Prufrock is off this week and will return on August 8.
Reviews and News:
Poet Basil Bunting‘s life story is a largely forgotten monument to the twentieth century:
“As a London Times correspondent in Tehran, in 1952, he watched as a hired mob congregated outside his hotel and chanted, ‘death to Mr. Bunting!’ Guessing, correctly, that nobody calling for Mr. Bunting’s death had ever seen the man, Bunting joined the mob and chanted along with them. Soon after, he and his family fled the country, driving from Iran to Bunting’s mother’s house in England—a one-month trip—in a company car.”
And his greatest work, the epic-length poem “Briggflatts: An Autobiography,” started out as a collection of lines he thought of on the commuter train:
“‘Briggflatts’ chronicles both a teen-age love affair and the growth of a poet’s mind. Its central narrative, in which a broken-off young romance inaugurates a life of self-blame and restless wandering, sounds, when summarized, like a tale of ‘the one who got away.’ But the poem is something more sober, and more unsettled: a five-movement composition in the key of unfulfillment, with, as its opening and closing theme, love that is not simply abandoned but ‘murdered,’ ‘discarded.’ The poem’s arc mirrors Bunting’s own travels, beginning and ending in Northumberland, and it overlays his adventurous life with the journeys of legendary leaders (Alexander the Great, King Eric Bloodaxe), as if to suggest that conquerors and lovesick teen-agers can be equally ambitious, and equally frustrated.”
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Gudetama, Japan’s next-generation emoji, is an egg yolk with “no spunk” nor will to carry on.
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Philip Roth : the movies :: Henry James : the stage.
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Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, worked for T.S. Eliot in the 1960s.
“I hadn’t been there more than a few months when he caught me looking out of the window onto Russell Square. I had my back both to my colleagues and to the door, and I was saying: ‘Look at all those lucky people in Russell Square doing bugger all.’ My colleagues were silent and when I turned round I realised why: Eliot had come into the room and was glowering at me. I might as well have been tearing at the grapes with murderous paws. After I’d graduated to blurb-writing he showed all the directors a blurb I’d written, saying: ‘Surely we can’t publish this.’ It was for Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack and I’d said that the knack in question was the knack of getting girls into bed. Once, early on, I pointed out a discrepancy between two printings of one of his early poems – I can’t remember which. I was quite proud of myself. He said it didn’t matter.
“The disapproval wasn’t all one way. When no one else was in the room I’d look at the letters his secretary typed up for him and turn away dismayed to have found him thanking people for their ‘courteous’ or ‘gracious’ letters. How could he use such awful words? Then there were the clothes, the light blue flannel suits: surely a poet, even an elderly poet, should dress in normal tweeds, or in black, or in something more outlandish altogether. Worst of all, I saw him one evening standing at the top of the stairs holding hands with Valerie. How could someone so old and so grand allow himself to be seen in public holding hands with his wife?”
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Save the fireflies! Sweet summer nights depend on it.
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For the first time, the winning Hemingway was also a Hemingway.
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A new collection of early stories by Walter Benjamin reveals a young flâneur.
“The somewhat crazed, oversensitive young man in Still Story, a gently disguised Benjamin, is himself returning to university by train from Switzerland, where he spent ‘a few expensive and rain-filled days’ that seemed to have drenched his spirit in listlessness. Alone, he takes care to ‘summon up a mild sense of boredom’. He finds himself staring, for no obvious reason, at an older couple in the car. Then he sees the lady.
“Benjamin’s story is laced with the sexual frustration of youth. Nonetheless, there is poetry at work here: he makes nothing happen. No dramatic arguments erupt on the train; he doesn’t attempt to write Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. Even at this tender age, he shows flashes of restraint and composure. And this fiction conjures up themes that would come to fruition in his later criticism. The usefulness of boredom and the loneliness of travel give way to silent observations on culture and fashion (the girl’s travel coat is a ‘plaid monstrosity’). New technologies transform human experience; you can feel the speed of the express train pressuring the young man’s still-forming thoughts.”
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Essay of the Day:
“How Feminism Lost the Feminine Mystique”
“The first edition of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique was pro-family and pro-men. It made no mention of contraception or abortion. It was a questing philosophical work, not a screed.
“Seen from the vantage of today’s feminism, these are startling facts. Friedan’s groundbreaking work was crucial in launching second-wave feminism, the movement that tore through the 1960s and revolutionized the way women were treated in the workforce, in public life, and at home. And yet nowhere in that first edition was there any talk of the two topics that have become culture war battlefronts. The tone is passionate but not angry. It was only years later that Friedan would make culture war issues a part of her particular brand of feminism.
“When she first published her book, Friedan was tapping into something much deeper than social or political issues. The problem with modern women was not family and children, she argued, but the idea that family should be your entire life. Hungry for creative and intellectual work and hobbies, suburban women felt isolated. Suffering from ‘this nameless aching dissatisfaction, women,’ Friedan wrote, were ‘trapped in endless and empty housewifery.’ (Of course, not all of them were.)”
Read the rest here.
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Poem of the Day: “Noise” by Marilyn Taylor
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Picture of the Day: Firefly Flight Path
