be easily correctable, Thomas. Simply take a work of hers and point to its merits.

Have you read any of her novels?

The description of the father thinking in “To the Lighthouse” has always blown me away — so incisive, witty, humane (and, so I’ve read, probably a portrait of her own father at least in part). It’s too long to quote here, but if anybody is interested, I quoted it at length on my blog a few years ago while thinking about Dylan & Lennon’s differing conceptions of truth.

http://utopianturtletop.blogspot.com/search?q=woolf+meltzer

Terreson, I often want to turn off my “judgment button” too. Nice description. Thanks — and thanks to Daisy.
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Imagine the spectrum of human intelligence and creativity being an inch long from the lowest to highest IQ.

Then think of the Intelligence beyond a mile long and then 10 and a 100 and 1M ad infinitum. In the cosmic scale, our minds are paltry things, always getting it wrong, thinking the erarth flat till Newton came along.

But we cannot help it, we have to have the pecking order, Leavis the sneery cheeerleader ass lickin Eliot ushering in the 20C version of it. Major and minor, all designed to exclude, whilst the real artists take no part, just doing what they do.

I blame Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, who were that dumb they only had men in their gang. And look at the churches. I saw a picture of an old man in a strange ornamental dress, standing by a wall in Palastine, eighty and more years of age, in control of billions, claims he speaks for the God we all share and him, unmarried, a single bachelor. That’s what the pecking orders lead to, fights and death under a guise of doing waht’s right, what’s in our best interests, to go kick ass, do the Taliban the US created when it’s short term view was on the reds, telling the rest of us what’s important and all along, selfish singular interest.

If i had my way, no one would be allowed to judge and free love and hugs would be the order of the day. I’d be at the head, dispensing wisdom texts and having a gang of fawns agreeing with all i said. Isn’t that the truth, we all wanna be a benevolent dictator, global rulers and what we say respected, carved into brick, our forms made into statues, our minds hailed as the prophetic source of the cosmic creator – with all the rest just, conversation.
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Please! I wouldn’t want you to take leave of your senses on my account! I’m not worth it!

I would like to say a word, if I may, on sorting and ranking.

The philosopher in us often rejects ranking systems as too competitive or small-minded.

But not so fast, says MY inner philosopher.

I recall that Arnold’s “Touchstone” idea really is nothing more than a variation of ‘ranking.’ It admits that we know little until we compare. There is nothing wrong with this, I think.

It really is nothing more than another form of organization, and it does not mean there is a final answer, but that’s just critics keep doing it to keep their senses alive, rather than merely accept some authority which says ‘this author is great and you shall not question it.’

Also, it is valuable, given that there is SO much to read and ponder, especially for young students, to be given works and writers of high quality. And how do we know which ones are important if we don’t compare (i.e., rank) them?

To say why something is important is to rank it, really. We can’t get away from this completely. Ranking may not be the only method, but it is helpful, and I don’t think we should run away from it in the name of some misplaced superior-sounding prejudice.

Thomas
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But she wrote 500 essays! She started writing essays in her 20s and did not publish her well-known novels until well into her 40s. Why can’t I ask about the influence of the essays?

I’m not trying to ‘knock Woolf off her pedestal’ or anything so petty as that. Really. I’m not trying to crap on anybody except to determine more clearly how Modernism continues to play out in Letters.

Her ‘stream of consciousness’ style surfaced quite a bit after William James and his student Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, etc etc She always seems to be included as a Modernist Writer, affirming the agenda of that Men’s Club, rather than a writer of merit on her own.

I also find it interesting that her press not only published “The Waste Land” but the complete works of Freud and that she herself seems to have been gripped by an early (and negative) sexual experience, which, as far as I know, was a secret to the public for a very long time. This is not, again, meant to diminish her in any way, but just to show how inextricably caught up she was in the male world of her time. Her work certainly fits into ‘The Waste Land’ anxiety of upper class Britain.

Thomas
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But upthread Daisy Fried points out the gatekeeping mentality among us who look to rank poets according to our respective sorting systems. This is certainly more incisive than anything I’ve contributed to the conversation. It rather brought me up short, got me to reflecting. In brief, there are times when I much prefer the kind of reader I was a good thirty years ago when I knew nothing about nothing. Maybe I am a better reader than I was then and better equipped in my approaches and comprehensions. But I didn’t have a sorting system back then, having no reference points and fewer opinions. And so the page in front of me was closer, more immediate, not at all filtered through the bias of perspective. I remember reading Proust, for example, in my teeny weeny twenties. Many times since I’ve thought, man, you were way too young to get him that first time around. But I think I’ll still go with the first reading. Albertine, Swann and Marcel showed up more vibrant then. But for this, I can’t imagine wanting to be a young man again.

Thanks, Daisy Fried, for the slap upside the head. Sorting systems can be such killers, with poetry the loser.
I would mention in this context what Joyce said about what constitutes the supreme question of a work of art, but it would just get slapped down and bandied about. I am just glad I knew nothing about nothing when I first read him.

Terreson
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Bingo.

Yea, you’re right, Matt. Where do we get authority to queston authority? Exactly, dude, you’re speaking right inside the dilemma I’m talking about…

What essays of hers do you consider influential?
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“A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Why is this the only thing for which Woolf is remembered?

She wrote 500 essays, but when we read the formulating essays of modernism we always read Empson, Eliot, Pound, the New Critics, Jarrell, Schwartz, etc. “A woman must…” Here is how she is remembered as an essayist. Which is disgusting. Which proves my point.

And again, Woolf, herself, wrote that literature had been controlled by men. Yet Woolf is put forth my Michael Robbins as proof that I am wrong!!

Do you see the absurdity here?

The status quo (and we would expect this in a field as clever as literature) rule the roost not only by exclusion, but by the tokens (of some oppressive stereotype) they choose to include.
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>Frances seems a tad verbose, though.

The purloined letter, in plain sight, all along!

:~)

Kent
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anytimefrances, huh? Tell anytime Thomas Brady says hello. Frances seems a tad verbose, though. One needn’t waste so many words on Burroughs. I can describe Burroughs and his appeal to the Beats in one word: money.

Thomas
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There is a regular commentator on the guardian books blog, going by the name anytimefrances, who is quite simply the best critic there, who can handle her own with all comers and has proved themself to be capable of the sharpest wit going, able to slice to the core in one line, any pretenders to the Critic throne.

s/he is the only person whose gender is unknown and just by being there, taught me some of the most fundamental lessons in writing one can learn. for example, how to deploy upper case effectively, by keeping all lower until the Critic needs to make an arresting point.

s/he is a very intelligent mind and i am indebted to this person, as one anytimefrances, is worth a thousand less sharp voices.

However, much like you, s/he has a pet hate which sends atf into spewing apoplectic rants in a paroxysm of pure bile, directed towards the tax- money spent on the Monarchy, *junkie literature* and people who make too much noise. what s/he terms BOOM ! BOOM !

a/he is a sufferer from tinnitus and these outbursts can vary between mild and funny, to a volcano of incoherent rage, littered with fuk this eff that, cnut and all the rest of it. s/he claims to despise swearing but when something sets her off and s/he gets going – phwoar, yer wanna stand back Tom me arl mucker.

. but this side of atf, the mad side if you like, s/he couldn’t be the top class with s/he is, without it. this is anytime frances on William Burroughs:

I have read a few threads here on Burroughs and those who say they’ve read him and that he’s not ‘all that good’ are usually ganged up on and abused and insulted. I’m more inclined to believe these readers who have read him and are not fanatical about him. These reader seem to me to have a reasonable balanced attitude. His idolisers seem to think he is the greatest writer of all time, that he is the best, that no one can touch him, that he is a super hero. This fanaticism puts me off him.

These are two of the titles of his novels “Junkie”, “Queer” so why condemn someone for calling it ‘junkie literature’ – that’s what they themselves say it is, to appeal to a certain sort of reader. It’s not meant to appeal to others types of readers, it’s meant to shock them and put them off; the shock value of the titles – and contents – is what makes it appeal to the other sort of reader, who wants to feel that they know what life is at the underbelly, who want to know about the drugs and prostitutes that obsessed him all his life.
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First, of course Michael and John and others are right about the importance of Stein, Woolf, etc. Of course Thomas is wrong about several things, especially Marianne Moore.

Second, of course, anyone can have opinions about anything regardless of gender, and express them.

Third, especially this: Eileen–thanks for elegantly explaining what my jibe apparently didn’t communicate.

I’m always mystified by the need to rank greatness, excellence, etc. There’s a gatekeeper-mentality to this, and though gatekeeping does seem to be something of a boy’s game, of course I play that game myself; when I read I’m always saying, this is good, this is great, this is mediocre, this is awful. Of course. I like to make judgments. It’s important to reading and writing. But judgment is only a small part of gatekeeping; this kind of gatekeeping–who’s in, who’s out, who’s *really* as good as her reputation and who was just in the in-crowd–has very little to say about what art and life are about.

Still, it’s not for me to tell anyone not to have the conversations they want to have. I apologize for seeming to want to shut anyone up.

Carry on, boys, and the occasional girl.
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That’s perfectly fine, Thomas. I don’t doubt your superior tastes would be perfectly fine with M. Moore, as well.

>P.S. A thousand apologies for my grammar, I’m writing fast…

Don’t let your typing get ahead of your thinking!
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I’d rather drink Elinor Wylie’s “warm claret” than eat M. Moore’s cookies.

Thomas

P.S. A thousand apologies for my grammar, I’m writing fast…
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Matters of Mr. Brady’s grammar aside, this “housewife” sounds less than “dull” to me!

Kent
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The idea that Michael or I have the power to decide whether the little women are great or not is absurd, of course. I was just trying to speak up for a literary history that I had thought was settled already. I started reading Stein and Woolf as a teenager, and I have always taken them to be part of my heritage too. I agree with Eileen that in some respects Stein and Woolf’s literary history is parallel because the experience of female writers is so different than that of male writers — literary history can be sliced and diced by any demographic indicator, and that would be true — class, race, gender. Eileen was being neither churlish nor misinformed about Stein and Woolf in this observation, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them fellow travelers, as she does; nor do I think that Stein and Woolf were mistaken to aim for an un-hyphenated literary history, as Eileen does. I’d be curious to hear from others on this opinion of Eileen’s.

Meanwhile this got started because Thomas got harrummphy about Michael making a list of great female modernist, saying that Michael was grasping at straws and characterizing Woolf as an artist’s model and publisher. Then Thomas got outraged when I pointed out that it was an insult to dismiss a professional writer by saying we should think of her by her ancillary activities, and mentioned that it was traditionally sexist for men to use belittling rhetoric about women. Then Thomas, master of hyperbole, lectured me about my use of hyperbole. And so Daisy makes a barroom-style quip about men men men men men men men men (to quote Monty Python), lumping us all together. I have failed to heed Don Cherry’s advice to beware distractions, and while this tea party is indeed not one of Gertrude’s it has at times reminded me of another literary tea, in which the immortal question was asked, “How is a raven like a writing desk?”
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One more thing about Elinor Wylie. I read more things by her on-line, as she’s actually quite good. She’s a force to be reckoned with, in fact. Look at this:

Love Song

Lovers eminent in love
Ever diversities combine;
The vocal chords of the cushat-dove,
The snake’s articulated spine.

Such elective elements
Educate the eye and lip
With one’s refreshing innocence,
The other’s claim to scholarship.

The serpent’s knowledge of the world
Learn, and the dove’s more naïve charm;
Whether your ringlets should be curled,
And why he likes his claret warm.

This lady was one hot lady! Good lord!

Why someone would prefer Marianne Moore to this is…well, Marianne Moore belonged to that clique, you see…the important one…Moore was editor of ‘The Dial’ the magazine in the 20s that published ‘The Waste Land’ and gave E.E. Cummings, WC Williams, Ezra Pound, and Eliot the annual Dial Prize–wealthy Scofield Thayer, who Eliot met at Milton Academy ran the ‘Dial’ before his crack-up.

Yes, Marianne Moore gets far wider notice than Wylie, even though Wylie is a thousand times richer and more enjoyable to read, as hackneyed as her verses sometimes are. But Moore, her brittle, rock-hard verses are as sickeningly dull as a bored housewife letting cookies burn into hard little rocks and throwing them at you. Moore, the bric-a-brac poet.

I’m all for ‘experimentation’ and it’s fine if someone like Moore attempts to turn poetry into a plastic art, but if you’re going to take a temporal art and turn it into a plastic one, you better learn how to work in the temporal art first. Have you ever noticed that the poets who make poetry feel like sculpture are the ones who can also make it sing? The modernists experiments of those like Moore were complete failures, like burned, rock-hard cookies.

Thank you, Des, for giving us Wylie, a neglected woman from the modernist era, who, obviously somewhat deranged, at least gives us some interesting poetry, unlike the Modernist Club token Marianne (BO-RING) Moore.

By the way, I notice that H.D.’s husband Richard Aldington’s big anthology from the 30s picks one Wylie poem, and it’s that “Eagle and the Mole” atrocity, which is really her WORST poem. Why did you choose it?

Thomas
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Oh that’s great, Yeats with his big fur coat cursing the middle classes! Yes, that’s the modernists, haters of the middle classes. Well-connected, aristocratic haters of the middle classes. That’s Modernism’s face which their supporters try to hide, making them into “innovative” cultural heroes–when they were really men of low ambition and haughty expectations.

As for Yeats being some great Romantic-Modernist straddler: T.S. Eliot’s first blast of criticism (introduction to the Sacred Wood) was to quote Arnold calling Byron “empty” and Shelley “incoherent.” You have to forget Shelley in order to think the Modernists are any good. That’s the thing. The Modernist weren’t expanders. They were narrowers. They wanted us to forget Shelley (and Poe and Millay). They were haters, not lovers. You have to buy Eliot’s pessimism before you can buy Modernism. Yeats was closer to Pound than he was to ancient bards–but then who the hell are the ancient bards? It’s all religious rot, don’t you think? This craggy, misty, bardic tradition? Misty is great, I suppose, for poetry, but…

All these ‘isms! All these schools! All these ancient bardic pretensions! Nah, there’s just good people who write good poetry, and then there’s the ambitious swine…

This is what’s it all about, right?

This:

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose heards with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix’d; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lye.

And who the hell da ya think wrote this Romantic thing, eh?

Alexander Pope!!

Thomas
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This leaves me stone cold. It doesn’t move me at all.

It’s doggerel, by the way.

Listen:

Autumn is over the long leaves that—love us,
And over the mice—in barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of rowan—above us,
And yellow the wet wild—-strawberry leaves.
The hour of the waning love has—beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls—now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion—forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping—brow.

The mood is mournful but the rhythm is rollicking. This is second-rate, or third-rate verse, I’m afraid.

You see, the opinions of his Yeats’ friends in the press, his friends, Pound and Eliot, the coterie! the coterie! have convinced us of something that is false, and we’ve listened, I’m afraid.

There is nothing that poetry needs right now more than independent thought; that, and listening, independent hearts and ears.

Here, by contrast is lyric poetry that IS moving, which can move one to tears, which is NOT doggerel, written by a lower-middle-class teenage girl:

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again –
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man — who happened to be you –
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud — I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place –
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Thomas
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