Books, Literature Miscellany

 Cleaning out my Clippings app, again, of things noted but not posted here until now.

I read The Age of Innocence in prison; Ethan Frome was read in college; I like Wharton.What Do We Do with The Age of Innocence in 2020?: Sarah Blackwood on the Lasting Insights of Edith Wharton's Classic :

The Age of Innocence has, a bit surprisingly, gained in freshness and insight in the 21st century. Certainly it seems the Gilded Age is back, subjecting a diverse society to the nightmarish dramas and conventions of the one percent. How the social mores of the rich shape the lives and values of everyone else has arguably been the topic of American popular and political culture throughout the 2000s and 2010s. And Wharton’s ability to demonstrate the mercilessness with which individualized otherness is socially reproached and censured in the United States remains incomparable.

But, more optimistically, The Age of Innocence feels, today, prescient in how it asks us to draw from the dramas of intimacy the power to imagine more profligately. May Welland, the novel gently reminds us, may be more than just a stock bridezilla. Newland Archer, it now seems clearer, is one in a long line of Men Who Explain Things to Us. And perhaps most provokingly, the famous, tear‑jerking ending of The Age of Innocence feels newly open. Through tears, we can now celebrate Ellen Olenska’s life in full, as something that extends beyond the question of whether she might pair‑bond with a flawed man trying to achieve his own freedom through her. The novel’s meaningful elasticity is thanks to a writer who was exacting, meticulous, and perceptive, in her life and in her art, fascinated by the alchemical interplay of social structure and individual freedom.

The Glutton by AK Blakemore review – the man who ate everything:

However, The Glutton’s weakest passages are more interesting than most novels’ strongest ones. If you add the wild story of Tarare to the setting of revolutionary France, and throw in the chaotic riches of Blakemore’s prose, The Glutton is certain to be one of the most remarkable novels of the year. As a reviewer, I generally give books away when I’ve finished writing about them. This one I will keep.

A brilliant piece of creative non-fiction: Midwestern by Courtney Ebert.

The perils of time and fame: The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor.

Freud Meets Homer by Mark Adair:

Tension-tolerance is implicit in the teachings of Classical culture, which valorized self-restraint and, above all, self-knowledge. Tension-tolerance made possible Classical culture’s unswervable resolve to learn more and more about both the inner and outer worlds. This ethic, admittedly an ideal, is sometimes called paideia. Freud’s immersion in paideia helped him identify tolerance for reality, both internal and external, as the main challenge to the human mind.

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Freud points out that no one, however, entirely renounces hallucination; instead, we retain that device in dreams, which continue to hallucinate (disguised) satisfactions of wishes. Society retains the device in a group daydream, akin to a delusion, that is made to seem real by mutual grooming among scientists, media, economists, and the public, and revolves around the fantasy that human cleverness and technology will omnipotently conquer every threat to human life, every frustration to human wishes.

Long before Freud, as we’ll now see, Homer, in symbolic narrative, recreated both the infantile hallucination and the agony of disillusionment....

In Daughter, Claudia Dey Explores the Ugly Side of the Great Literary Male.

New Homelands: Alexander Chee on Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger:

This book returns now to a publishing landscape that is very different from the one in which it first was published. Imagine back to when the many successful writers of color Chang has shepherded just through the Iowa Writers Workshop in her time as the director have not even imagined themselves as writers yet. Some are yet to be born. There were so few Asian American women writers that Chang was compared to two writers she does not at all resemble in style–Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston–and who are in turn very different from each other. Whatever big rebellion she had on her mind back in 2005, she is one of the few American writers who can be said to have actively worked to change the literary landscape in which she is understood, helping to create a more diverse literature in which she might actually be seen for the writer she is.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021 by Clinton Heylin review – a fierce kind of love 

That will do for now.

sch 9/28