Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Pnin
(Vladimir Nabokov) (1953) Say what you like but America and Americans are lovely. In this grand, concise novel, Nabokov sets his fish, Professor Timofey Pnin, given new teeth to match the wounds of his new challenges, in unaccustomed, American, waters, with morbidly hilarious results, in an “almost perfect work” according to Harold Bloom, the man who, like Anna Cunningham, has read everything. Nabokov described the pedantic Professor as “A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity…
Continue Reading →The Masterpieces of the Early Flemish
Jerome Bosch
(F. Hanfstaengl) (1905) One of those great little guides, blocked in gold, crammed with plates and a table of particulars – no commentary required. The early Flemish painters were conventional in subject, usually involving Christian imagery, but were radical in their eclectic rendering. Some examples will illuminate:
Continue Reading →Goethe – The Man and His Character
(Joseph McCabe) (1912) In the years before Kaiser Wilhelm turned the English off anything German, this stodgy but comprehensive life is a good introduction to the Teutonic Shakespeare. From 28 August 1749 through Faust Part I, numerous flings with strait-laced ladies (all lovers of literature), festschrifts in Weimar, an Italian pilgrimage, the search for a Germany, mateship with Schiller, the French Revolution and Faust II, to the last cry for “More light!”, the story carries you along and hopefully leads you to the work. And what work! He is the post-classical bridge to the new literature and he remains a Giant,…
Continue Reading →The Stones of Venice
(John Ruskin) (3 volumes, 1851-3) Ruskin, high priest of fine art and architecture, wrote these 3 volumes based on a deep well of learning and meticulous research, including a Pevsner-like mountain of sketches and using the new technique of daguerreotype, a revolution in architectural appreciation and review. It will be read from cover to cover now only by art historicists, not architects, for on aesthetics Ruskin (like Carlyle) is a man out of time: “art is valuable or otherwise , only as it expresses the personality, activity, and living perception of a good and great human soul; …it may express and…
Continue Reading →Israfel
Daguerreotype copy by Oscar Halling, c. 1860s
(Hervey Allen) (1926) The big Pennsylvanian author of the romantic hit Anthony Adverse (apparently the favourite novel of Tony Curtis) obviously admired the lush and gothic, and his long, detailed, overwritten biography of Poe is great fun in a crusty, hoary, adamantine way. Poe’s life was such as to invite that treatment. His work might best be called ‘patchy’, and his life a tribulation. Harold Bloom, who famously detested Poe’s writing, said “Only outrageous overplaying works with Poe…but [he], as I have glumly acknowledged, is inescapable. To dream everyone’s nightmare has to be genius, which cannot be denied Poe.”* He did…
Continue Reading →