Treating metaphors as merelycolorful ways of saying things can irritate them, and sometimes they bite. In a local arts & culture magazine, an aricle about how hard it was to restore Emily Dickinson's house. It was helped by the discovery of some fragments of wall paper still adhering to surfaces. "Discovery of the wall paper fragments...lit a a fire under museum directors and the board of governors," the article says. "Not that the fire was quick to burn," he continues, giving us time to beat out the metaphorical flames consuming Emily's home.
I have every sympathey with myself here, thinking perhaps that my perplexity arose from the fact that I was actually not there at all. Still I have to admire the grace, self-possession and dry wit with which I conducted myself. I hope I was let off.
Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker about Max Beerbohm, the paradigmatic beloved minor writer. "Beerbohm found so many ways to be modest that when he had to try and be major he couldn't." (Max assembled materials for a big Jamesian novel he got nowhere with.) "Still," Gopnik writes, there is no such thing as a minor writer, because--there is no such thing as a major writer. As Max wrote, considering Whistler, even Shakespeare occupies shockingly little of our attention -- shocking, that is, for those of us who are trying to occupy it too. (Boswell, one of Max's favorites, said the same thing about Voltaire: no had ever been more talked of, and look how little, really, Voltaire was talked of.) This means that bigness is a mirage, but it also means smallness is a kind of illusion too. Anyone who is read at all is more or less the same size."
From an article in the 0online NYRB by Glen H. Shepherd about photiographs of the now-nonexistent Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego: "There is something bewitchingly surreal about his photographs of the Hain initiation ceremony, in which young Selk’nam men are hazed by a pantheon of spirits that are revealed, in the final moments (forbidden to women), to be kinsmen in elaborate masks." An African people I read about have an inititation for young men in which weird sounds are heard in the bush, and the young men are dared to follow the sounds. When they have sufficiently faced their terror of the spirit world the elders appear and show them how the sound is made, with what in English is called a bullroarer. Basically the older men induct the younger into the facts of the world: we are the gods you fear. It's like a child being told there's no Santa Claus, it's Dad in the red suit, but don't tell the younger ones.
Women aren't part of these intitiation ceremonies -- theirs turn on menstruation and other secrets -- maybe they already guess these male secrets, or maybe they don't care.
Wouldn't it be interseting if our churches worked the same way -- you believe and pray and have magic helpers and angels and speak to Grandma in heaven, and then when you grow up your "confirmation" is actually to learn it's all not so; it's a means or a divine game but not a set of facts, and we ourselves are its origin. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
I'm glad to know that despite being a former cover star (whatever that is) I have not slaved uselessly as a wealth manager only to find it is not the way to riches
The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive
in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really
introduced.
Reading "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" for reasons that will be clear when my Harper's essay-after-next (November) appears. It's the best example I know -- there are many -- of the novel that contains summaries or selections of novels written by a character, to varied effect. (Nabokov's mostly to discharge ideas that sound wonderful but really couldn't be written.)
Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Reinhardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic strong Shakespeare verse-speaking. ANd of course Helen Mirren as Prospero -- sorry, Prospera -- giving one of the most moving performances in a Shakespeare film I've ever seen. Somehow her exchanges with Miranda were more touching and intimate as mother-daughter than as father-daughter, and her concern for both her lost power and her child were enriched. Her great last speech ("This rough magic I here abjure") had me in tears, maybe because I feel myself to be an old (would-be) mage in the same condition.
Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Rheihardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic strong Shakespeare verse-speaking. ANd of course Helen Mirren as Prospero -- sorry, Prospera -- giving one of the most moving performances in a Shakespeare film I've ever seen. Somehow her exchanges with Miranda were more touching and intimate as mother-daughter than as father-daughter, and her concern for both her lost power and her child were enriched. Her great last speech ("This rough magic I here abjure") had me in tears.
I enjoy the Times Litereary Supplement for a lot of reasons. It reviews books that wouldn't be noticed in any general weekly. It reviews books in languages other than English and quotes from them in the original, which even if I can't read is pleasant to encounter. And it furnishes me every week with examples of how different British and American English are, both in older locutions and in new-fangled ones -- despite the fear in my youth that the two would become an indistinguishable slew they have actually drifted farther apart in recent decades (I think). Older locution of the week, in a review of a Antonia Fraser's autobiography: her mother's brother "contracts polio: from his propinquity to the Oxford poor in Cowley or the bran-tub of the Countess of Jersey's lucky-dip?"
