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And even weaknesses delight the eye
Nov. 9th, 2012 02:08 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 3. High today: 7. I went out back this afternoon to see if the beets were still alive--they are--and was surprised to see that in the back corner against the cinder-block wall, where the sinking sun doesn't get anymore, the topsoil (where I'd dug in the new burdock plants, so they won't take over in the spring) was white, like it was salted--frozen. The air temperature, at head-height or what-have-you, was probably at least five degrees.
Something I think about now and then (which is a banal thing, but I suppose each of us has our own set of banal things that we think about now and then): if you produce something exceptionally good (and that's recognized as exceptionally good), people will pay attention to stuff you produce that's not so good, maybe mediocre, maybe lousy. Frost makes me think about this quite a lot, of course. Leonard Cohen--reading lightly through the Leonard Cohen greatest hits collection years ago, I thought, this guy doesn't seem to know whether anything he writes is any good or not ... and the trouble is, when you're Leonard Cohen, it isn't so important to other people whether a poem you've written is any good or not, because it is a Leonard Cohen, and so you can't rely on other people to let you know whether it's any good or not either. (Somewhere or other my father picked up some sketches by one of the Group of Seven painters--I don't even remember which one. They're tiny things, not much more than smudges of paint, but they are, in some minimal sense, Group of Sevens. Well, as a friend of mine used to say, you don't go to a concert for the music, you go to pay homage to the genius. There's not nothing to that.) A long time ago I read a bunch of pretty tedious Anthony Burgess novels that I never would've heard of it not for A Clockwork Orange. (It's a really kind of oppressive thing in academic philosophy, and I guess lots of other scholarly fields, that you can't be a serious scholar of so-and-so unless you've read every scrap that so-and-so ever wrote, even if reading many or most of those scraps is a waste of time for anything except being a serious scholar of so-and-so. I think far too frequently about this guy, before I gave a paper on the Republic at a conference last year, saying to me, "Still working on the Republic, eh?" I told him that I was just getting started, which was of course true. (Here's the beginning of the back-cover review quote on Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction: "Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book." Good Lord but it bugs me when people say that kind of thing. Do you know how many books there are? I mean, think of it this way--if Annie Dillard had not written this book, do you think she herself would read it? Well, maybe. But I suspect she would rather read some book about bug behaviour, or, you know, some other book that people who are interested in the world, as opposed to, or and not just, interested in what people say about the world, would read.) Sometimes I think about how if I somehow managed to write an Important Book, then people would become interested in all kinds of stupid things I have to say about everything. Sometimes I think about how I, like the vast majority of people, escape from all kinds of criticism and condemnation by virtue of the fact that nobody thinks that anything I say is all that important. It is, so far, and it will almost certainly remain, basically impossible for anyone to think it's important (I mean like important for the world, not just important for you and me or whatever) to criticize what I put in this blog-like thing, for instance. But for some people it suddenly happens that other people think they're important, and so everything they do becomes fair game for criticism. All those lousy poems of Frost's--I wouldn't know they existed, to consider them lousy, if not for the good poems; if I just came across them randomly somewhere, I wouldn't bother to think they're lousy; I wouldn't think a thing of them at all.)
Tonight I picked up a used copy of Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, which seems to be some even looser set of reflections or meditations than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, surely not something I ever would've come across (or maybe that ever would have been published, or written) if not for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but there is, off the bat, something I like about it: an apparent willingness, or rather urgency, to say things that are important, without being clear about what the point of saying them is, or what they have to do with each other. (Of course that kind of thing may sometimes be a result of a failure of some kind, maybe of laziness....) I feel that urgency ... a lot? The last time, come to think of it, was when it suddenly struck me, the other day, as important for someone to read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Something I think about now and then (which is a banal thing, but I suppose each of us has our own set of banal things that we think about now and then): if you produce something exceptionally good (and that's recognized as exceptionally good), people will pay attention to stuff you produce that's not so good, maybe mediocre, maybe lousy. Frost makes me think about this quite a lot, of course. Leonard Cohen--reading lightly through the Leonard Cohen greatest hits collection years ago, I thought, this guy doesn't seem to know whether anything he writes is any good or not ... and the trouble is, when you're Leonard Cohen, it isn't so important to other people whether a poem you've written is any good or not, because it is a Leonard Cohen, and so you can't rely on other people to let you know whether it's any good or not either. (Somewhere or other my father picked up some sketches by one of the Group of Seven painters--I don't even remember which one. They're tiny things, not much more than smudges of paint, but they are, in some minimal sense, Group of Sevens. Well, as a friend of mine used to say, you don't go to a concert for the music, you go to pay homage to the genius. There's not nothing to that.) A long time ago I read a bunch of pretty tedious Anthony Burgess novels that I never would've heard of it not for A Clockwork Orange. (It's a really kind of oppressive thing in academic philosophy, and I guess lots of other scholarly fields, that you can't be a serious scholar of so-and-so unless you've read every scrap that so-and-so ever wrote, even if reading many or most of those scraps is a waste of time for anything except being a serious scholar of so-and-so. I think far too frequently about this guy, before I gave a paper on the Republic at a conference last year, saying to me, "Still working on the Republic, eh?" I told him that I was just getting started, which was of course true. (Here's the beginning of the back-cover review quote on Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction: "Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book." Good Lord but it bugs me when people say that kind of thing. Do you know how many books there are? I mean, think of it this way--if Annie Dillard had not written this book, do you think she herself would read it? Well, maybe. But I suspect she would rather read some book about bug behaviour, or, you know, some other book that people who are interested in the world, as opposed to, or and not just, interested in what people say about the world, would read.) Sometimes I think about how if I somehow managed to write an Important Book, then people would become interested in all kinds of stupid things I have to say about everything. Sometimes I think about how I, like the vast majority of people, escape from all kinds of criticism and condemnation by virtue of the fact that nobody thinks that anything I say is all that important. It is, so far, and it will almost certainly remain, basically impossible for anyone to think it's important (I mean like important for the world, not just important for you and me or whatever) to criticize what I put in this blog-like thing, for instance. But for some people it suddenly happens that other people think they're important, and so everything they do becomes fair game for criticism. All those lousy poems of Frost's--I wouldn't know they existed, to consider them lousy, if not for the good poems; if I just came across them randomly somewhere, I wouldn't bother to think they're lousy; I wouldn't think a thing of them at all.)
Tonight I picked up a used copy of Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, which seems to be some even looser set of reflections or meditations than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, surely not something I ever would've come across (or maybe that ever would have been published, or written) if not for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but there is, off the bat, something I like about it: an apparent willingness, or rather urgency, to say things that are important, without being clear about what the point of saying them is, or what they have to do with each other. (Of course that kind of thing may sometimes be a result of a failure of some kind, maybe of laziness....) I feel that urgency ... a lot? The last time, come to think of it, was when it suddenly struck me, the other day, as important for someone to read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
