So much here to ponder. One note,in particular, which speaks to me: Berenson’s understanding that “it wasn’t exactly the eye that troubled our responses to art”. In my experience it isn’t exactly the ear that “troubles” (colors?) our responses to music (the touch of the ivories e.g.)
Sorry I didn't say more. I was in the midst of solving a ridiculously difficulet problem. Turns out measurements should be really precise. Who knew?
Anyway Wow pretty much summed up my initial impression. You have this way of shifting gears vey deftly moving from a" lyrical" mode to something more criticla to a bit of memoir. I like how the pieces fit together. It's what I think of as a real essay a la DeQuincy or your man Emerson. Thanks for passing it on.
I put lyrical in quotes becaause it doesnt quite do justice to the prose which is so earthy. I mean I can feel it. So there you go.
Thanks so much, Ray, especially for feeling that the four passages "fit together." I feel less incoherent. I took these four from a 2013 version of the manuscript, but I did rearrange them for this post so that "Me, in England" came first, and the "lyrical" and memorial alternated with the analytical and reportorial—something like that.
Thanks Ray. I just answered Mark’s comment, touching the first of these four passages (which I’m thinking your “Wow!” mostly touches). The others were written when we were at Rutgers. All were part of a manuscript I first put together in 1999.
Mark, man––these are great. The verbs, the phrasings, are doing all kinds of things in the first of the three. Your hair grows (intrans.), it grows colors (trans.). Your eyes clap up, thunder-purple; or they clap up thunder (obj.), purple (adj.); or they clap-up-thunder—*purple*. And it gets wilder from there. I love it, how it goes. There's roundhouse love in it, all manner of things down under and up in. I've been trying to read it aloud, and can do it forty-eleven ways. It's fun to eat, as you once said of a written thing.
And "Gillian": "Fat roses." That's good. I Google Ngrammed it, of course. You're a rare user, but I did find this, from 1876, in a magazine of horticulture: "Really some of our fat roses seem to act as if they have done wonders in vouchsafing two or three blooms in a season."
Hi Mark. Thank you so much for getting "how it goes," and for the "fat roses." That first passage, "Me, in England," was written in England 1979, in a pocket notebook, and is full of Cummings- and Thomas- and Hopkins-like things and my first experiences of English nature and English trains and homesick longing. In particular, as I recall, it was written near Dorking, Surrey (Milton country), where I would go to visit Veronica Anderson, mother of Perry Anderson, Benedict Anderson, and Melanie Anderson. We would have dinner. Veronica, in her 70s then, as I recall, would cook—my first Brussels sprouts!—and I would do the dishes and we would talk and walk a little. I was reading Perry's "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" in one of my classes at University College London, and she would tell me about his (she always called him "Rory") sweet Hungarian wife Gyöngyi. One time, she and Perry came to Veronica's for dinner, but usually it was just Veronica and yours truly. Veronica told me once that one of the effects of the Blitz on her as a young girl in London was that she became anorexic, and how a therapist cured her. I was introduced to Veronica, and she to me, before I left for my year at UCL, by a family friend named Ruth Steel. One of the great accidents of my life, that a neighbor in Englewood, Colorado happened to have known the young Veronica Anderson and her husband when they were in the US. (I realize now that I would have to go back to find out how the Andersons met the Steels.)
I had the thought, but didn't add it in: the first of the three (unlike just about anything else I recall reading by you), seemed to have some riptides pulling under it—of Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. Rich, rich stuff. Great story about Veronica Anderson and those Brussels sprouts (a vegetable I always spell wrong the first time I write it).
I misremembered and mistimed my Veronica story: the Blitz was WWII, 1940–41. Veronica's childhood story was from WWI, 1916: "Veronica got anorexia in a dark school in London, 1916, a school recommended to Veronica’s mother by Clive Bell or Lytton Strachey. Lights out to save electricity, the girl next to her threw up on Veronica. Veronica stopped eating after she overheard someone say that the girl had vomited because she hogged the raisin cake. She remembers, too, seeing a drunkard get sick in a London gutter. There she was, meditating on God in the wartime London dark—and nobody took any notice. It took an Irish psychiatrist, Craig, three months to cure her with doll-house pitchers of milk and sugar solutions, until finally she began eating again, on the verge of death." (from my notebook)
So much here to ponder. One note,in particular, which speaks to me: Berenson’s understanding that “it wasn’t exactly the eye that troubled our responses to art”. In my experience it isn’t exactly the ear that “troubles” (colors?) our responses to music (the touch of the ivories e.g.)
Hi Mark,
Sorry I didn't say more. I was in the midst of solving a ridiculously difficulet problem. Turns out measurements should be really precise. Who knew?
Anyway Wow pretty much summed up my initial impression. You have this way of shifting gears vey deftly moving from a" lyrical" mode to something more criticla to a bit of memoir. I like how the pieces fit together. It's what I think of as a real essay a la DeQuincy or your man Emerson. Thanks for passing it on.
I put lyrical in quotes becaause it doesnt quite do justice to the prose which is so earthy. I mean I can feel it. So there you go.
Ray
Thanks so much, Ray, especially for feeling that the four passages "fit together." I feel less incoherent. I took these four from a 2013 version of the manuscript, but I did rearrange them for this post so that "Me, in England" came first, and the "lyrical" and memorial alternated with the analytical and reportorial—something like that.
Wow!
Thanks Ray. I just answered Mark’s comment, touching the first of these four passages (which I’m thinking your “Wow!” mostly touches). The others were written when we were at Rutgers. All were part of a manuscript I first put together in 1999.
Mark, man––these are great. The verbs, the phrasings, are doing all kinds of things in the first of the three. Your hair grows (intrans.), it grows colors (trans.). Your eyes clap up, thunder-purple; or they clap up thunder (obj.), purple (adj.); or they clap-up-thunder—*purple*. And it gets wilder from there. I love it, how it goes. There's roundhouse love in it, all manner of things down under and up in. I've been trying to read it aloud, and can do it forty-eleven ways. It's fun to eat, as you once said of a written thing.
And "Gillian": "Fat roses." That's good. I Google Ngrammed it, of course. You're a rare user, but I did find this, from 1876, in a magazine of horticulture: "Really some of our fat roses seem to act as if they have done wonders in vouchsafing two or three blooms in a season."
Hi Mark. Thank you so much for getting "how it goes," and for the "fat roses." That first passage, "Me, in England," was written in England 1979, in a pocket notebook, and is full of Cummings- and Thomas- and Hopkins-like things and my first experiences of English nature and English trains and homesick longing. In particular, as I recall, it was written near Dorking, Surrey (Milton country), where I would go to visit Veronica Anderson, mother of Perry Anderson, Benedict Anderson, and Melanie Anderson. We would have dinner. Veronica, in her 70s then, as I recall, would cook—my first Brussels sprouts!—and I would do the dishes and we would talk and walk a little. I was reading Perry's "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" in one of my classes at University College London, and she would tell me about his (she always called him "Rory") sweet Hungarian wife Gyöngyi. One time, she and Perry came to Veronica's for dinner, but usually it was just Veronica and yours truly. Veronica told me once that one of the effects of the Blitz on her as a young girl in London was that she became anorexic, and how a therapist cured her. I was introduced to Veronica, and she to me, before I left for my year at UCL, by a family friend named Ruth Steel. One of the great accidents of my life, that a neighbor in Englewood, Colorado happened to have known the young Veronica Anderson and her husband when they were in the US. (I realize now that I would have to go back to find out how the Andersons met the Steels.)
I had the thought, but didn't add it in: the first of the three (unlike just about anything else I recall reading by you), seemed to have some riptides pulling under it—of Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. Rich, rich stuff. Great story about Veronica Anderson and those Brussels sprouts (a vegetable I always spell wrong the first time I write it).
I misremembered and mistimed my Veronica story: the Blitz was WWII, 1940–41. Veronica's childhood story was from WWI, 1916: "Veronica got anorexia in a dark school in London, 1916, a school recommended to Veronica’s mother by Clive Bell or Lytton Strachey. Lights out to save electricity, the girl next to her threw up on Veronica. Veronica stopped eating after she overheard someone say that the girl had vomited because she hogged the raisin cake. She remembers, too, seeing a drunkard get sick in a London gutter. There she was, meditating on God in the wartime London dark—and nobody took any notice. It took an Irish psychiatrist, Craig, three months to cure her with doll-house pitchers of milk and sugar solutions, until finally she began eating again, on the verge of death." (from my notebook)