Posted on: February 26, 2009
Storm in the Rockies, by Albert Bierstadt. 1866
We have some new fiction on tap, by Nels Hanson: In Pace Requiescat. Persectivalism, elective affinities and religious sensibilities. What is a hero? Why do some of us view the same people in such radically different ways? Your comments about the story are welcome.
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I’ve been a part of the flu crew for more than a week now. Still can’t kick it. It’s a strange time, and brings on feelings of pure selfishness and self-pity unlike few other states. Being sick also seems to create infinite loops and obsessions while caught between sleep and wakefulness. I’ve spent more than a few recent nights thinking I had discovered deathless prose and wonderful scenes…
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Posted on: February 23, 2009
In Pace Requiescat
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
—W.B. Yeats
To Poe’s so acute, so prophetic meditation of 150 years ago — that the truly extraordinary mind or spirit would necessarily find itself isolated, hated, and misunderstood by the society in which it appeared, and, especially, that news of the eminently great should not be sought in biographies but in “the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows” — the life of Joseph Clifton Case bears haunting testimony.
In all of recorded history, who but Case so intimately sensed the dread duality of all things, and so personally suffered this jarring collision of opposites, with less rancor or self-pity, less sorrow or hope?
Because he understood those emotions were barred to him, by himself from himself, for our better good…
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Posted on: February 19, 2009
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke. 1910
Rilke’s one and only novel is a mysterious, beautifully written, baffling modernist stew. Reading it for the third time, I was struck again by its yearning and incompleteness, its meditative and incantatory qualities, and the sense it gives us of loneliness and despair, without removing hope and the potential for redemption.
The protagonist is a struggling young poet, living in Paris, poverty stricken, seemingly quite alone. He is neither successful at his craft, nor completely defeated. Rilke presents Malte in the present, lets him take us back in time into his childhood, and also much further back, into the Middle Ages. This is done in a seemingly random fashion, but works. Fits. Amplifies what comes before and after. The voice of Malte is erudite, extremely…
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Posted on: February 16, 2009
Mysteries, by Knut Hamsun. 1892
Okay. So, yes. The title of my blog post is a bit misleading, if not melodramatic. It’s a bald attempt to merge two new additions to Spinozablue — by Alexis Wingate and George Spencer, respectively. Here and here. Alexis brings us a provocative essay on Knut Hamsun’s novel, Mysteries, and George gives us his unique improvisation from a line of Barbara Guest’s poetry.
But there is a precedent for that merger. Women and roses have been connected for millennia, in obvious and covert ways. Mysterious ways. Wild, secret, deep under the surface ways. Secret societies used The Rose as a multi-faceted symbol for woman, growth, love, birth, beauty, the unfolding of life, surprise, shock and awe. Perhaps Dagny is Hamsun’s rose. Barbara Guest used the symbol in a…
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Posted on: February 16, 2009
Alexis Wingate — The Mystery of Mysteries
To dissect Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries as one would an ordinary novel is impossible. This is a book in which nothing is quite as it seems to be, and the more closely the reader examines it or tries to make sense of it, the more inexplicable it becomes. At the core of the story is Johan Nagel, easily one of the most enigmatic characters in literary history. His arrival in a small Norwegian town in 1891, with no visible aim or purpose, is the first piece in a puzzle that doesn’t ever quite fit together. Moreover, we are left wondering, at the end, if it was actually meant to.
Hamsun’s initial description of Nagel paints a portrait of a rather ordinary individual:
“He was below average in height; his face was dark-complexioned, with deep brown eyes which had a
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Posted on: February 16, 2009
A Line from Barbara Guest’s Roses
That air in life is important but may be less so in the arts interests me. But we are 60% water and worth $28.49 in bone, fat and chemicals so should we focus more on water and $’s and less on air. But you may respond the atmosphere that encases us is all air but this is not completely true since there is pollution and those little filaments we see when light shafts float into a room and illuminate the air. Then we see what we think is truly there. Of course this ignores the question of the further reaches of space where air may be solid and water may be a gas. Then we would have to understand plants differently since plants would have to adjust and worms and beetles too. Maybe there is some type…
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