Okay, sorry but I had to give up on this only part-way in. The flippant tone of the review may be trying for light-hearted touch, but it only makes the reviewer sound completely ignorant of anything to do with mythology or poetry. When I hit this bump in the road:
" their hope for Modernity was to preserve that tradition, reprising old forms but, in Pound’s slogan, “Making Them New” so as to keep them alive and fresh and fascist"
That's when I got off this trolley car. Maybe the review gets better after that, but I have better things to do than read the rest of it, like stick forks in my eyes.
(Gorsh, Ezra Pound was a Fascist? Or maybe just a fascist? Or maybe he went bugnuts and we shouldn't judge the poetry by the man? I don't trust this reviewer to give me anything deeper in consideration of the genuine Problem Of Pound than I'd get on a Reddit sub about shallow vaguely liberal vaguely political but mostly social commentary of the "I have a sign in my yard about 'In this house we believe' style).
(Yes, I do take poetry seriously. And while I believe there *is* a genuine The Problem Of Pound, I'm gonna cut a bitch who disses Eliot's poetry and his genuine struggles with reconciling the Modernist idiom to what he eventually found himself working in. That reminds me, as well as re-reading The Four Quartets, I should go re-read The Cocktail Party).
Short version: Pound moved to Italy in 1924, and while he had always expressed extreme anti-Semitic sentiments, he upped this during the Second World War, started a letter-writing campaign to American politicians about staying out of the war, and most damning of all, did radio broadcasts on behalf of Fascist Italy.
After the fall of Mussolini, Pound surrendered to/was arrested by American forces and eventually charged with treason. He ended up back in the USA, was put in psychiatric hospitals for examination to see if he was fit to stand trial, and was eventually discharged in 1958.
He wrote one important work, The Pisan Cantos, during this entire period of commitment, and the diagnoses differed but all pretty much agreed that he had bats in his belfry. So was he crazy all along, was he actually a Fascist, was this a performance to get out of being charged and tried, or did he start off sincere but end up insane?
And out of all this, if he really was an anti-Semite segregationist Fascist (or fascist), should that affect how we regard his poetry? Should he be cancelled? That's the Problem Of Pound.
"The section he wrote at the end of World War II, a composition started while he was interned by American occupying forces in Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos, and is the part of the work most often considered to be self-sufficient. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1948. There were many repercussions, since this in effect honoured a poet who had been condemned as a traitor of his native country, and was also diagnosed with a serious and disabling mental illness."
They're very difficult, challenging, and are they a mish-mash of word salad by a crazy guy or the pinnacle of Modernist poetry? Here's Pound reciting one of them from 1939 and if you think the Beat Poets, in particular Allan Ginsberg, invented the epitome of agonised social protest commentary with Moloch and "Howl", here's their intellectual father doing it first:
Ah I see. Thanks muchly, your mastery of English literature is as always very much appreciated.
Well, as a philistine I can have no opinion on his merit as an artist, and the charges of sympathy with fascism, disdain for patriotism, and antisemitism leave my outrage meter pegged at well I guess so -- all three were not uncommon among the aristocratic intelligentsia of the 20s and 30s -- he may have been pilloried more because he said the quiet parts out loud and sounds like he had a knack for getting under peoples' skin than because he was uniquely offensive.
As a man I would judge him inadequate, if only because a brief skim of his Wikipedia article seems to suggest that he was a real-life latter-day George Wickham.
The question of whether he was actually insane or played at it, and whether if he played at it it turned willy nilly real, like Cerberus actually leaping red-eyed and dripping slobber off the pages of "Inferno" if you lingered over its description too long, is a really interesting one, though.
"all three were not uncommon among the aristocratic intelligentsia of the 20s and 30s"
Very much so, we have our own example in Yeats who flirted (how seriously it is hard to know, was he using it as poetic inspiration the same way he used occultism, or was it genuine political conviction?) with our weak version of Fascism, the Blueshirts:
"Yeats was an Irish nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'. But as his life progressed, he sheltered much of his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense political landscape until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State.
In the earlier part of his life, Yeats was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In the 1930s Yeats was fascinated with the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalist movements of Europe, and he composed several marching songs for the Blueshirts, although they were never used. He was a fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism. On the other hand, he was also an elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule, and saw democracy as a threat to good governance and public order.[64] After the Blueshirt movement began to falter in Ireland, he distanced himself somewhat from his previous views, but maintained a preference for authoritarian and nationalist leadership. D. P. Moran called him a minor poet and "crypto-Protestant conman."
Perhaps it is just that I am also a Philistine, but when I read the part about moving the Eleusinian myth to New Jersey, all I could think of was P.D.Q. Bach's "Iphigenia in Brooklyn."
I wondered if perhaps the reviewer was just relating WCW's opinion that there was something fascist about Pound and Eliot's verse. So I found Project Gutenberg's "Kora in Hell: Improvisations" and searched for "fascist". Nope, not there. But enough disdain for the alleged inauthenticity of Eliot's and Pound's verse that it may as well have been? Maybe.
Since I'd already searched the dratted thing, I skimmed it. The reviewer wasn't far off in describing its style as, "The style is part aphoristic and part like the highbrow version of passive-aggressive Tweets, where you know the people you’re talking about might be reading and you want plausible deniability."
The reviewer explains, "We are not actually seeing WCW improvising on the fly. He takes his method from Kandinsky and the method is 'Never go Full Unconscious'... You use your improvisation as material for your final work. That’s why only 81 entries survive in Kora In Hell from the original 365. Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning. Composition is then an act of love and care towards the reader, and is what classicists and romantics share in their method."
If that is what excision of nonsense to show love and care toward the reader look like, I'd hate to see WCW's hate and neglect -- and he was a doctor.
It's not impossible to write a good review focusing on the reviewer's opinion and speculation rather than on what the thing reviewed is *about*. Sometimes a review is little more than pretext for saying something hopefully interesting. In this review, though, I couldn't tell where the speculation was coming from, WCW or the reviewer? That was irritating.
WCW's literary peers apparently found "Kora in Hell: Improvisations" irritating, too, and couldn't understand why he was so proud of it.
"[F]ew peers shared Williams's enthusiasm for the book. Pound called it 'incoherent' and 'un-American'; H.D. objected to its 'flippancies,' its 'self-mockery,' its 'un-seriousness'; and Wallace Stevens complained about Williams's 'tantrums.'" I might not have believed them had I not seen for myself.
I'm sticking to not reading the rest of this review (when I do dig my heels in, they stay dug) but reading the link (and thank you for that) to Williams' work, I can see the reviewer trying to ape the style (though failing badly). Since I have to do my own review of the book, here we go! I both laughed and scowled at this swipe by Williams at Eliot, though mainly the swipe is at Jepson who lauds Eliot as the best of the American poets:
"And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because Eliot is a subtle conformist. It tickles the palate of this archbishop of procurers to a lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New World type. Prufrock, the nibbler at sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not quite (because he refuses to turn his back), is “the soul of that modern land,” the United States!"
Looking into it a little, Eliot is not the bone of contention, Edgar Jepson is. Seemingly he was an English critic who offended a lot of American literary establishment types by a review of American poetry he wrote; a 1918 issue American poetry magazine had a very unhappy article in response to him:
Though I have to say, if we are posterity, then we will probably come down on Mr. Jepson's rather than Miss Monroe's side when it comes to appraising Chicago:
“[A]nd Chicago the powerful will go on mirroring her new-flowering beauty in Lake Michigan, and her new-flowering soul in her poets and other artists, who will give a new glory to her fame that long ago crossed the world”.
Yes, when I think of modern-day Chicago, it's the flowering beauty of its poetic soul that first comes to mind 🙄
As to the book itself, the introduction is laying out the slap-fighting between British reviewers, classically-influenced Americans, and the new authentically American, uninfluenced by Anglo-European influences, that Williams was trying to create. The improvisations themselves are also, I think, a little slap at the Imagists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and others he quotes in his Introduction trying to get him to conform more to their notion of 'proper' poetry, so he is being deliberately and indeed wilfully obscure with the involved imagery he uses for the Improvisations:
"To you! whoever you are, wherever you are! (But I know where you are!) There’s Durer’s “Nemesis” naked on her sphere over the little town by the river—except she’s too old. There’s a dancing burgess by Tenier and Villon’s maitress—after he’d gone bald and was shin pocked and toothless: she that had him ducked in the sewage drain. Then there’s that miller’s daughter of “buttocks broad and breastes high”. Something of Nietzsche, something of the good Samaritan, something of the devil himself,—can cut a caper of a fashion, my fashion! Hey you, the dance! Squat. Leap. Hips to the left. Chin—ha!—sideways! Stand up, stand up ma bonne! you’ll break my backbone. So again! —and so forth till we’re sweat soaked.
(Some fools once were listening to a poet reading his poem. It so happened that the words of the thing spoke of gross matters of the everyday world such as are never much hidden from a quick eye. Out of these semblances, and borrowing certain members from fitting masterpieces of antiquity, the poet began piping up his music, simple fellow, thinking to please his listeners. But they getting the whole matter sadly muddled in their minds made such a confused business of listening that not only were they not pleased at the poet’s exertions but no sooner had he done than they burst out against him with violent imprecations.)"
"Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. “No one believes that poetry can exist in his own life,” Williams said. “The purpose of an artist, whatever it is, is to take the life, whatever he sees, and to raise it up to an elevated position where it has dignity.”
In 1920, Williams turned his attentions to Contact, a periodical launched by Williams and fellow writer Robert McAlmon: "The two editors sought American cultural renewal in the local condition in clear opposition to the internationalists—Pound, The Little Review, and the Baroness." Yvor Winters, the poet/critic, judged that Williams's verse bears a certain resemblance to the best lyric poets of the 13th century."
Well, old quarrels, old fights, high words and hot blood of the day are now just historical curiosities for us moderns, amusements to pass the time, but we don't feel the urgency or what it was that they were fighting over.
And maybe in turn, our own controversies and urgencies that we think mean the end of the world will strike our descendants, in turn, as "why ever did they spend so much effort on trifles?"
You're right Jepson is the focus of scorn, but Williams does seem to treat Eliot as some sort of traitor to the "distinctly American" poetic project. To which I'd wonder, why expend so much effort making something "distinctly American"? I'm a minor (extremely minor -- however minor you think, think less than that) poet in my own right, and even if I did try to ape another nation's antique style, I'd be doing it as an American in the 21st century exposed to a bunch of influences that those I'm aping never were. That's true of imitation in any art form, and a reason "derivative" is so often a dumb criticism.
Miss Monroe's boosterism of Chicago is somewhat excused by the fact that the Poetry Foundation is headquartered in Chicago. I've been there. As cities go, Chicago is probably my favorite, but I still find it embarrassing to picture Chicago's "new-flowering soul". Certainly, it's not something Chicagoans typically think about!
Even HL Mencken, famed for skewering Americans, wrote "The American Language", as if it mattered to American identity to give "American" a separate language category from "English". That era's self-conscious Americanism in arts and letters just seems goofy now, even when works produced under its influence are outstanding.
The whole project of this "New, American" identity in arts and letters itself seems to depend on ideas about genius and originality expressed in German romanticism. But originality isn't the hard part, really. Making originality *good* is. And, since we can't help being ourselves, living in the time we live in and not before, I think we get more artistically out of focusing on what we find good and interesting, rather than on trying to be "original" -- even if advertising "originality" is a good marketing gimmick.
I don't have a favorite composer, but Gesualdo is one of them, and the one I'm inclined to name if asked to name one, since naming him is good shorthand for my interests. I remember learning this myth that Gesualdo was a man before his time, a mad genius, discovering sounds that would not be heard again for centuries after. But then early music historians go and check, and, while Gesualdo was innovative, his innovations were an outgrowth of the musical school he learned from, which was already pretty weird:
Gesualdo, a nobleman, had the luxury of studying the music that interested him deeply, without other obligations, and printing his own compositions, fruits of that interest, without having to please others. He had the resources to pursue an interest and leave enough copies of his work behind to survive. That doesn't make his music any less admirable, just makes "admirable" sound a lot more mundane than cults of "genius" advertise.
It does seem that Williams wanted to write "American" poetry, not retread the old paths and churn out the old models, and that's not a bad ambition, every nation *should* have a national voice.
But I think Carl Sandburg is the poet we think of as the "American vernacular" poet, and also Whitman. Not Williams or Greenleaf Whittier; Longfellow perhaps is another "American" poet but even he did a translation of Dante.
The real American vernacular voice is pop music - jazz, rock'n'roll, rap - and Hollywood. Those are the artistic original American forms that have conquered the world.
My mom, a woman of great patriotic sentiment, would probably name Robert Frost as the "American" poet, but, true, I've never thought of Frost as pointedly "vernacular". Carl Sandberg? Yeah. Whitman? Sadly.
Whitman cheeses me off for reasons I concede may be unfair. Take a kid who's already cynically sick of self-esteem mumbo-jumbo, and introduce her to Whitman with, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume," and it may be a recipe for lifelong enmity. ("Good on you, buddy, celebrating yourself, but why should anyone else?")
Stevens, Dickenson, Ammons... they seem plenty American to me even if that wasn't their self-conscious project. National and regional identity spring from ordinary familiarity and attachment without a self-conscious effort, and while not all self-conscious efforts are bad, getting good at the vernacular that's already around you, like vernacular music, because it's already there, seems less futile than trying to forge the vernacular yourself, because you think you have the right vision of what it is or should be (as Williams apparently thought).
You came across Whitman when you were, as you say, "sick of the self-esteem mumbjo-jumbo" so he does seem to be too breezy and self-involved. But to do him justice, when he was writing "Leaves of Grass" starting in the 1850s, this kind of modern-day self-esteem mantra wasn't in existence. Whitman was seen as the poet of democracy, of the ordinary working-man and ordinary American life, not standing as someone apart from the common stream:
He had a great influence on the young G.K. Chesterton; to quote from a memoir by his brother about Chesterton:
"He embraced passionately the three great articles of Whitman’s faith, the ultimate goodness of all things implying the acceptance of the basest and meanest no less than the noblest in life, the equality and solidarity of men, and the redemption of the world by comradeship.
...For, though Whitman himself was an Anarchist rather than a Socialist, his influence on the Socialist movement was immense, and young Socialists talked continually the language of Whitmanism, preaching comradeship, equality, and good will among men—in a word, the very things which G. K. Chesterton was then intent on proclaiming."
There is the mention of Whitman in the dedication to "The Man Who Was Thursday" and Whitman's open optimism was set against the fin-de-siecle decadence of the period:
"Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;"
This second round of book reviews has done more to convince me that the rationalist writing community is weak than it has to teach me about the books. Far more. I felt the same way about this review as you did. Sad! :-(
I don't care about poetry or William Carlos Williams or any of the people or concepts discussed in this review. But I couldn't turn away or stop reading, and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The style sets a high bar for itself but it worked, it got me. In its weird way, I think this might be the most successful book review for me, because it distills the experience of reading the book and injects it via the review into my brain. Confused kudos, but definitely kudos.
I had exactly the same thought midway through. Are we secretly playing a game of AI hide and seek? Either way this review proves that the Turing test is closer than ever to being overcome, at least for me.
It would be classic Scott (in the olden' times sense) to sneak a GPT-3 entry into the contest. And maybe put a question or two about it onto the survey.
BRB, checking for tell-tale “the the”'s in the body…
You are right that Dr Soong’s earlier versions of positronic brains were unable to use contractions, but later versions were quite capable properly using words like “don’t” and “can’t”.
In all seriousness, this is exactly the kind of statement that sounds like it came out of GPT-3 after feeding it a bunch of contemporary poetry
Sorry that wasn‘t clear, I didn‘t mean this single sentence on it‘s own, I meant it in context; it was set up previously in the review. (But actually, „surrealist‘s“ is a mistake, right, it should be „surrealists‘“? That could be another indication is wasn‘t an AI.)
Parallels and errors in the corpus would definitely show up in AI generated text. I’ll admit that I don’t know WCW’s work so my guess that this is AI generated actually is more a bet on something Scott would do rather than because I think I can tell the difference between a human generated WCW review and an AI generated WCW review. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can’t. I think someone would need to be very familiar with WCW’s work to be able to not get Sokal’d by modern AI.
But if it‘s too intelligent to be AI-generated then it can‘t be AI-generated, whatever Scott would do and whatever my knowledge of this poet‘s work (I never heard of him before)?
It’s not that it’s too intelligent to be AI generated. It’s that the topic is so esoteric that laypeople like me couldn’t tell the difference between a genuine contribution to the discussion versus word salad buzzword bingo. Maybe it’s too intelligent, maybe it’s not. I can’t tell /shrugs
The quoted sentence is an interesting example of assumptions. I too always assumed that the descriptor "high concept" referred to something with _more_ or _more complex_ conceptual elements than a "low concept" work.
In fact, the opposite is true; "high concept" describes movies without a plot, where "low concept" describes movies with involved plots. Per wikipedia:
> A movie described as being "high-concept" is considered easy to sell to a wide audience because it delivers upon an easy-to-grasp idea.
The paradigm for a director of high-concept films is Michael Bay.
I don't really agree; I think "highbrow" and "lowbrow" are in harmony with the conventional (extended) meanings of "high" and "low" while "high concept" and "low concept" conflict with the conventional meanings.
Which is to say that people would find the designations "high concept" and "low concept" to be just as confusing regardless of whether they were familiar with "highbrow" and "lowbrow". The phrases mean the opposite of the sum of their parts; that's not how things are supposed to work.
As I understand it, "high concept" means that the *concept* is what dominates - all you need to know is that it's about motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane, and no one cares about the plot or the characters. "Low concept" might equally be called "high plot" or "high acting" or "high character development".
It's just that somehow the term "high concept" is the one that stuck, and since "concept" often refers to abstract artistic things, and "high" is often used for those, we associate "high concept" with that sort of meaning, rather than understanding it literally as "your ad concept ate the whole movie".
So what does that make Christopher Nolan, where the narrative is mixed up and internationally inaudible dialogue thrown in for the purpose of making audience feel smart for having "got it".
I enjoyed the first part(s), but in the end the review felt like it didn't go into enough detail or offer much that was particularly surprising/enlightening/otherwise obscure-yet-interesting. Some few bits did manage the latter, and I was becoming hooked at first, but by the end... I'm unsatisfied. I still don't know what relevance this work to me, or why I should / shouldn't read it.
(That last paragraph also seems a bit, uh, fragmented itself, to me.)
I am personally not a big fan of book reviews that do not introduce the book right away, who wrote it, when it was written, what it is about, and why the reviewer has decided to review it. I have to decide right away whether it is something that I find interesting and worthwhile to read, rather than suffer through a bunch of introductory paragraphs that try to set up a story. I understand many people enjoy this type of intro, but I am not one of those people.
In general I agree, but I'm more forgiving if the review is going to be about unclear poetic writers. I haven't read WCW, so am not sure in this case, but if a person had just spent a day reading Faulkner or Joyce I would forgive them for being in an unclear, associative state of mind.
Personally I kind of like it when a review somewhat echoes the feeling of a piece (though I can't say if this does), since that gives me some information about whether I would like it or not, including choices about whether or not to fully introduce major characters, such as the author. As it happens, I mostly do not like that kind of thing, or only like it when forced -- of the Joyce and Faulkner I've tried and failed to read, I only got through Light in August. It was beautiful, but I don't know what happened in it. Based on this review, I feel that Williams is the kind of writer I would like to take a seminar on, but not read on my own initiative, because he's probably the sort of person to start a review with no introduction and assume readers will work to catch up.
I myself am a big fan of Kierkegaard, and so I love to talk about / explain his philosophy all the time. BUT, part of his philosophy is that you should have genuine, one-on-one engagement with people and their books. He hated the idea of his work being summarized and turned into a paragraph in somebody’s systematic account of philosophy. So how do I write about him? Lots of people write about Kierkegaard in a way that Kierkegaard himself would have hated, and, worse, proves they never really understood him — how do I avoid doing that to an author I love? Can I say anything more than just, read Either/Or, read Fear and Trembling?
I sense that the writer of this review is in a similar dilemma. Trying to write about WCW in a way that honors WCW, in a way that wouldn’t make WCW hate the reviewer or think they didn’t actually understand WCW’s work at all.
Maybe the only way to respond genuinely to poetry is to write poetry.
Because you often are. Particularly with the modern continentals. Often there is some whole book with one or two fairly valuable insights dressed up with twenty chapters of impenetrable nonsense stretching those insights beyond any reason but since it is so impenetrable it is difficult to tell what the fuck is supposed to be going on. A lot of Motte & Bailey.
You will probably still think you're dealing with opaque charlatanism after reading the following. That's fine, Kierkegaard isn't for everybody.
It has to do with the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. The easiest example (although not one used by K) would be color. Objectively, the color blue is 6.66 x 10^14 Hz. Whether that's true or not has nothing to do with any existing individual person's ideas or opinions. You can verify it with mechanical instruments. But there's also a subjective experience of the color blue, which can't be communicated objectively, and which can only be experienced by an existing individual. Objectivity is "the view from nowhere" (also not a K saying); subjectivity is the experience of a particular, existing individual, in a particular time, at a particular place.
One of Kierkegaard's important points is that, while objectivity is useful, considering it the only valid type of truth is toxic to your soul. Truth requires an existing person, to be the one knowing the truth. Truly attaining objectivity would be to remove yourself, as an existing individual, entirely. His famous dictum, then, is "subjectivity is truth". Because without the subjective experience of an existing individual, there isn't actually any knowledge of the truth happening.
So a summarizer or systematizer of philosophy is attempting to present things the same way you talk about the frequencies of light -- as though it has nothing to do with any existing individual. As though the book was written by nobody, to be read by nobody. Kierkegaard wants to write in a way that's conducive to truth. Not objective "truth" that has nothing to do with anybody, but actual truth that can be true for actual people. Kierkegaard is true for me in a way that his books probably won't be for most people, because they had a big impact on my life.
So, if you're a very objectivity-minded person, you'll be okay with disregarding what I say, because I'm such an obvious fan of Kierkegaard. I'm biased. I read Fear and Trembling, and I was like, "Holy crap, this guy is breaking some questions about Christianity wide open!" Then I read Either/Or, and he diagnosed everything that was going on in my mind and showed how it would get worse and worse, and more and more, until I was in despair. And that actually, the reason I was in despair now (although I didn't always feel it) was my unwillingness to deal with things _as though I was myself_, to abstract my own personal existence out of the picture. "Okay," I asked, "but then, how do I live?" Book 2 of Either/Or answered, "Not like some perfectly ethical judge, that's despair too." Fear and Trembling answered, "Live by this weird thing called faith." "But without objectivity, how do I know what you're saying is true?" Answered in Philosophical Fragments. "Okay, then what even is faith?" Answer: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (he had fun with titles). "But how do I even do all this?" Answer: Stages on Life's Way. "Okay, you've got me, but I'm weak and forget, I need to be encouraged as I go on." Turns out, every one of those books of philosophy has a secret companion book of sermons; the philosophy books are for those on the outside; the sermons are for those on the inside.
But he does all that in such a way that, if you think it's Kierkegaard trying to convince you of these things, you won't be convinced of them. He puts all sorts of contradictory ideas in front of you, in the voices of all sorts of different viewpoints and made up characters, and makes you sort it all out yourself. All those books I just named (except the sermons) were published without his name on them. He doesn't let you claim to be his disciple. He teaches as though what he himself thinks about it means nothing -- all he wants is for you to think about it for yourself. Thinking for yourself and arriving at the opposite conclusion from him is a result he would far, far prefer to believing what he says just because he said it.
You could probably find a philosophy professor who has a more academically rigorous, objective approach, who could locate Kierkegaard's work in the historical development of existentialism, between Hegel and Sartre, and who points out the similarities with Nietzsche's work. And that professor wouldn't consider, would never dream of asking, _whether it's actually true or not_. Because if he did that, you'd feel like you were being preached to; it would lack the objectivity of a trustworthy academic treatment.
Kierkegaard was against Hegel, exactly because Hegel took other people's philosophies and located them in the historical development of particular trends in philosophy. K said the worst fate he could think of would be to have his own philosophy shoved into a textbook next to Hegel, to be talked about by people who would never even think to consider whether it was actually true, or what use it could be to their own lives, other than as bricks to build a career out of.
Philosophers like that might know everything there is to know about philosophy, but they've _never actually done philosophy_. Objectivity has robbed them of truth. Like a Christian minister who knows everything about theology, but doesn't care about God and doesn't help the poor. Kierkegaard would say that kind of truth might be accurate, but it's not really true.
So this is the best answer I can give. Kierkegaard can be summarized and explained, but not in a way that could ever conceivably convey the truth that Kierkegaard himself wanted to convey. Because if, in your mind, some idea is Kierkegaard's idea, rather than an idea you believe because you figured it out yourself, then it's not really Kierkegaard's idea.
Actually, forgive me, but everything I just wrote is wrong. Or, most of it is. Probably some is partially true, but most is dumb and wrong. It's been distorted by my personal, subjective bias, and my experience of reading his books at a particular time in my particular life. You shouldn't believe it, and you definitely shouldn't tell anybody that Kierkegaard says such-and-such on the basis of having read what I, Matthew, wrote about him on the Internet.
If you want to know what he actually said, the Hong translations are good and have excellent endnotes.
Thanks for the info about Kierkegaard - I've never really checked out his stuff, but it sounds like there might be something to it. Disliking Hegel is almost always a good sign!
Fine review of Kierkegard's oeuvre! Focus a bit more on one of his works (in context of the whole), and you very much qualify for an ACX book-review - please, do it! - I read only a few pieces of Sören K., but he is as least as relevant as this Williams-guy. - As for this Kora in Hell review: I liked it, style fits topic. But I'd say: Not the proper audience here for such a review - and not the right kind of review for this audience. "Selling" K. to Rationalists will be a huge challenge, too. But Kierkegaard's honesty should help. And most of us here are not that much into R., but ṛta. - just click "About" on this blog :)
>while objectivity is useful, considering it the only valid type of truth is toxic to your soul
Is this statement objective, or subjective? If there isn't an objective truth somewhere in there, then why did Kierkegaard or his "disciples" think that it's relevant to anybody other than themselves? Such line of argumentation seems to be self-defeating. It seems obvious to me that truth can be communicated only to the extent that it is objective, otherwise you admit to being trapped in a hall of mirrors, which is personally unique to yourself and incommunicable to everybody else in principle.
This is exactly the right line of questioning. The “Either” section of Either/Or is about this very thing. If you understand both the dehumanization problem of objectivity and the hall of mirrors problem of subjectivity, you’re at the place in the journey where his book Philosophical Fragments picks up.
In the Western tradition, there are 3 great child sacrifices: Jephthah, Agamemnon and Abraham. Jephthah and Agamemnon are tragic heroes, and sometimes people write plays or songs about them; but Abraham is the father and founder of three of the great world religions: the Father of Faith. Why? Jephthah and Agamemnon could communicate their situation to their people. It was relevant to people other than themselves. But Abraham's situation was incommunicable to everybody else in principle.
That's the general drift of a big part of Fear and Trembling.
More explicitly (but still in a pretty roundabout way!) Book 2 of Either/Or ("Or") has a pseudonymous narrator named Judge William, who takes the issue you raise, of communicability, very seriously. Kierkegaard uses that section to show us where he thinks that attitude leads. TLDR: it's the Kantian categorical imperative, basically, with all that system's attendant problems.
And the first book of Either/Or ("Either") can be seen as being dedicated to proving your point! It's written by a character who understands the importance of subjectivity, of finding the way of life that he himself, as an existing individual, can live ... and shows him spiraling into nihilism and despair.
But did Kierkegaard, or anybody else arrive at a satisfying resolution to this conundrum, in your opinion? From what I've gathered, philosophy doesn't usually provide them, and everybody more or less stays confused, interminably retreading old malformed arguments. For example, David Chapman says that existentialists hadn't in the end managed to find answers to nihilism and despair, and now postmodernists pretty much ended in the same place.
I guess I'm lucky myself that my subjective experience has never been particularly prone to this sort of angst. I've never been bothered much about "meaning" or lack thereof, so I can look at this stuff with bemused equanimity and sympathy to those not so lucky.
"...is that you should have genuine, one-on-one engagement with people and their books. He hated the idea of his work being summarized and turned into a paragraph in somebody’s systematic account of philosophy. So how do I write about him"
Couldn't you begin by taking it for granted that he's wrong in this respect? A strong preference for intimate and deep discussion is just a preference, not a philosophical position. Surely his philosophical work has actual substance right? If the author's preferred style of engagement is a hindrance to getting to the substance of the work, then surely you could (and should) just disregard the author's preferences and engage with the work in any way you see fit. Why be beholden to the author? If I buy a book and the author's note at the beginning of the book says that the book is to be read only while upside-down, I hardly feel bound to obey.
I'm not very good at explaining it. I'll try again.
In the case of the particular truths he's trying to communicate, straightforward objectivity-based communication would make him a hypocrite.
Like: I'm going to tell you what opinion you should have. Here's the opinion: you should never let anybody tell you what opinion you should have. Oops...
Or: I'm going to lead you to God. The first step is, you have to approach God as yourself, as a genuine, existing individual, alone. Come on, follow me and I'll show you! Oops...
Just wanted to say that I love this, and your discussion of Kierkegaard above. You do an excellent job of showing why he's the only philosopher who ever really showed me something about life.
I agree--the lack of "[Book Name] by [Author]" construction anywhere in the first paragraph did more to throw me off-kilter than the attempt to emulate WCW's style (which I thought was a good attempt, by the way; this read roughly how I'd imagine WCW's prose would sound considering I've read a fair bit of his poetry).
One thing I think Williams, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce had in common was that they meant their work to be difficult, but they worked to fill it with discoverable value that would reward readers who went to the trouble. The reviewer contrasts that with self-indulgent surrealists, and I think he has fashioned his review in the same spirit. His long reflection on improvisation, which reads like a kind of impro itself, seems to me a surprise island of easy coherence. The ideas are not new, but they are ones I have a lot of sympathy with, so I enjoyed that section.
Having looked through the Williams, I'm not sure it reaches the criteria the reviewer lays out for the skilled master riffing in a way that appeals to an audience with appreciation of those skills. But, obviously, I'd have to put in much more work--rise to the level of Pound's "reader of good will"--in order to reach a real conclusion. The review really doesn't inspire me to devote the effort; there's plenty of Williams's poetry still in line before "Kora in Hell."
"Having looked through the Williams, I'm not sure it reaches the criteria the reviewer lays out for the skilled master riffing in a way that appeals to an audience with appreciation of those skills."
Perhaps if the audience appreciates "the highbrow version of passive-aggressive Tweets"?
But you're right. WCW has plenty of other poems, and there are plenty of other poets.
I can never really get into poetry. While there are several poems I like, and sometimes they can be very insightful and amazing. Even when they are very good they mostly seem like bad philosophy, or excellent song lyrics lacking a melody.
Al Says doesn't seem to rhyme with ass, but maybe there's a non-French pronunciation I'm unfamiliar with. (That was a local street in the town I grew up in, so it's a word I heard a lot of...although, entirely possible all the non-French white people simply mispronounced it. The "Frenchman's Creek" neighborhood certainly wasn't full of French emigres.)
For many poems, and many people, it's important to say them aloud with other people present. I took a Shakespeare course in college, and was terribly confused, wondering what all the fuss was about. Then I took another Shakespear course where we spent most of our time just reading the plays out loud. It made an amazing difference. Poems mostly aren't meant to be read silently, and suffer from it.
There's definitely nothing wrong with adding music. Songs are even-more-elevated versions of poetry. But I still find lots of value in (mainly shorter) poems because of the way they do two things.
1) The rhymes we learn as kids are very foundational, and affect our speech patterns for the whole of our lives. Playing with those is just awesome fun.
2) Poems use the randomness of language to throw ideas together that don't really belong together, and create interesting new stuff.
Well, I enjoy lyrical poetry but share a distaste for wilfully-obscure "deep" tripe; that said, I don't think I'd like *your* poetry, if you tried your hand at it — it'd just wind up being Blank verse.
Was this review written by GPT-3? It seems to have the disjointed quality I associate with AI writing: each sentence is a fine individual sentence, but there doesn't seem to be any between-sentence coherence.
I know people who write like this. They are more likely than most to read 20th Century poets, David Foster Wallace essays, and Wittgenstein, and listen to John Coltrane. A computer might be able to write like that, but mostly just to the extent that it's getting very good at impersonating actual human writing. It is, to some extent, an intentional aesthetic.
I enjoyed reading the review, but can't tell whether I should read WCW or not based on it. I never thought I would like TS Elliot until I read him, because I don't like most poetry. But the musicality of his language is amazing, even when read silently. So if I were reviewing him, I would want to mention: definitely read him! The sound is at least as important as the meaning!
I've read several of the other entries and wondered if Scott secretly wrote them, or perhaps if he was discriminating against contestants who don't imitate his style.
I thought at first that today's entry might be someone trying and failing to sound like Scott. (He definitely didn't write this one himself... I think?) But I did read it through to the end, and now I think I should read "Kora in Hell". That counts as a successful book review, even if it's unorthodox.
Until reading today's comments it hadn't occurred to me that some or all of these were written by an AI. If it turns out that any of them were, I'm going to revise my priors about when human history will end.
I particularly appreciate the use of Jackie Chan as a stand in for Aristotle here. The review was entertaining enough, and probably as good a promotion of the book as it deserves?
Yeah, I liked this a lot. Perhaps we might call it a response to the work, rather than a review as such, but that's not a problem. Saying a bunch of interesting things, even slightly incoherently, is better than saying some dull things in a tightly logical structure.
The signal my brain kept throwing up over and over and over was "I notice I am confused!"
*Difficult writing style...lots of very long sentences, some broken up with a series of serial commas, others with no punctuation at all. Meant to mirror WCW himself?
*Many reference pointers that didn't seem to clearly terminate on single subjects or objects (imprecise grammar).
*Lots of references to other artists and works that I don't recognize, due to not being particularly well-read. So I know Extremely Famous big names like Marshal McLuhan, but "Like Cortazar's Hopscotch"...I have no idea what that refers to? Prefer not to have to repeatedly Googlepedia unfamiliar terms, it breaks up the reading flow majorly...
*It wasn't until almost the end of the review that I understood clearly what the book is (about): it's poetry. At first I was like...it's about some weird Mystery Cult? it's a police blotter? it's about women's oppression in early 1900s? it's a diary?
*Would have been very helpful to organize all the meta into one place; it's weird to reach almost the end of the review and only then get told the book's broken into 3 main parts. It's weird to have the timeline/history of the book spread out throughout the review, dripped out in dabs.
All I know at the end is that WCW wrote some poems which seem mildly interesting, like Thought-A-Day calendar style, possibly good-quality loo library material. Unclear about the greater significance, either artistically or historically. The brevity of the review was both a welcome change, and also left me with the distinct feeling I missed "the point" somewhere along the way. I dunno, this one was just a head-scratcher to me... :?
Reading other comments, it seems the review is in roughly the same style as the book/ author, so if you didn't like the review, you probably won't like the book either.
I actually enjoyed reading this! Mind you, I won't vote for it, because it didn't teach me new things in the same way as some other reviews, and to me that's what these reviews are for. But I certainly felt like I had an interesting glimpse into this book, and ended up wanting to actually read it!
It took me a while to understand (or believe) that he/she was actually reviewing "Kora in Hell" as opposed to just using the collection as a analogy to review something else with similar name.
Once I figured out/convince myself that it was in fact an attempt at a book review, I was able to embrace it as a not entirely horrible literary criticism essay. But this is not praise, because even as a piece of literary criticism it was too long and without proper focus.
The longer an essay is, the higher the bar!
Of course, we must concede that reviewing a collection of poems (which actually includes WCW own reflections about the poems (was that even mentioned?) is a challenging task. It is especially challenging in an age in which poetry is as dead as so-called jazz is dead. See Nicholas Payton's essay. "ON WHY JAZZ ISN’T COOL ANYMORE" (2011) https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/
And improvising is probably also as dead. Jerry Garcia like sweet Jane: all a friend can say is ain't it a shame.
WCW was a physician which I think should have been mentioned. (Maybe it was and I missed it.) I am recalling a story about when another poet Wallace Stevens died, a work acquaintance of Stevens remarked after the eulogy: "Wally was a poet?" Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive.
The person told me the WS funeral story after learning that I had been honored and paid for being a poet. (Nearly 40 years ago, at a commencement.) My relationship with poetry is like my relationship with jazz (where I've also been paid.) I suppose an embarrassment; as embarrassing as when a jazz colleague finds out I'm a trial lawyer, or when my legal brothers as sisters find out I'm a sculptor or even worse that I published a paper about mathematics. I am also currently translating a work of Janusz Korczak, and I've certainly kept that a secret.
If poetry and jazz are dead (Payton I think is correct), the concept of the polymath is also dead.
So too is the idea of a public intellectual.
Even what passes for being an educated person, is messed up. Undergraduate business degrees? Liberal arts lacking STEM and STEM lacking liberal arts. Not actually learning some other languages and doing some art and music.
Sigh.
I may have to find Duke Tumatoe's album: A Ejukatid Man (1999) to cheer me up.
I should have written my comment immediately after reading. ( I see twice about doctor, maybe I didn't realize at that point what I was reading.)
I see now about the commentary references, but I guess it was not particularly clear that these were actually part of book until I looked at book, as opposed to being part of a process to winnow down to 81 "poems/improvisations" from 365 or so.
I don't see too many people worried (there are some) about musical AIs replacing humans.
I'm counting on my raggedy edge to keep me in gigs. And really nobody dies when I mess up. I've used Impro-Visor as a creative composing aid for over a decade. RIP Bob Keller.
Everyone saying this is written by an AI has clearly never read any WCW.
If you have, it’s pretty evident why the review is written the way it is. Conveniently then, if you hated reading this review, you probably won’t love Williams.
I'm not sure if I learned anything, but I enjoyed it!
btw '...the Hindu god Brahma, you’ll improvise the Universe like you’re dancing.' - you probably want the god Shiva, who creates and destroys with his (improvised) dances.
Did not get past the first chapter of the review. Doing the whole "mysterious, confusing introduction" can work to wet the appetite, but this one just left me hanging. You have to clear some stuff up before you lose most of your readers.
I don't understand the general dislike of this in the comments. I found it well-written, well-structured, and interesting. The reviewer sets the scene, pulls in some juicy excerpts, editorializes a bit about the author, and makes good comparisons. The review provided solid context and piqued my interest.
Out of every book reviewed so far, this is the one I'm most likely to read.
Just to help you understand, here's my play-by-play of the first paragraph. This certainly reflects more deeply on me as a lousy reader than the reviewer as a writer, but still. I literally thought all these thoughts (albeit many unarticulated) as I attempted to read the review.
*"Fanboy": So Pound really likes reading about mythological references. But then there's no description of where Pound came across this reference, so I'm confused already. [In retrospect, apparently "fanboy" was intended to mean "practitioner", a usage with which I'm unfamiliar.]
*"Persephone or Proserpina": written as though they are two god[desse]s, but the next few sentences ignore Proserpina so maybe they're the same? I'm not sufficiently familiar with mythology to know. More confusion.
*Spring as in the season or Spring as in water coming from the ground? I thought we were talking about a goddess, not a season or a hydrological feature. More confusion.
*Now it's important for me to know her mother was Demeter, but why? Maybe other readers would gain meaning from "aha, her mother's actually Demeter" but not me. I'm quickly learning that I'm not the target audience of this review.
*The Eleusinian Mysteries? Never heard of them. Are they a book series, like the Nancy Drew Mysteries, for which Nancy Drew was the central figure? Why do I need to know about them, and why doesn't the rest of the sentence even give me enough information to tell conclusively whether they're even a book series? Apparently I didn't need to know about them, because they don't seem to come up again. I'm getting confused for no good reason.
*"Kora" sounds like a name to me. So what if it has a meaning too? We've been reminded two sentences ago that "Hades" means "Hades". So doesn't seem like Voldemort at all.
*I don't know what a Mystery Cult is. Is every sentence going to just fly past my head without anything sticking?
*If "Kora" represents all of the maidens, the name alludes to the suffering young women. What if "Kora" represents a name not to be spoken? Does the title only make sense under one of two possible interpretations of "Kora"? I'm trying hard to learn something, because not being familiar with mythology I'm relying heavily on the author here to toss me a bone, and now it seems that the author is intentionally misleading me. This is not fun at all.
*"Conditions were dire" I read as alluding to doctors being extremely scarce and WWI going on. But the following excerpt doesn't mention doctors or WW1. It doesn't seem especially dire for the girl or anyone else mentioned in the excerpt, but nobody mentioned in the excerpt is doing well either so "dire" doesn't seem to be meant satirically either.
[So far I've learned that I'm not going to understand most of the text of the review, making it not worth my time. Oh well, at least I learned it quickly and can cut my losses now. And yes, if Kora in Hell is that difficult too (the brat's the girl? no the brat's the one-year-old. what's "cover her moves"?) then the review has been extremely effective at telling me I don't want to read the book, which is a good thing.]
Appreciate the in-depth play-by-play! I'm more of a skim reader and am pretty comfortable with ambiguous meanings.
"Cover her moves" gave me pause too, I ended up interpreting it as taking responsibility for her actions and/or not getting caught sleeping around. The context in the book doesn't make it clear how consensual the interaction with the 17 guys is, think it refers to her as "lusty".
Feels like a big theme in the book is the market value of women based on age, attractiveness and sexual history. Everyone is portrayed as a passive victim of circumstance. The women are sexual objects, and the men are spectators to their own impulses.
I think Williams is portraying it as both consensual, in a sense (this girl is a Venus, if we strip away all the idealisation around the notion of sexual desire, this is what Venus really is) and non-consensual (I think the modern term is "lot lizard" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lot_lizard), the girl hangs out in the railroad saloon where respectable women wouldn't go, and all the guys there are getting sexual favours from her. How much this is that she is earning money by sex work, and how much that she is (what at the time would have been considered) simple-minded or intellectually disabled, and can't tell that she is being taken advantage of, and sleeps with the guys because she likes sex but has no idea of consequences or taking care of herself.
"to a saloon back of the rail-road switch where they have that girl, you know, the one that should have been Venus by the lust that’s in her. They’ve got her down there among the railroad men. A crusade couldn’t rescue her."
'A crusade couldn't rescue her' is referring to the moral crusades of the time, and how they won't help because (1) the girl has sunk too far into that kind of poverty and exploitation, she's been 'ruined' and (2) she doesn't want to be rescued, she is acting as a sexual being and the moral judgements don't - or shouldn't - apply here.
Compare this to the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, where the eugenic argument for sterilisation on the grounds of immorality and feeble-mindedness were put:
"The ruling was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In support of his argument that the interest of "public welfare" outweighed the interest of individuals in their bodily integrity, he argued:
'We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.'
Holmes concluded his argument by citing Jacobson v. Massachusetts as a precedent for the decision, stating "Three generations of imbeciles are enough"
> "Persephone or Proserpina": written as though they are two god[desse]s, but the next few sentences ignore Proserpina so maybe they're the same? I'm not sufficiently familiar with mythology to know.
Yes, they're the same. Proserpina is the name of the goddess in Latin; Persephone is the name in Greek. For most of post-classical history, only the Latin name would have been used, but in the modern day we like to use the Greek names of Greek gods.
> The Eleusinian Mysteries? Never heard of them.
They were a set of religious beliefs and rituals in classical Greece. We don't know much about them, because one of their tenets was that their beliefs should not be written down. But we do know that they related at least in large part to "the Goddesses", Demeter and Persephone.
> "Kora" sounds like a name to me. So what if it has a meaning too?
Basically correct. It is the ordinary ancient Greek word for "girl" (more conventionally spelled kore), but also a conventional way to refer to Persephone. As a name, there's no reason to read anything more into it than that.
> What if "Kora" represents a name not to be spoken?
Not really a relevant question; we know that that isn't the case.
All that said, the review wouldn't be any better if you knew the classical material it refers to. It doesn't make sense and doesn't appear to be intended to.
Your reaction to this review reminds me of my reaction to Amazon's "Rings of Power" trailers: for the casual viewer who doesn't know the story, then it's confusing because "who are all these people, what are they doing, where is this?" and for the fans who do know the background, it's annoying and frustrating because of the changes to the characters and plot.
This review, like Amazon hoping a general audience will be familiar with the "Lord of the Rings" movies and so sign up to their streaming service to view the show, presumes that if you read ACX then you'll recognise all these references.
(1) Persephone or Proserpina - Persephone is the Greek version of her name, Proserpina the Roman (the Romans liked to adapt or even take over Greek myths, identifying them where possible with Roman versions, since the Greeks had a much more worked-out mythology and were considered cultural superiors in the arts, a bit like the equivalence being drawn between British/European cultural leadership and American copying of same, which Williams is fighting about). There was a Roman (or Italian) goddess Libera whom the Romans identified with Persephone and so Proserpina was the version they adopted.
Swinburne has a poem dedicated to Proserpina, but let me not stray too far afield:
(2) Spring as in the season. Persephone was out picking flowers with her attendants when she was abducted by Hades. This all ties into the personifications of nature that Demeter and Persephone represent, as well as the kind of traditional divisions of Maiden/Mother/Crone. Demeter is an earth goddess, represented with growth and bounty, with the harvest, hence autumn. As her daughter, Persephone is a younger counterpart and so associated with spring, the budding return of vegetation after winter, but not yet fully ripe. So, since crops are important because without food you die, you can see the reason for the association between Spring and Autumn, new growth after winter that ripens into plenty to keep men and animals alive. Autumn depends on Spring, else it can't happen, and Spring without Autumn is barren and useless (and we'll come back to that later).
(3) The Eleusinian Mysteries - okay, this is only a quick'n'dirty explanation. Eleusis is a Greek city and where a famous shrine is/was based. It was the headquarters of the cult of Demeter and Persephone, and where people were initiated into the cult. They're called "Mysteries" for several reasons, first because it's a religious term with a specific meaning (and in Christianity, we've retained it as "the mystery of faith" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_faith), second because the details were kept secret, upon pain of death. Scholars have reconstructed what they think are the basic elements and rituals of the belief.
The afterlife, in the Classical world, was a rather grim place. And how could you be even sure that your spirit would survive after death, anyway? Or that there even was a spirit? By the myth of the goddess who goes down into the Underworld (death, the grave) and returns every spring, this was the hope of the initiate: by a connection with Demeter and Persephone as personal deities, in a sense, they too could have the hope of continuing survival after death, and in a somewhat better situation than the thin, bat-squeaking shades without sense or memory as generally represented.
(4) Kore is a name, or rather a title. This is where the flippancy of the reviewer annoys me: it's not because she's like Voldemort, but it is apotropaic. She is now the Queen of the Underworld, and has real and dangerous powers. Being intimately involved with death, you should and must treat her with respect. Not just the Greeks, practically every culture has the tradition of averting misfortune by not directly referring to powers whose attention you don't want to draw, e.g. referring to the fairies as the Fair Folk or the Good People. She's not just *a* maiden, she is *the* Maiden, in the cycle of Maiden/Mother/Crone - except she never becomes a mother, never bears any children by Hades (and of course never becomes a crone). So she is both barren - neither maiden nor mother, which fits with death - and a perpetual maiden, the new tender growth of spring which has not yet bloomed into fruit, as befits the goddess of spring and renewal.
(4) Conditions were dire - that seems to be referring to the anecdote about the girl who was sleeping around with everyone and had a bastard child that died (ostensibly of pneumonia, possibly of neglect). It's the kind of anecdote of the underclass that Theodore Dalrymple often recounts, and at the time Williams was writing, was used as underpinnings for eugenic arguments about sterilising the poor and the idiotic.
Williams, in the book, is deliberately dragging the Classical myths down to earth, to the grubby realities of modern life, in order to rub the noses of the Classical non-American American poets in what they are trying to describe: Venus not a goddess but a slut, if you were writing the myths today in American life, here's how they really sound:
Giants in the dirt. The gods, the Greek gods, smothered in filth and ignorance. The race is scattered over the world. Where is its home? Find it if you’ve the genius. Here Hebe with a sick jaw and a cruel husband,—her mother left no place for a brain to grow. Herakles rowing boats on Berry’s Creek! Zeus is a country doctor without a taste for coin jingling. Supper is of a bastard nectar on rare nights for they will come—the rare nights! The ground lifts and out sally the heroes of Sophocles, of Æschylus. They go seeping down into our hearts, they rain upon us and in the bog they sink again down through the white roots, down—to a saloon back of the rail-road switch where they have that girl, you know, the one that should have been Venus by the lust that’s in her. They’ve got her down there among the railroad men. A crusade couldn’t rescue her. Up to jail—or call it down to Limbo—the Chief of Police our Pluto. It’s all of the gods, there’s nothing else worth writing of. They are the same men they always were—but fallen. Do they dance now, they that danced beside Helicon? They dance much as they did then, only, few have an eye for it, through the dirt and fumes.
(When they came to question the girl before the local judge it was discovered that there were seventeen men more or less involved so that there was nothing to do but to declare the child a common bastard and send the girl about her business. Her mother took her in and after the brat died of pneumonia a year later she called in the police one day. An officer opened the bedroom door. The girl was in bed with an eighteenth fellow, a young roaming loafer with a silly grin to his face. They forced a marriage which relieved the mother of her burden. The girl was weak minded so that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she could cover her moves, in fact she never could do so with success.)"
"Cover her moves" refers to the failure of the girl to keep it hidden from her mother that she was being sexually used by seventeen men, or the latest guy - literally found in bed with him - or to avoid getting pregnant outside of marriage (the brat that died of pneumonia a year later). This is modern-day American Demeter and Persephone, these are the Greek gods and heroes in contemporary life, not the cleaned-up, whitewashed versions the aspiring poets would repeat over and over.
It is dire for the girl - she has no hope of marriage, she's in practical terms a whore, her reputation is gone, by the laws and mores of the time she's liable to be charged with offences and go to jail; she and her mother are clearly poor, clearly have no resources, and the child born out of 'we can't tell who the father is, because she slept with seventeen men' dies at only a year old. Had it survived, it would repeat the cycle of poverty, deprivation, and neglect. If a modern-day Williams were to write up a repeat story, it would be inner-city urban Black poverty, with feckless young men who float around involved in petty crime and drug addiction have multiple baby-mammas, nobody has a job or any notion of a way out of the mess, and the kids that result are fatherless and going to repeat the same cycle themselves.
> Kore is a name, or rather a title. This is where the flippancy of the reviewer annoys me: it's not because she's like Voldemort, but it is apotropaic. She is now the Queen of the Underworld, and has real and dangerous powers. Being intimately involved with death, you should and must treat her with respect. Not just the Greeks, practically every culture has the tradition of averting misfortune by not directly referring to powers whose attention you don't want to draw
Yes, but Kore is also approached with reverent hope as a saviour. Not really the same thing with Voldemort. I get why the reviewer used that parallel, but unfortunately all it evoked in me was "Oh for pete's sake not *another* Harry Potter reference" and it fell short of making the equivalence between "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" and "Kore" as ways of naming something/someone without using their real name in order to get around the power that real names have, and of drawing (malign) attention by calling out that entity's name.
> And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere.
The much more obvious theory is that they called her that because that's what she was usually called. Deities have many names, titles, and epithets, and you don't need a reason to use one of them. You may have a reason to choose a particular form of address, but you never need one.
This is a total failure of a book review: it doesn't tell us what the book is or what information it notionally contains. It seems to be a vehicle for the author (of the review) to do some unconnected free-association. The review does not even bother to mention the title of the book, "Kora in Hell: Improvisations", which would make references to "the Improvisations" much less nonsensical.
FWIW this is a recognizable, and actually somewhat decent, attempt at poetry, but its a terrible review. The problem is that the writer knows that the greatest insights are often cloaked in exoteric writing, so they think if they write esoterically, this must mean they have deep insight into the book, even if the review is mere dribble in terms of a review. What value it has is as an artifact, a record of the stream of consciousness reflections of the author as they reflect on the book, but the review lacks the self awareness to understand that, as interesting as this might be in another context, a review requires you to actually think about the book, and be at least have a vague idea of what you’re trying to say
Funny how this review is so polarizing - I thought it one of the best in the contest. I read all 130 + entries, and put this in the top 3.
Only two of my top 3 made the finals, so my taste is not perfectly aligned with the group, but I’m surprised that so many commenters didn’t even finish reading it, or didn't understand it, or speculated about it being an AI-generated hoax.
It’s well-written and funny - a few of my favorite lines:
- “the greedy claws of the God of the Underworld, personified in this allegory by the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.”
- “Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning.”
- “Even if you don’t know that red is supposed to make you angry or that everything in the world is secretly the number three…”
And it’s only a little over 3000 words. Given Scott’s remark “There’s no official word count requirement, but last year’s finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words” this is clearly on the shorter side.
Of course, the subject matter is pretty far off the beaten track for ACX. I’m reminded of a quote used in the movie The Big Short: "Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry." There’s not much reason to read Kora in Hell unless you’re already interested in early-20th-century arts & letters, which I’m sure many ACX readers aren’t. (If you are, I’d like to recommend Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley, if you haven’t read it yet.)
In any case, I very much enjoyed this review: props to the anonymous reviewer for an entertainingly written account of an obscure yet interesting book!
It had plenty of brilliant and creative one-liners and a few several-liners (the originality and coherence of which rule out it being written by an AI of course). Where I had difficulty is that it seemed to me the clever pieces were never assembled into a whole. I am left with a bunch of shiny and interesting-lookling pieces, but not the communication of a complete message, a set of thoughts in service to one clear overarching theme.
For example, if the text were divided in half, or thirds, and one part randomly deleted, I'm not sure it would have suffered greatly -- which suggests to me its top-level organization and a top-level direction are not strong.
Of course, it may be that the top-level organization and message escaped my ability to find them, and others could, or it could be that for other people this absence isn't important.
I believe there are genres of literature that are close to a "series of vignettes" kind of construction -- some works by Italo Calvino come vaguely to mind -- which are more or less appealing to certain readers, compared to something with a powerful narrative arc (like a Jane Austen novel). Maybe something similar is at work here.
Yes, the "series of vignettes" approach is more appealing to me personally, and less so to people who are accustomed to writing which is tightly plotted (fiction), or has a clear and well-supported main point (non-fiction). I like and admire Jane Austen's work - she's funnier than people give her credit for - but Italo Calvino is really more my cup of tea. And I consider Mark Twain to be the Great American Novelist of the 19th century, not despite but *because of* his episodic, picaresque approach.
I like poetry just fine. I don't like faux-ignorance masquerading as wit, and since the reviewer succeeded in making me quit 3.5 paragraphs in, I don't think that makes this a good review.
If they had managed to keep me spite-reading to the end, then it would have succeeded as a review. But making readers decide "I could better occupy my time sticking my head in the microwave" isn't succeeding. To quote someone who previously lamented the verbose length of book reviews on here, did the reviewer consider if this piece would have made it into USA Today?
After reading some of it, the review really oversold the book. It's trapped by self-awareness, oblique, and fetishizes language. There's wisdom and a keen eye there, some gems, but it would take a better man to make something readable out of it. Too inward-turned, high on his own farts. And so, so horny!
Joining Team Haters. Not qualified to say to what extent this succeeds as poetry inspired by the book, but for me this simply isn’t a book review. Not every form fits every purpose.
Strangely enough I got a bit more out of this review than most because I'm lucky enough to have read the webtoon Lore Olympus: Kore can mean both "maiden" and "deathbringer". I'm not as familiar with the Roman names so Proserpina went over my head.
I know next to nothing about early 20th century lit/poetry, other than recognizing most of the names through some decent cultural osmosis, and having read the first part of "Howl" in a throwaway scene in the comic Blacksaad (highly recommended btw (also because of a mistype I only just realized that "heard" and "read" only differ by an H and where to put the R)), and so the references to their works also went over my head.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the rambling, free-associative style, which seems to be a pastiche of the style of the book itself. It's fun to stretch the old comprehension muscles every so often, but giving them a stretch every now and then is really all I'm up for these days, so the full body workout of the actual book is something I'll likely have to pass on.
Still, kudos to the reviewer for trying something experimental, and to the comments for the links and references.
This is an unusually effective book review. I began it thinking, "I can't remember which guy William Carlos Williams is" and went through the following stages quite quickly:
* Who is WCW?
* What is this review even about?
* I don't like this.
* I'm not going to finish this.
* Hmm, the other comments didn't like it either.
* Oh, I remember who WCW is! I hate that guy!
Mission accomplished -- I have no need to read the original work itself and if anyone ever were to ask if I have (or why I haven't) I'll be able to respond. I suspect the multi-step process of discovery in the above bullet-point list will prove a more durable marker for me about WCW than having read some of his work in college and having thought "wow this is forgettable garbage I will forget it immediately".
First couple paragraphs almost lost me completely but I'm glad I kept reading- would be much better if there was a more clear introduction. Might be that I had no knowledge of WCW beforehand.
Okay, sorry but I had to give up on this only part-way in. The flippant tone of the review may be trying for light-hearted touch, but it only makes the reviewer sound completely ignorant of anything to do with mythology or poetry. When I hit this bump in the road:
" their hope for Modernity was to preserve that tradition, reprising old forms but, in Pound’s slogan, “Making Them New” so as to keep them alive and fresh and fascist"
That's when I got off this trolley car. Maybe the review gets better after that, but I have better things to do than read the rest of it, like stick forks in my eyes.
(Gorsh, Ezra Pound was a Fascist? Or maybe just a fascist? Or maybe he went bugnuts and we shouldn't judge the poetry by the man? I don't trust this reviewer to give me anything deeper in consideration of the genuine Problem Of Pound than I'd get on a Reddit sub about shallow vaguely liberal vaguely political but mostly social commentary of the "I have a sign in my yard about 'In this house we believe' style).
(Yes, I do take poetry seriously. And while I believe there *is* a genuine The Problem Of Pound, I'm gonna cut a bitch who disses Eliot's poetry and his genuine struggles with reconciling the Modernist idiom to what he eventually found himself working in. That reminds me, as well as re-reading The Four Quartets, I should go re-read The Cocktail Party).
What is the Problem Of Pound, pray? Being a lifelong philistine -- not even sure I've even read any Pound -- I am completely ignorant.
Short version: Pound moved to Italy in 1924, and while he had always expressed extreme anti-Semitic sentiments, he upped this during the Second World War, started a letter-writing campaign to American politicians about staying out of the war, and most damning of all, did radio broadcasts on behalf of Fascist Italy.
After the fall of Mussolini, Pound surrendered to/was arrested by American forces and eventually charged with treason. He ended up back in the USA, was put in psychiatric hospitals for examination to see if he was fit to stand trial, and was eventually discharged in 1958.
He wrote one important work, The Pisan Cantos, during this entire period of commitment, and the diagnoses differed but all pretty much agreed that he had bats in his belfry. So was he crazy all along, was he actually a Fascist, was this a performance to get out of being charged and tried, or did he start off sincere but end up insane?
And out of all this, if he really was an anti-Semite segregationist Fascist (or fascist), should that affect how we regard his poetry? Should he be cancelled? That's the Problem Of Pound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound#World_War_II_and_radio_broadcasts_(1939%E2%80%931945)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos
"The section he wrote at the end of World War II, a composition started while he was interned by American occupying forces in Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos, and is the part of the work most often considered to be self-sufficient. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1948. There were many repercussions, since this in effect honoured a poet who had been condemned as a traitor of his native country, and was also diagnosed with a serious and disabling mental illness."
They're very difficult, challenging, and are they a mish-mash of word salad by a crazy guy or the pinnacle of Modernist poetry? Here's Pound reciting one of them from 1939 and if you think the Beat Poets, in particular Allan Ginsberg, invented the epitome of agonised social protest commentary with Moloch and "Howl", here's their intellectual father doing it first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEADZ2PJ6iY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz-_8QxoFfA
Ah I see. Thanks muchly, your mastery of English literature is as always very much appreciated.
Well, as a philistine I can have no opinion on his merit as an artist, and the charges of sympathy with fascism, disdain for patriotism, and antisemitism leave my outrage meter pegged at well I guess so -- all three were not uncommon among the aristocratic intelligentsia of the 20s and 30s -- he may have been pilloried more because he said the quiet parts out loud and sounds like he had a knack for getting under peoples' skin than because he was uniquely offensive.
As a man I would judge him inadequate, if only because a brief skim of his Wikipedia article seems to suggest that he was a real-life latter-day George Wickham.
The question of whether he was actually insane or played at it, and whether if he played at it it turned willy nilly real, like Cerberus actually leaping red-eyed and dripping slobber off the pages of "Inferno" if you lingered over its description too long, is a really interesting one, though.
"all three were not uncommon among the aristocratic intelligentsia of the 20s and 30s"
Very much so, we have our own example in Yeats who flirted (how seriously it is hard to know, was he using it as poetic inspiration the same way he used occultism, or was it genuine political conviction?) with our weak version of Fascism, the Blueshirts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats#Politics
"Yeats was an Irish nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'. But as his life progressed, he sheltered much of his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense political landscape until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State.
In the earlier part of his life, Yeats was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In the 1930s Yeats was fascinated with the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalist movements of Europe, and he composed several marching songs for the Blueshirts, although they were never used. He was a fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism. On the other hand, he was also an elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule, and saw democracy as a threat to good governance and public order.[64] After the Blueshirt movement began to falter in Ireland, he distanced himself somewhat from his previous views, but maintained a preference for authoritarian and nationalist leadership. D. P. Moran called him a minor poet and "crypto-Protestant conman."
The poetry remains, whatever about the politics.
Well and thank God for that. If the work could not rise above the man, what a sad and cramped little world it would be.
Perhaps it is just that I am also a Philistine, but when I read the part about moving the Eleusinian myth to New Jersey, all I could think of was P.D.Q. Bach's "Iphigenia in Brooklyn."
I wondered if perhaps the reviewer was just relating WCW's opinion that there was something fascist about Pound and Eliot's verse. So I found Project Gutenberg's "Kora in Hell: Improvisations" and searched for "fascist". Nope, not there. But enough disdain for the alleged inauthenticity of Eliot's and Pound's verse that it may as well have been? Maybe.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56681/56681-h/56681-h.htm
Since I'd already searched the dratted thing, I skimmed it. The reviewer wasn't far off in describing its style as, "The style is part aphoristic and part like the highbrow version of passive-aggressive Tweets, where you know the people you’re talking about might be reading and you want plausible deniability."
The reviewer explains, "We are not actually seeing WCW improvising on the fly. He takes his method from Kandinsky and the method is 'Never go Full Unconscious'... You use your improvisation as material for your final work. That’s why only 81 entries survive in Kora In Hell from the original 365. Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning. Composition is then an act of love and care towards the reader, and is what classicists and romantics share in their method."
If that is what excision of nonsense to show love and care toward the reader look like, I'd hate to see WCW's hate and neglect -- and he was a doctor.
It's not impossible to write a good review focusing on the reviewer's opinion and speculation rather than on what the thing reviewed is *about*. Sometimes a review is little more than pretext for saying something hopefully interesting. In this review, though, I couldn't tell where the speculation was coming from, WCW or the reviewer? That was irritating.
WCW's literary peers apparently found "Kora in Hell: Improvisations" irritating, too, and couldn't understand why he was so proud of it.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-carlos-williams
"[F]ew peers shared Williams's enthusiasm for the book. Pound called it 'incoherent' and 'un-American'; H.D. objected to its 'flippancies,' its 'self-mockery,' its 'un-seriousness'; and Wallace Stevens complained about Williams's 'tantrums.'" I might not have believed them had I not seen for myself.
The review is a fitting tribute to the book.
I'm sticking to not reading the rest of this review (when I do dig my heels in, they stay dug) but reading the link (and thank you for that) to Williams' work, I can see the reviewer trying to ape the style (though failing badly). Since I have to do my own review of the book, here we go! I both laughed and scowled at this swipe by Williams at Eliot, though mainly the swipe is at Jepson who lauds Eliot as the best of the American poets:
"And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because Eliot is a subtle conformist. It tickles the palate of this archbishop of procurers to a lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New World type. Prufrock, the nibbler at sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not quite (because he refuses to turn his back), is “the soul of that modern land,” the United States!"
Looking into it a little, Eliot is not the bone of contention, Edgar Jepson is. Seemingly he was an English critic who offended a lot of American literary establishment types by a review of American poetry he wrote; a 1918 issue American poetry magazine had a very unhappy article in response to him:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=12&issue=4&page=36
Though I have to say, if we are posterity, then we will probably come down on Mr. Jepson's rather than Miss Monroe's side when it comes to appraising Chicago:
“[A]nd Chicago the powerful will go on mirroring her new-flowering beauty in Lake Michigan, and her new-flowering soul in her poets and other artists, who will give a new glory to her fame that long ago crossed the world”.
Yes, when I think of modern-day Chicago, it's the flowering beauty of its poetic soul that first comes to mind 🙄
As to the book itself, the introduction is laying out the slap-fighting between British reviewers, classically-influenced Americans, and the new authentically American, uninfluenced by Anglo-European influences, that Williams was trying to create. The improvisations themselves are also, I think, a little slap at the Imagists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and others he quotes in his Introduction trying to get him to conform more to their notion of 'proper' poetry, so he is being deliberately and indeed wilfully obscure with the involved imagery he uses for the Improvisations:
"To you! whoever you are, wherever you are! (But I know where you are!) There’s Durer’s “Nemesis” naked on her sphere over the little town by the river—except she’s too old. There’s a dancing burgess by Tenier and Villon’s maitress—after he’d gone bald and was shin pocked and toothless: she that had him ducked in the sewage drain. Then there’s that miller’s daughter of “buttocks broad and breastes high”. Something of Nietzsche, something of the good Samaritan, something of the devil himself,—can cut a caper of a fashion, my fashion! Hey you, the dance! Squat. Leap. Hips to the left. Chin—ha!—sideways! Stand up, stand up ma bonne! you’ll break my backbone. So again! —and so forth till we’re sweat soaked.
(Some fools once were listening to a poet reading his poem. It so happened that the words of the thing spoke of gross matters of the everyday world such as are never much hidden from a quick eye. Out of these semblances, and borrowing certain members from fitting masterpieces of antiquity, the poet began piping up his music, simple fellow, thinking to please his listeners. But they getting the whole matter sadly muddled in their minds made such a confused business of listening that not only were they not pleased at the poet’s exertions but no sooner had he done than they burst out against him with violent imprecations.)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams#Poetry
"Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. “No one believes that poetry can exist in his own life,” Williams said. “The purpose of an artist, whatever it is, is to take the life, whatever he sees, and to raise it up to an elevated position where it has dignity.”
In 1920, Williams turned his attentions to Contact, a periodical launched by Williams and fellow writer Robert McAlmon: "The two editors sought American cultural renewal in the local condition in clear opposition to the internationalists—Pound, The Little Review, and the Baroness." Yvor Winters, the poet/critic, judged that Williams's verse bears a certain resemblance to the best lyric poets of the 13th century."
Well, old quarrels, old fights, high words and hot blood of the day are now just historical curiosities for us moderns, amusements to pass the time, but we don't feel the urgency or what it was that they were fighting over.
And maybe in turn, our own controversies and urgencies that we think mean the end of the world will strike our descendants, in turn, as "why ever did they spend so much effort on trifles?"
You're right Jepson is the focus of scorn, but Williams does seem to treat Eliot as some sort of traitor to the "distinctly American" poetic project. To which I'd wonder, why expend so much effort making something "distinctly American"? I'm a minor (extremely minor -- however minor you think, think less than that) poet in my own right, and even if I did try to ape another nation's antique style, I'd be doing it as an American in the 21st century exposed to a bunch of influences that those I'm aping never were. That's true of imitation in any art form, and a reason "derivative" is so often a dumb criticism.
Miss Monroe's boosterism of Chicago is somewhat excused by the fact that the Poetry Foundation is headquartered in Chicago. I've been there. As cities go, Chicago is probably my favorite, but I still find it embarrassing to picture Chicago's "new-flowering soul". Certainly, it's not something Chicagoans typically think about!
Even HL Mencken, famed for skewering Americans, wrote "The American Language", as if it mattered to American identity to give "American" a separate language category from "English". That era's self-conscious Americanism in arts and letters just seems goofy now, even when works produced under its influence are outstanding.
The whole project of this "New, American" identity in arts and letters itself seems to depend on ideas about genius and originality expressed in German romanticism. But originality isn't the hard part, really. Making originality *good* is. And, since we can't help being ourselves, living in the time we live in and not before, I think we get more artistically out of focusing on what we find good and interesting, rather than on trying to be "original" -- even if advertising "originality" is a good marketing gimmick.
I don't have a favorite composer, but Gesualdo is one of them, and the one I'm inclined to name if asked to name one, since naming him is good shorthand for my interests. I remember learning this myth that Gesualdo was a man before his time, a mad genius, discovering sounds that would not be heard again for centuries after. But then early music historians go and check, and, while Gesualdo was innovative, his innovations were an outgrowth of the musical school he learned from, which was already pretty weird:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MRp8DO7epc&t=3s
Gesualdo, a nobleman, had the luxury of studying the music that interested him deeply, without other obligations, and printing his own compositions, fruits of that interest, without having to please others. He had the resources to pursue an interest and leave enough copies of his work behind to survive. That doesn't make his music any less admirable, just makes "admirable" sound a lot more mundane than cults of "genius" advertise.
It does seem that Williams wanted to write "American" poetry, not retread the old paths and churn out the old models, and that's not a bad ambition, every nation *should* have a national voice.
But I think Carl Sandburg is the poet we think of as the "American vernacular" poet, and also Whitman. Not Williams or Greenleaf Whittier; Longfellow perhaps is another "American" poet but even he did a translation of Dante.
The real American vernacular voice is pop music - jazz, rock'n'roll, rap - and Hollywood. Those are the artistic original American forms that have conquered the world.
My mom, a woman of great patriotic sentiment, would probably name Robert Frost as the "American" poet, but, true, I've never thought of Frost as pointedly "vernacular". Carl Sandberg? Yeah. Whitman? Sadly.
Whitman cheeses me off for reasons I concede may be unfair. Take a kid who's already cynically sick of self-esteem mumbo-jumbo, and introduce her to Whitman with, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume," and it may be a recipe for lifelong enmity. ("Good on you, buddy, celebrating yourself, but why should anyone else?")
Stevens, Dickenson, Ammons... they seem plenty American to me even if that wasn't their self-conscious project. National and regional identity spring from ordinary familiarity and attachment without a self-conscious effort, and while not all self-conscious efforts are bad, getting good at the vernacular that's already around you, like vernacular music, because it's already there, seems less futile than trying to forge the vernacular yourself, because you think you have the right vision of what it is or should be (as Williams apparently thought).
You came across Whitman when you were, as you say, "sick of the self-esteem mumbjo-jumbo" so he does seem to be too breezy and self-involved. But to do him justice, when he was writing "Leaves of Grass" starting in the 1850s, this kind of modern-day self-esteem mantra wasn't in existence. Whitman was seen as the poet of democracy, of the ordinary working-man and ordinary American life, not standing as someone apart from the common stream:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman#Legacy_and_influence
He had a great influence on the young G.K. Chesterton; to quote from a memoir by his brother about Chesterton:
"He embraced passionately the three great articles of Whitman’s faith, the ultimate goodness of all things implying the acceptance of the basest and meanest no less than the noblest in life, the equality and solidarity of men, and the redemption of the world by comradeship.
...For, though Whitman himself was an Anarchist rather than a Socialist, his influence on the Socialist movement was immense, and young Socialists talked continually the language of Whitmanism, preaching comradeship, equality, and good will among men—in a word, the very things which G. K. Chesterton was then intent on proclaiming."
There is the mention of Whitman in the dedication to "The Man Who Was Thursday" and Whitman's open optimism was set against the fin-de-siecle decadence of the period:
"Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;"
Frost is the American vernacular poet. True, it's the flinty New England vernacular, but it's transformed by his writing into something sublime.
This second round of book reviews has done more to convince me that the rationalist writing community is weak than it has to teach me about the books. Far more. I felt the same way about this review as you did. Sad! :-(
A bold stylistic decision by the reviewer, and I think he pulls it off.
I have nothing to say about this, because of that rule. You know the rule.
Yes, he is a sexist assumption on my part. Hades awaits...
No its the rule about “if you have nothing nice to say...” that was meant to be a top level comment too, so apologies on that.
Dafuq did I just read? That was seriously weird.
I don't care about poetry or William Carlos Williams or any of the people or concepts discussed in this review. But I couldn't turn away or stop reading, and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The style sets a high bar for itself but it worked, it got me. In its weird way, I think this might be the most successful book review for me, because it distills the experience of reading the book and injects it via the review into my brain. Confused kudos, but definitely kudos.
It’s not really about winning the book review contest, it’s about guessing which LLM generated this
I had exactly the same thought midway through. Are we secretly playing a game of AI hide and seek? Either way this review proves that the Turing test is closer than ever to being overcome, at least for me.
It would be classic Scott (in the olden' times sense) to sneak a GPT-3 entry into the contest. And maybe put a question or two about it onto the survey.
BRB, checking for tell-tale “the the”'s in the body…
„Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning.“
Surely no current AI could pull this off?
You are right that Dr Soong’s earlier versions of positronic brains were unable to use contractions, but later versions were quite capable properly using words like “don’t” and “can’t”.
In all seriousness, this is exactly the kind of statement that sounds like it came out of GPT-3 after feeding it a bunch of contemporary poetry
Sorry that wasn‘t clear, I didn‘t mean this single sentence on it‘s own, I meant it in context; it was set up previously in the review. (But actually, „surrealist‘s“ is a mistake, right, it should be „surrealists‘“? That could be another indication is wasn‘t an AI.)
Parallels and errors in the corpus would definitely show up in AI generated text. I’ll admit that I don’t know WCW’s work so my guess that this is AI generated actually is more a bet on something Scott would do rather than because I think I can tell the difference between a human generated WCW review and an AI generated WCW review. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can’t. I think someone would need to be very familiar with WCW’s work to be able to not get Sokal’d by modern AI.
But if it‘s too intelligent to be AI-generated then it can‘t be AI-generated, whatever Scott would do and whatever my knowledge of this poet‘s work (I never heard of him before)?
It’s not that it’s too intelligent to be AI generated. It’s that the topic is so esoteric that laypeople like me couldn’t tell the difference between a genuine contribution to the discussion versus word salad buzzword bingo. Maybe it’s too intelligent, maybe it’s not. I can’t tell /shrugs
“It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey.”
But now you’ve suggested it, we may have to.
The quoted sentence is an interesting example of assumptions. I too always assumed that the descriptor "high concept" referred to something with _more_ or _more complex_ conceptual elements than a "low concept" work.
In fact, the opposite is true; "high concept" describes movies without a plot, where "low concept" describes movies with involved plots. Per wikipedia:
> A movie described as being "high-concept" is considered easy to sell to a wide audience because it delivers upon an easy-to-grasp idea.
The paradigm for a director of high-concept films is Michael Bay.
I think that assumption comes from "highbrow" and "lowbrow", which have the meaning swapped.
I don't really agree; I think "highbrow" and "lowbrow" are in harmony with the conventional (extended) meanings of "high" and "low" while "high concept" and "low concept" conflict with the conventional meanings.
Which is to say that people would find the designations "high concept" and "low concept" to be just as confusing regardless of whether they were familiar with "highbrow" and "lowbrow". The phrases mean the opposite of the sum of their parts; that's not how things are supposed to work.
As I understand it, "high concept" means that the *concept* is what dominates - all you need to know is that it's about motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane, and no one cares about the plot or the characters. "Low concept" might equally be called "high plot" or "high acting" or "high character development".
It's just that somehow the term "high concept" is the one that stuck, and since "concept" often refers to abstract artistic things, and "high" is often used for those, we associate "high concept" with that sort of meaning, rather than understanding it literally as "your ad concept ate the whole movie".
So what does that make Christopher Nolan, where the narrative is mixed up and internationally inaudible dialogue thrown in for the purpose of making audience feel smart for having "got it".
Buried in the rubble of someone addicted to his own snark lie gems. What a broken bitter heart lies here.
I enjoyed the first part(s), but in the end the review felt like it didn't go into enough detail or offer much that was particularly surprising/enlightening/otherwise obscure-yet-interesting. Some few bits did manage the latter, and I was becoming hooked at first, but by the end... I'm unsatisfied. I still don't know what relevance this work to me, or why I should / shouldn't read it.
(That last paragraph also seems a bit, uh, fragmented itself, to me.)
The book, I suspect,
is better than the review.
I am personally not a big fan of book reviews that do not introduce the book right away, who wrote it, when it was written, what it is about, and why the reviewer has decided to review it. I have to decide right away whether it is something that I find interesting and worthwhile to read, rather than suffer through a bunch of introductory paragraphs that try to set up a story. I understand many people enjoy this type of intro, but I am not one of those people.
Agree totally.
In general I agree, but I'm more forgiving if the review is going to be about unclear poetic writers. I haven't read WCW, so am not sure in this case, but if a person had just spent a day reading Faulkner or Joyce I would forgive them for being in an unclear, associative state of mind.
Sure, but whether I can forgive them is separate from whether I like it or care?
Yes, you certainly don't have to like it.
Personally I kind of like it when a review somewhat echoes the feeling of a piece (though I can't say if this does), since that gives me some information about whether I would like it or not, including choices about whether or not to fully introduce major characters, such as the author. As it happens, I mostly do not like that kind of thing, or only like it when forced -- of the Joyce and Faulkner I've tried and failed to read, I only got through Light in August. It was beautiful, but I don't know what happened in it. Based on this review, I feel that Williams is the kind of writer I would like to take a seminar on, but not read on my own initiative, because he's probably the sort of person to start a review with no introduction and assume readers will work to catch up.
Not all of WCW’s stuff is this opaque! If you know a single one of his poems it’s
This is just to say
I have eaten the plums
That were in the icebox
And which you were probably
Saving for breakfast
Forgive me.
They were delicious —
So sweet, and so cold.
There’s a reason people have heard of that poem and not, say, Kora in Hell.
Or "The Red Wheelbarrow", which is pure Imagism:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
I myself am a big fan of Kierkegaard, and so I love to talk about / explain his philosophy all the time. BUT, part of his philosophy is that you should have genuine, one-on-one engagement with people and their books. He hated the idea of his work being summarized and turned into a paragraph in somebody’s systematic account of philosophy. So how do I write about him? Lots of people write about Kierkegaard in a way that Kierkegaard himself would have hated, and, worse, proves they never really understood him — how do I avoid doing that to an author I love? Can I say anything more than just, read Either/Or, read Fear and Trembling?
I sense that the writer of this review is in a similar dilemma. Trying to write about WCW in a way that honors WCW, in a way that wouldn’t make WCW hate the reviewer or think they didn’t actually understand WCW’s work at all.
Maybe the only way to respond genuinely to poetry is to write poetry.
Why cant Kierkegaard be summarised, or explained? Whenever I see that claim in regards to philosophers i feel i am dealing with opaque charlatanism.
Because you often are. Particularly with the modern continentals. Often there is some whole book with one or two fairly valuable insights dressed up with twenty chapters of impenetrable nonsense stretching those insights beyond any reason but since it is so impenetrable it is difficult to tell what the fuck is supposed to be going on. A lot of Motte & Bailey.
Modern continentals have fallen far from their great forebears.
You will probably still think you're dealing with opaque charlatanism after reading the following. That's fine, Kierkegaard isn't for everybody.
It has to do with the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. The easiest example (although not one used by K) would be color. Objectively, the color blue is 6.66 x 10^14 Hz. Whether that's true or not has nothing to do with any existing individual person's ideas or opinions. You can verify it with mechanical instruments. But there's also a subjective experience of the color blue, which can't be communicated objectively, and which can only be experienced by an existing individual. Objectivity is "the view from nowhere" (also not a K saying); subjectivity is the experience of a particular, existing individual, in a particular time, at a particular place.
One of Kierkegaard's important points is that, while objectivity is useful, considering it the only valid type of truth is toxic to your soul. Truth requires an existing person, to be the one knowing the truth. Truly attaining objectivity would be to remove yourself, as an existing individual, entirely. His famous dictum, then, is "subjectivity is truth". Because without the subjective experience of an existing individual, there isn't actually any knowledge of the truth happening.
So a summarizer or systematizer of philosophy is attempting to present things the same way you talk about the frequencies of light -- as though it has nothing to do with any existing individual. As though the book was written by nobody, to be read by nobody. Kierkegaard wants to write in a way that's conducive to truth. Not objective "truth" that has nothing to do with anybody, but actual truth that can be true for actual people. Kierkegaard is true for me in a way that his books probably won't be for most people, because they had a big impact on my life.
So, if you're a very objectivity-minded person, you'll be okay with disregarding what I say, because I'm such an obvious fan of Kierkegaard. I'm biased. I read Fear and Trembling, and I was like, "Holy crap, this guy is breaking some questions about Christianity wide open!" Then I read Either/Or, and he diagnosed everything that was going on in my mind and showed how it would get worse and worse, and more and more, until I was in despair. And that actually, the reason I was in despair now (although I didn't always feel it) was my unwillingness to deal with things _as though I was myself_, to abstract my own personal existence out of the picture. "Okay," I asked, "but then, how do I live?" Book 2 of Either/Or answered, "Not like some perfectly ethical judge, that's despair too." Fear and Trembling answered, "Live by this weird thing called faith." "But without objectivity, how do I know what you're saying is true?" Answered in Philosophical Fragments. "Okay, then what even is faith?" Answer: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (he had fun with titles). "But how do I even do all this?" Answer: Stages on Life's Way. "Okay, you've got me, but I'm weak and forget, I need to be encouraged as I go on." Turns out, every one of those books of philosophy has a secret companion book of sermons; the philosophy books are for those on the outside; the sermons are for those on the inside.
But he does all that in such a way that, if you think it's Kierkegaard trying to convince you of these things, you won't be convinced of them. He puts all sorts of contradictory ideas in front of you, in the voices of all sorts of different viewpoints and made up characters, and makes you sort it all out yourself. All those books I just named (except the sermons) were published without his name on them. He doesn't let you claim to be his disciple. He teaches as though what he himself thinks about it means nothing -- all he wants is for you to think about it for yourself. Thinking for yourself and arriving at the opposite conclusion from him is a result he would far, far prefer to believing what he says just because he said it.
You could probably find a philosophy professor who has a more academically rigorous, objective approach, who could locate Kierkegaard's work in the historical development of existentialism, between Hegel and Sartre, and who points out the similarities with Nietzsche's work. And that professor wouldn't consider, would never dream of asking, _whether it's actually true or not_. Because if he did that, you'd feel like you were being preached to; it would lack the objectivity of a trustworthy academic treatment.
Kierkegaard was against Hegel, exactly because Hegel took other people's philosophies and located them in the historical development of particular trends in philosophy. K said the worst fate he could think of would be to have his own philosophy shoved into a textbook next to Hegel, to be talked about by people who would never even think to consider whether it was actually true, or what use it could be to their own lives, other than as bricks to build a career out of.
Philosophers like that might know everything there is to know about philosophy, but they've _never actually done philosophy_. Objectivity has robbed them of truth. Like a Christian minister who knows everything about theology, but doesn't care about God and doesn't help the poor. Kierkegaard would say that kind of truth might be accurate, but it's not really true.
So this is the best answer I can give. Kierkegaard can be summarized and explained, but not in a way that could ever conceivably convey the truth that Kierkegaard himself wanted to convey. Because if, in your mind, some idea is Kierkegaard's idea, rather than an idea you believe because you figured it out yourself, then it's not really Kierkegaard's idea.
Actually, forgive me, but everything I just wrote is wrong. Or, most of it is. Probably some is partially true, but most is dumb and wrong. It's been distorted by my personal, subjective bias, and my experience of reading his books at a particular time in my particular life. You shouldn't believe it, and you definitely shouldn't tell anybody that Kierkegaard says such-and-such on the basis of having read what I, Matthew, wrote about him on the Internet.
If you want to know what he actually said, the Hong translations are good and have excellent endnotes.
Thanks for the info about Kierkegaard - I've never really checked out his stuff, but it sounds like there might be something to it. Disliking Hegel is almost always a good sign!
Fine review of Kierkegard's oeuvre! Focus a bit more on one of his works (in context of the whole), and you very much qualify for an ACX book-review - please, do it! - I read only a few pieces of Sören K., but he is as least as relevant as this Williams-guy. - As for this Kora in Hell review: I liked it, style fits topic. But I'd say: Not the proper audience here for such a review - and not the right kind of review for this audience. "Selling" K. to Rationalists will be a huge challenge, too. But Kierkegaard's honesty should help. And most of us here are not that much into R., but ṛta. - just click "About" on this blog :)
This is an interesting and thought-provoking little essay, thank you.
>while objectivity is useful, considering it the only valid type of truth is toxic to your soul
Is this statement objective, or subjective? If there isn't an objective truth somewhere in there, then why did Kierkegaard or his "disciples" think that it's relevant to anybody other than themselves? Such line of argumentation seems to be self-defeating. It seems obvious to me that truth can be communicated only to the extent that it is objective, otherwise you admit to being trapped in a hall of mirrors, which is personally unique to yourself and incommunicable to everybody else in principle.
This is exactly the right line of questioning. The “Either” section of Either/Or is about this very thing. If you understand both the dehumanization problem of objectivity and the hall of mirrors problem of subjectivity, you’re at the place in the journey where his book Philosophical Fragments picks up.
In the Western tradition, there are 3 great child sacrifices: Jephthah, Agamemnon and Abraham. Jephthah and Agamemnon are tragic heroes, and sometimes people write plays or songs about them; but Abraham is the father and founder of three of the great world religions: the Father of Faith. Why? Jephthah and Agamemnon could communicate their situation to their people. It was relevant to people other than themselves. But Abraham's situation was incommunicable to everybody else in principle.
That's the general drift of a big part of Fear and Trembling.
More explicitly (but still in a pretty roundabout way!) Book 2 of Either/Or ("Or") has a pseudonymous narrator named Judge William, who takes the issue you raise, of communicability, very seriously. Kierkegaard uses that section to show us where he thinks that attitude leads. TLDR: it's the Kantian categorical imperative, basically, with all that system's attendant problems.
And the first book of Either/Or ("Either") can be seen as being dedicated to proving your point! It's written by a character who understands the importance of subjectivity, of finding the way of life that he himself, as an existing individual, can live ... and shows him spiraling into nihilism and despair.
But did Kierkegaard, or anybody else arrive at a satisfying resolution to this conundrum, in your opinion? From what I've gathered, philosophy doesn't usually provide them, and everybody more or less stays confused, interminably retreading old malformed arguments. For example, David Chapman says that existentialists hadn't in the end managed to find answers to nihilism and despair, and now postmodernists pretty much ended in the same place.
I guess I'm lucky myself that my subjective experience has never been particularly prone to this sort of angst. I've never been bothered much about "meaning" or lack thereof, so I can look at this stuff with bemused equanimity and sympathy to those not so lucky.
"...is that you should have genuine, one-on-one engagement with people and their books. He hated the idea of his work being summarized and turned into a paragraph in somebody’s systematic account of philosophy. So how do I write about him"
Couldn't you begin by taking it for granted that he's wrong in this respect? A strong preference for intimate and deep discussion is just a preference, not a philosophical position. Surely his philosophical work has actual substance right? If the author's preferred style of engagement is a hindrance to getting to the substance of the work, then surely you could (and should) just disregard the author's preferences and engage with the work in any way you see fit. Why be beholden to the author? If I buy a book and the author's note at the beginning of the book says that the book is to be read only while upside-down, I hardly feel bound to obey.
I'm not very good at explaining it. I'll try again.
In the case of the particular truths he's trying to communicate, straightforward objectivity-based communication would make him a hypocrite.
Like: I'm going to tell you what opinion you should have. Here's the opinion: you should never let anybody tell you what opinion you should have. Oops...
Or: I'm going to lead you to God. The first step is, you have to approach God as yourself, as a genuine, existing individual, alone. Come on, follow me and I'll show you! Oops...
Just wanted to say that I love this, and your discussion of Kierkegaard above. You do an excellent job of showing why he's the only philosopher who ever really showed me something about life.
Thanks! That means a lot.
I agree--the lack of "[Book Name] by [Author]" construction anywhere in the first paragraph did more to throw me off-kilter than the attempt to emulate WCW's style (which I thought was a good attempt, by the way; this read roughly how I'd imagine WCW's prose would sound considering I've read a fair bit of his poetry).
I appreciate some of Williams's poetry, but I'd never heard of "Kora in Hell." It's out of copyright; here's a link to the text:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56681/56681-h/56681-h.htm
One thing I think Williams, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce had in common was that they meant their work to be difficult, but they worked to fill it with discoverable value that would reward readers who went to the trouble. The reviewer contrasts that with self-indulgent surrealists, and I think he has fashioned his review in the same spirit. His long reflection on improvisation, which reads like a kind of impro itself, seems to me a surprise island of easy coherence. The ideas are not new, but they are ones I have a lot of sympathy with, so I enjoyed that section.
Having looked through the Williams, I'm not sure it reaches the criteria the reviewer lays out for the skilled master riffing in a way that appeals to an audience with appreciation of those skills. But, obviously, I'd have to put in much more work--rise to the level of Pound's "reader of good will"--in order to reach a real conclusion. The review really doesn't inspire me to devote the effort; there's plenty of Williams's poetry still in line before "Kora in Hell."
"Having looked through the Williams, I'm not sure it reaches the criteria the reviewer lays out for the skilled master riffing in a way that appeals to an audience with appreciation of those skills."
Perhaps if the audience appreciates "the highbrow version of passive-aggressive Tweets"?
But you're right. WCW has plenty of other poems, and there are plenty of other poets.
I can never really get into poetry. While there are several poems I like, and sometimes they can be very insightful and amazing. Even when they are very good they mostly seem like bad philosophy, or excellent song lyrics lacking a melody.
An epicure, dining at Crewe,
Found quite a large mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter "Don't shout,
Or wave it about,
Or the rest'll be wanting one, too."
Reminds me of the “master of the house” from the recent Les miserables.
Far too highbrow. Clearly I need to coarsen the tone substantially:
There was a young lass from Madras
Who had a magnificent ass,
Not rounded and pink,
As you probably think,
It was grey, had long ears, and ate grass.
I don't think Madras and ass rhyme. Maybe Alsace?
Al Says doesn't seem to rhyme with ass, but maybe there's a non-French pronunciation I'm unfamiliar with. (That was a local street in the town I grew up in, so it's a word I heard a lot of...although, entirely possible all the non-French white people simply mispronounced it. The "Frenchman's Creek" neighborhood certainly wasn't full of French emigres.)
The second syllable of "Alsace" in the French pronunciation is basically "sass". Indeed, the German version of the name is spelled Elsass.
Yeah, or if you want to keep her nationality, There was a young Indian lass.
For many poems, and many people, it's important to say them aloud with other people present. I took a Shakespeare course in college, and was terribly confused, wondering what all the fuss was about. Then I took another Shakespear course where we spent most of our time just reading the plays out loud. It made an amazing difference. Poems mostly aren't meant to be read silently, and suffer from it.
There's definitely nothing wrong with adding music. Songs are even-more-elevated versions of poetry. But I still find lots of value in (mainly shorter) poems because of the way they do two things.
1) The rhymes we learn as kids are very foundational, and affect our speech patterns for the whole of our lives. Playing with those is just awesome fun.
2) Poems use the randomness of language to throw ideas together that don't really belong together, and create interesting new stuff.
Well, I enjoy lyrical poetry but share a distaste for wilfully-obscure "deep" tripe; that said, I don't think I'd like *your* poetry, if you tried your hand at it — it'd just wind up being Blank verse.
.
.
.
heh heh heh get it
Tough crowd for poetry. I think it's a good review, deserves an honorable mention at least.
Was this review written by GPT-3? It seems to have the disjointed quality I associate with AI writing: each sentence is a fine individual sentence, but there doesn't seem to be any between-sentence coherence.
I know people who write like this. They are more likely than most to read 20th Century poets, David Foster Wallace essays, and Wittgenstein, and listen to John Coltrane. A computer might be able to write like that, but mostly just to the extent that it's getting very good at impersonating actual human writing. It is, to some extent, an intentional aesthetic.
I enjoyed reading the review, but can't tell whether I should read WCW or not based on it. I never thought I would like TS Elliot until I read him, because I don't like most poetry. But the musicality of his language is amazing, even when read silently. So if I were reviewing him, I would want to mention: definitely read him! The sound is at least as important as the meaning!
This succeeds as an essay, but not as a review.
The first of all of the book reviews that I have not felt compelled to finish :/
Oh THAT’s who Stella Gibbons is making fun of in Cold Comfort Farm. I always wondered.
I've read several of the other entries and wondered if Scott secretly wrote them, or perhaps if he was discriminating against contestants who don't imitate his style.
I thought at first that today's entry might be someone trying and failing to sound like Scott. (He definitely didn't write this one himself... I think?) But I did read it through to the end, and now I think I should read "Kora in Hell". That counts as a successful book review, even if it's unorthodox.
Until reading today's comments it hadn't occurred to me that some or all of these were written by an AI. If it turns out that any of them were, I'm going to revise my priors about when human history will end.
I particularly appreciate the use of Jackie Chan as a stand in for Aristotle here. The review was entertaining enough, and probably as good a promotion of the book as it deserves?
Agree with all of this, especially about replacing Aristotle with Jackie Chan, which is always a top-notch innovation.
Yeah, I liked this a lot. Perhaps we might call it a response to the work, rather than a review as such, but that's not a problem. Saying a bunch of interesting things, even slightly incoherently, is better than saying some dull things in a tightly logical structure.
The signal my brain kept throwing up over and over and over was "I notice I am confused!"
*Difficult writing style...lots of very long sentences, some broken up with a series of serial commas, others with no punctuation at all. Meant to mirror WCW himself?
*Many reference pointers that didn't seem to clearly terminate on single subjects or objects (imprecise grammar).
*Lots of references to other artists and works that I don't recognize, due to not being particularly well-read. So I know Extremely Famous big names like Marshal McLuhan, but "Like Cortazar's Hopscotch"...I have no idea what that refers to? Prefer not to have to repeatedly Googlepedia unfamiliar terms, it breaks up the reading flow majorly...
*It wasn't until almost the end of the review that I understood clearly what the book is (about): it's poetry. At first I was like...it's about some weird Mystery Cult? it's a police blotter? it's about women's oppression in early 1900s? it's a diary?
*Would have been very helpful to organize all the meta into one place; it's weird to reach almost the end of the review and only then get told the book's broken into 3 main parts. It's weird to have the timeline/history of the book spread out throughout the review, dripped out in dabs.
All I know at the end is that WCW wrote some poems which seem mildly interesting, like Thought-A-Day calendar style, possibly good-quality loo library material. Unclear about the greater significance, either artistically or historically. The brevity of the review was both a welcome change, and also left me with the distinct feeling I missed "the point" somewhere along the way. I dunno, this one was just a head-scratcher to me... :?
Agreed. I'm afraid I don't like this review style and feel like I couldn't tell much about the book from the review.
Reading other comments, it seems the review is in roughly the same style as the book/ author, so if you didn't like the review, you probably won't like the book either.
I actually enjoyed reading this! Mind you, I won't vote for it, because it didn't teach me new things in the same way as some other reviews, and to me that's what these reviews are for. But I certainly felt like I had an interesting glimpse into this book, and ended up wanting to actually read it!
It took me a while to understand (or believe) that he/she was actually reviewing "Kora in Hell" as opposed to just using the collection as a analogy to review something else with similar name.
Once I figured out/convince myself that it was in fact an attempt at a book review, I was able to embrace it as a not entirely horrible literary criticism essay. But this is not praise, because even as a piece of literary criticism it was too long and without proper focus.
The longer an essay is, the higher the bar!
Of course, we must concede that reviewing a collection of poems (which actually includes WCW own reflections about the poems (was that even mentioned?) is a challenging task. It is especially challenging in an age in which poetry is as dead as so-called jazz is dead. See Nicholas Payton's essay. "ON WHY JAZZ ISN’T COOL ANYMORE" (2011) https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/
And improvising is probably also as dead. Jerry Garcia like sweet Jane: all a friend can say is ain't it a shame.
I found these reviews of Kora to be really much better: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2447144.Kora_in_Hell
And they were shorter!
WCW was a physician which I think should have been mentioned. (Maybe it was and I missed it.) I am recalling a story about when another poet Wallace Stevens died, a work acquaintance of Stevens remarked after the eulogy: "Wally was a poet?" Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive.
The person told me the WS funeral story after learning that I had been honored and paid for being a poet. (Nearly 40 years ago, at a commencement.) My relationship with poetry is like my relationship with jazz (where I've also been paid.) I suppose an embarrassment; as embarrassing as when a jazz colleague finds out I'm a trial lawyer, or when my legal brothers as sisters find out I'm a sculptor or even worse that I published a paper about mathematics. I am also currently translating a work of Janusz Korczak, and I've certainly kept that a secret.
If poetry and jazz are dead (Payton I think is correct), the concept of the polymath is also dead.
So too is the idea of a public intellectual.
Even what passes for being an educated person, is messed up. Undergraduate business degrees? Liberal arts lacking STEM and STEM lacking liberal arts. Not actually learning some other languages and doing some art and music.
Sigh.
I may have to find Duke Tumatoe's album: A Ejukatid Man (1999) to cheer me up.
Both WCW’s physicianship and his reflections were mentioned repeatedly.
I should have written my comment immediately after reading. ( I see twice about doctor, maybe I didn't realize at that point what I was reading.)
I see now about the commentary references, but I guess it was not particularly clear that these were actually part of book until I looked at book, as opposed to being part of a process to winnow down to 81 "poems/improvisations" from 365 or so.
Kafka was an insurance executive.
"It’s where you choose to put silence that makes sound music.
Sound and silence equals music.
Sometimes when I’m soloing, I don’t play shit.
I just move blocks of silence around.
The notes are an afterthought.
Silence is what makes music sexy.
Silence is cool."
I now understand The Fast Show's satirical "Jazz Club" sketches even better. See 6:30 onwards in this clip, with Ted Genus and Wet Blanket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TebUMhJAKSM
Ha ha. Now for some "jazz robots".
I don't see too many people worried (there are some) about musical AIs replacing humans.
I'm counting on my raggedy edge to keep me in gigs. And really nobody dies when I mess up. I've used Impro-Visor as a creative composing aid for over a decade. RIP Bob Keller.
Everyone saying this is written by an AI has clearly never read any WCW.
If you have, it’s pretty evident why the review is written the way it is. Conveniently then, if you hated reading this review, you probably won’t love Williams.
This review really could have benefited from a paragraph of setup. What even is this book? I had a hard time continuing in such uncertainty.
I'm not sure if I learned anything, but I enjoyed it!
btw '...the Hindu god Brahma, you’ll improvise the Universe like you’re dancing.' - you probably want the god Shiva, who creates and destroys with his (improvised) dances.
Did not get past the first chapter of the review. Doing the whole "mysterious, confusing introduction" can work to wet the appetite, but this one just left me hanging. You have to clear some stuff up before you lose most of your readers.
I don't understand the general dislike of this in the comments. I found it well-written, well-structured, and interesting. The reviewer sets the scene, pulls in some juicy excerpts, editorializes a bit about the author, and makes good comparisons. The review provided solid context and piqued my interest.
Out of every book reviewed so far, this is the one I'm most likely to read.
My dislike is that the reviewer is not as funny or as witty as they think they are, so I bailed early.
I didn't realize it was trying to be funny or witty!
Edit: getting a bit of deadpan humor on the re-read, mostly hear the tone as descriptive and a bit urgent.
Just to help you understand, here's my play-by-play of the first paragraph. This certainly reflects more deeply on me as a lousy reader than the reviewer as a writer, but still. I literally thought all these thoughts (albeit many unarticulated) as I attempted to read the review.
*"Fanboy": So Pound really likes reading about mythological references. But then there's no description of where Pound came across this reference, so I'm confused already. [In retrospect, apparently "fanboy" was intended to mean "practitioner", a usage with which I'm unfamiliar.]
*"Persephone or Proserpina": written as though they are two god[desse]s, but the next few sentences ignore Proserpina so maybe they're the same? I'm not sufficiently familiar with mythology to know. More confusion.
*Spring as in the season or Spring as in water coming from the ground? I thought we were talking about a goddess, not a season or a hydrological feature. More confusion.
*Now it's important for me to know her mother was Demeter, but why? Maybe other readers would gain meaning from "aha, her mother's actually Demeter" but not me. I'm quickly learning that I'm not the target audience of this review.
*The Eleusinian Mysteries? Never heard of them. Are they a book series, like the Nancy Drew Mysteries, for which Nancy Drew was the central figure? Why do I need to know about them, and why doesn't the rest of the sentence even give me enough information to tell conclusively whether they're even a book series? Apparently I didn't need to know about them, because they don't seem to come up again. I'm getting confused for no good reason.
*"Kora" sounds like a name to me. So what if it has a meaning too? We've been reminded two sentences ago that "Hades" means "Hades". So doesn't seem like Voldemort at all.
*I don't know what a Mystery Cult is. Is every sentence going to just fly past my head without anything sticking?
*If "Kora" represents all of the maidens, the name alludes to the suffering young women. What if "Kora" represents a name not to be spoken? Does the title only make sense under one of two possible interpretations of "Kora"? I'm trying hard to learn something, because not being familiar with mythology I'm relying heavily on the author here to toss me a bone, and now it seems that the author is intentionally misleading me. This is not fun at all.
*"Conditions were dire" I read as alluding to doctors being extremely scarce and WWI going on. But the following excerpt doesn't mention doctors or WW1. It doesn't seem especially dire for the girl or anyone else mentioned in the excerpt, but nobody mentioned in the excerpt is doing well either so "dire" doesn't seem to be meant satirically either.
[So far I've learned that I'm not going to understand most of the text of the review, making it not worth my time. Oh well, at least I learned it quickly and can cut my losses now. And yes, if Kora in Hell is that difficult too (the brat's the girl? no the brat's the one-year-old. what's "cover her moves"?) then the review has been extremely effective at telling me I don't want to read the book, which is a good thing.]
Appreciate the in-depth play-by-play! I'm more of a skim reader and am pretty comfortable with ambiguous meanings.
"Cover her moves" gave me pause too, I ended up interpreting it as taking responsibility for her actions and/or not getting caught sleeping around. The context in the book doesn't make it clear how consensual the interaction with the 17 guys is, think it refers to her as "lusty".
Feels like a big theme in the book is the market value of women based on age, attractiveness and sexual history. Everyone is portrayed as a passive victim of circumstance. The women are sexual objects, and the men are spectators to their own impulses.
I think Williams is portraying it as both consensual, in a sense (this girl is a Venus, if we strip away all the idealisation around the notion of sexual desire, this is what Venus really is) and non-consensual (I think the modern term is "lot lizard" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lot_lizard), the girl hangs out in the railroad saloon where respectable women wouldn't go, and all the guys there are getting sexual favours from her. How much this is that she is earning money by sex work, and how much that she is (what at the time would have been considered) simple-minded or intellectually disabled, and can't tell that she is being taken advantage of, and sleeps with the guys because she likes sex but has no idea of consequences or taking care of herself.
"to a saloon back of the rail-road switch where they have that girl, you know, the one that should have been Venus by the lust that’s in her. They’ve got her down there among the railroad men. A crusade couldn’t rescue her."
'A crusade couldn't rescue her' is referring to the moral crusades of the time, and how they won't help because (1) the girl has sunk too far into that kind of poverty and exploitation, she's been 'ruined' and (2) she doesn't want to be rescued, she is acting as a sexual being and the moral judgements don't - or shouldn't - apply here.
Compare this to the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, where the eugenic argument for sterilisation on the grounds of immorality and feeble-mindedness were put:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
"The ruling was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In support of his argument that the interest of "public welfare" outweighed the interest of individuals in their bodily integrity, he argued:
'We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.'
Holmes concluded his argument by citing Jacobson v. Massachusetts as a precedent for the decision, stating "Three generations of imbeciles are enough"
> "Persephone or Proserpina": written as though they are two god[desse]s, but the next few sentences ignore Proserpina so maybe they're the same? I'm not sufficiently familiar with mythology to know.
Yes, they're the same. Proserpina is the name of the goddess in Latin; Persephone is the name in Greek. For most of post-classical history, only the Latin name would have been used, but in the modern day we like to use the Greek names of Greek gods.
> The Eleusinian Mysteries? Never heard of them.
They were a set of religious beliefs and rituals in classical Greece. We don't know much about them, because one of their tenets was that their beliefs should not be written down. But we do know that they related at least in large part to "the Goddesses", Demeter and Persephone.
> "Kora" sounds like a name to me. So what if it has a meaning too?
Basically correct. It is the ordinary ancient Greek word for "girl" (more conventionally spelled kore), but also a conventional way to refer to Persephone. As a name, there's no reason to read anything more into it than that.
> What if "Kora" represents a name not to be spoken?
Not really a relevant question; we know that that isn't the case.
All that said, the review wouldn't be any better if you knew the classical material it refers to. It doesn't make sense and doesn't appear to be intended to.
Your reaction to this review reminds me of my reaction to Amazon's "Rings of Power" trailers: for the casual viewer who doesn't know the story, then it's confusing because "who are all these people, what are they doing, where is this?" and for the fans who do know the background, it's annoying and frustrating because of the changes to the characters and plot.
This review, like Amazon hoping a general audience will be familiar with the "Lord of the Rings" movies and so sign up to their streaming service to view the show, presumes that if you read ACX then you'll recognise all these references.
(1) Persephone or Proserpina - Persephone is the Greek version of her name, Proserpina the Roman (the Romans liked to adapt or even take over Greek myths, identifying them where possible with Roman versions, since the Greeks had a much more worked-out mythology and were considered cultural superiors in the arts, a bit like the equivalence being drawn between British/European cultural leadership and American copying of same, which Williams is fighting about). There was a Roman (or Italian) goddess Libera whom the Romans identified with Persephone and so Proserpina was the version they adopted.
Swinburne has a poem dedicated to Proserpina, but let me not stray too far afield:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45292/hymn-to-proserpine-after-the-proclamation-in-rome-of-the-christian-faith
(2) Spring as in the season. Persephone was out picking flowers with her attendants when she was abducted by Hades. This all ties into the personifications of nature that Demeter and Persephone represent, as well as the kind of traditional divisions of Maiden/Mother/Crone. Demeter is an earth goddess, represented with growth and bounty, with the harvest, hence autumn. As her daughter, Persephone is a younger counterpart and so associated with spring, the budding return of vegetation after winter, but not yet fully ripe. So, since crops are important because without food you die, you can see the reason for the association between Spring and Autumn, new growth after winter that ripens into plenty to keep men and animals alive. Autumn depends on Spring, else it can't happen, and Spring without Autumn is barren and useless (and we'll come back to that later).
(3) The Eleusinian Mysteries - okay, this is only a quick'n'dirty explanation. Eleusis is a Greek city and where a famous shrine is/was based. It was the headquarters of the cult of Demeter and Persephone, and where people were initiated into the cult. They're called "Mysteries" for several reasons, first because it's a religious term with a specific meaning (and in Christianity, we've retained it as "the mystery of faith" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_faith), second because the details were kept secret, upon pain of death. Scholars have reconstructed what they think are the basic elements and rituals of the belief.
The afterlife, in the Classical world, was a rather grim place. And how could you be even sure that your spirit would survive after death, anyway? Or that there even was a spirit? By the myth of the goddess who goes down into the Underworld (death, the grave) and returns every spring, this was the hope of the initiate: by a connection with Demeter and Persephone as personal deities, in a sense, they too could have the hope of continuing survival after death, and in a somewhat better situation than the thin, bat-squeaking shades without sense or memory as generally represented.
(4) Kore is a name, or rather a title. This is where the flippancy of the reviewer annoys me: it's not because she's like Voldemort, but it is apotropaic. She is now the Queen of the Underworld, and has real and dangerous powers. Being intimately involved with death, you should and must treat her with respect. Not just the Greeks, practically every culture has the tradition of averting misfortune by not directly referring to powers whose attention you don't want to draw, e.g. referring to the fairies as the Fair Folk or the Good People. She's not just *a* maiden, she is *the* Maiden, in the cycle of Maiden/Mother/Crone - except she never becomes a mother, never bears any children by Hades (and of course never becomes a crone). So she is both barren - neither maiden nor mother, which fits with death - and a perpetual maiden, the new tender growth of spring which has not yet bloomed into fruit, as befits the goddess of spring and renewal.
(4) Conditions were dire - that seems to be referring to the anecdote about the girl who was sleeping around with everyone and had a bastard child that died (ostensibly of pneumonia, possibly of neglect). It's the kind of anecdote of the underclass that Theodore Dalrymple often recounts, and at the time Williams was writing, was used as underpinnings for eugenic arguments about sterilising the poor and the idiotic.
Williams, in the book, is deliberately dragging the Classical myths down to earth, to the grubby realities of modern life, in order to rub the noses of the Classical non-American American poets in what they are trying to describe: Venus not a goddess but a slut, if you were writing the myths today in American life, here's how they really sound:
Giants in the dirt. The gods, the Greek gods, smothered in filth and ignorance. The race is scattered over the world. Where is its home? Find it if you’ve the genius. Here Hebe with a sick jaw and a cruel husband,—her mother left no place for a brain to grow. Herakles rowing boats on Berry’s Creek! Zeus is a country doctor without a taste for coin jingling. Supper is of a bastard nectar on rare nights for they will come—the rare nights! The ground lifts and out sally the heroes of Sophocles, of Æschylus. They go seeping down into our hearts, they rain upon us and in the bog they sink again down through the white roots, down—to a saloon back of the rail-road switch where they have that girl, you know, the one that should have been Venus by the lust that’s in her. They’ve got her down there among the railroad men. A crusade couldn’t rescue her. Up to jail—or call it down to Limbo—the Chief of Police our Pluto. It’s all of the gods, there’s nothing else worth writing of. They are the same men they always were—but fallen. Do they dance now, they that danced beside Helicon? They dance much as they did then, only, few have an eye for it, through the dirt and fumes.
(When they came to question the girl before the local judge it was discovered that there were seventeen men more or less involved so that there was nothing to do but to declare the child a common bastard and send the girl about her business. Her mother took her in and after the brat died of pneumonia a year later she called in the police one day. An officer opened the bedroom door. The girl was in bed with an eighteenth fellow, a young roaming loafer with a silly grin to his face. They forced a marriage which relieved the mother of her burden. The girl was weak minded so that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she could cover her moves, in fact she never could do so with success.)"
"Cover her moves" refers to the failure of the girl to keep it hidden from her mother that she was being sexually used by seventeen men, or the latest guy - literally found in bed with him - or to avoid getting pregnant outside of marriage (the brat that died of pneumonia a year later). This is modern-day American Demeter and Persephone, these are the Greek gods and heroes in contemporary life, not the cleaned-up, whitewashed versions the aspiring poets would repeat over and over.
It is dire for the girl - she has no hope of marriage, she's in practical terms a whore, her reputation is gone, by the laws and mores of the time she's liable to be charged with offences and go to jail; she and her mother are clearly poor, clearly have no resources, and the child born out of 'we can't tell who the father is, because she slept with seventeen men' dies at only a year old. Had it survived, it would repeat the cycle of poverty, deprivation, and neglect. If a modern-day Williams were to write up a repeat story, it would be inner-city urban Black poverty, with feckless young men who float around involved in petty crime and drug addiction have multiple baby-mammas, nobody has a job or any notion of a way out of the mess, and the kids that result are fatherless and going to repeat the same cycle themselves.
> Kore is a name, or rather a title. This is where the flippancy of the reviewer annoys me: it's not because she's like Voldemort, but it is apotropaic. She is now the Queen of the Underworld, and has real and dangerous powers. Being intimately involved with death, you should and must treat her with respect. Not just the Greeks, practically every culture has the tradition of averting misfortune by not directly referring to powers whose attention you don't want to draw
That is what's happening with Voldemort.
Yes, but Kore is also approached with reverent hope as a saviour. Not really the same thing with Voldemort. I get why the reviewer used that parallel, but unfortunately all it evoked in me was "Oh for pete's sake not *another* Harry Potter reference" and it fell short of making the equivalence between "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" and "Kore" as ways of naming something/someone without using their real name in order to get around the power that real names have, and of drawing (malign) attention by calling out that entity's name.
MW, D - Thanks for the detail. I wasn't really asking for it; nonetheless, I do enjoy footnotes a la David Foster Wallace.
> And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere.
The much more obvious theory is that they called her that because that's what she was usually called. Deities have many names, titles, and epithets, and you don't need a reason to use one of them. You may have a reason to choose a particular form of address, but you never need one.
This is a total failure of a book review: it doesn't tell us what the book is or what information it notionally contains. It seems to be a vehicle for the author (of the review) to do some unconnected free-association. The review does not even bother to mention the title of the book, "Kora in Hell: Improvisations", which would make references to "the Improvisations" much less nonsensical.
This review is a Rorschach test, and but I’m not sure of what the results mean.
FWIW this is a recognizable, and actually somewhat decent, attempt at poetry, but its a terrible review. The problem is that the writer knows that the greatest insights are often cloaked in exoteric writing, so they think if they write esoterically, this must mean they have deep insight into the book, even if the review is mere dribble in terms of a review. What value it has is as an artifact, a record of the stream of consciousness reflections of the author as they reflect on the book, but the review lacks the self awareness to understand that, as interesting as this might be in another context, a review requires you to actually think about the book, and be at least have a vague idea of what you’re trying to say
Funny how this review is so polarizing - I thought it one of the best in the contest. I read all 130 + entries, and put this in the top 3.
Only two of my top 3 made the finals, so my taste is not perfectly aligned with the group, but I’m surprised that so many commenters didn’t even finish reading it, or didn't understand it, or speculated about it being an AI-generated hoax.
It’s well-written and funny - a few of my favorite lines:
- “the greedy claws of the God of the Underworld, personified in this allegory by the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.”
- “Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning.”
- “Even if you don’t know that red is supposed to make you angry or that everything in the world is secretly the number three…”
And it’s only a little over 3000 words. Given Scott’s remark “There’s no official word count requirement, but last year’s finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words” this is clearly on the shorter side.
Of course, the subject matter is pretty far off the beaten track for ACX. I’m reminded of a quote used in the movie The Big Short: "Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry." There’s not much reason to read Kora in Hell unless you’re already interested in early-20th-century arts & letters, which I’m sure many ACX readers aren’t. (If you are, I’d like to recommend Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley, if you haven’t read it yet.)
In any case, I very much enjoyed this review: props to the anonymous reviewer for an entertainingly written account of an obscure yet interesting book!
The one that didn’t make it was “Now It Can Be Told,” about the Manhattan Project. I can’t talk about the third one right now.
It had plenty of brilliant and creative one-liners and a few several-liners (the originality and coherence of which rule out it being written by an AI of course). Where I had difficulty is that it seemed to me the clever pieces were never assembled into a whole. I am left with a bunch of shiny and interesting-lookling pieces, but not the communication of a complete message, a set of thoughts in service to one clear overarching theme.
For example, if the text were divided in half, or thirds, and one part randomly deleted, I'm not sure it would have suffered greatly -- which suggests to me its top-level organization and a top-level direction are not strong.
Of course, it may be that the top-level organization and message escaped my ability to find them, and others could, or it could be that for other people this absence isn't important.
I believe there are genres of literature that are close to a "series of vignettes" kind of construction -- some works by Italo Calvino come vaguely to mind -- which are more or less appealing to certain readers, compared to something with a powerful narrative arc (like a Jane Austen novel). Maybe something similar is at work here.
Yes, the "series of vignettes" approach is more appealing to me personally, and less so to people who are accustomed to writing which is tightly plotted (fiction), or has a clear and well-supported main point (non-fiction). I like and admire Jane Austen's work - she's funnier than people give her credit for - but Italo Calvino is really more my cup of tea. And I consider Mark Twain to be the Great American Novelist of the 19th century, not despite but *because of* his episodic, picaresque approach.
I like poetry just fine. I don't like faux-ignorance masquerading as wit, and since the reviewer succeeded in making me quit 3.5 paragraphs in, I don't think that makes this a good review.
If they had managed to keep me spite-reading to the end, then it would have succeeded as a review. But making readers decide "I could better occupy my time sticking my head in the microwave" isn't succeeding. To quote someone who previously lamented the verbose length of book reviews on here, did the reviewer consider if this piece would have made it into USA Today?
After reading some of it, the review really oversold the book. It's trapped by self-awareness, oblique, and fetishizes language. There's wisdom and a keen eye there, some gems, but it would take a better man to make something readable out of it. Too inward-turned, high on his own farts. And so, so horny!
Joining Team Haters. Not qualified to say to what extent this succeeds as poetry inspired by the book, but for me this simply isn’t a book review. Not every form fits every purpose.
I liked this review.
Strangely enough I got a bit more out of this review than most because I'm lucky enough to have read the webtoon Lore Olympus: Kore can mean both "maiden" and "deathbringer". I'm not as familiar with the Roman names so Proserpina went over my head.
I know next to nothing about early 20th century lit/poetry, other than recognizing most of the names through some decent cultural osmosis, and having read the first part of "Howl" in a throwaway scene in the comic Blacksaad (highly recommended btw (also because of a mistype I only just realized that "heard" and "read" only differ by an H and where to put the R)), and so the references to their works also went over my head.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the rambling, free-associative style, which seems to be a pastiche of the style of the book itself. It's fun to stretch the old comprehension muscles every so often, but giving them a stretch every now and then is really all I'm up for these days, so the full body workout of the actual book is something I'll likely have to pass on.
Still, kudos to the reviewer for trying something experimental, and to the comments for the links and references.
This is an unusually effective book review. I began it thinking, "I can't remember which guy William Carlos Williams is" and went through the following stages quite quickly:
* Who is WCW?
* What is this review even about?
* I don't like this.
* I'm not going to finish this.
* Hmm, the other comments didn't like it either.
* Oh, I remember who WCW is! I hate that guy!
Mission accomplished -- I have no need to read the original work itself and if anyone ever were to ask if I have (or why I haven't) I'll be able to respond. I suspect the multi-step process of discovery in the above bullet-point list will prove a more durable marker for me about WCW than having read some of his work in college and having thought "wow this is forgettable garbage I will forget it immediately".
First couple paragraphs almost lost me completely but I'm glad I kept reading- would be much better if there was a more clear introduction. Might be that I had no knowledge of WCW beforehand.