Category: language

What I do is live. And because of the way I have lived, I know what is possible. (RK)

noisome image

Me, I adhere to my salt. I draw strength from it, use it. I keep watch over my salt, and when it serves me, I keep watch over other people’s salt. I mine my salt, and sometimes, I mine the salt of others. Which is to say: I cooperate with the part of them that they can’t reach, are not in touch with, cannot see, but that sometimes, when I am lucky, I can see quite well.

For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom. The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner

Alexander Pope’s 1711 “An Essay on Criticism,” which hails the critic as “the Muse’s judge and friend.”

“An Essay on Criticism” is written in heroic couplets and divided into three parts. Part One begins rather acidly: “’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill / Appear in writing or in judging ill.” Poets may test our patience, Pope claimed, but critics—partial, arrogant, defensive—“mislead our sense.” Their writing was distorted by “false learning,” “pretending wit,” “vain ambition,” and “needful pride.” The drive to censure turned them into drones, “half-form’d insects” that swarmed by the dozens to a single dull verse. Like Johnson’s critics, Pope’s critics were fallen creatures, moderns with no compass to guide their judgment other than the “glimm’ring light” of their own minds, which too often bent sinister. But it was not always so, Pope assured us. High on Parnassus, the precepts of art were derived from the poetry of the ancients, which the first critic brought down to earth. He was like Prometheus, only guile­less and gentlemanly: “The gen’rous critic fann’d the poet’s fire, / And taught the world with reason to admire.”

“The gen’rous critic,” as Pope reconstructed him in Parts Two and Three of the essay, had a great capacity for “gen’rous pleasure” and a highly developed sense of commensurability, which allowed him to “regard the writer’s end / Since none can compass more than they intend.” The generous critic identified and accepted the work’s intentions, its conventions.

Running underneath Pope’s account of the commensurability between the generous critic and the text was a wonderfully com­plex and democratic theory of pleasure. Pleasure, for Pope, arose neither from the critic’s purely subjective reaction nor from the poem’s objective perfection. It derived from the mingling of admi­ration and reason—“a happiness as well as care.” Reason reconciled wholes and parts, intentions and expectations, to show “the joint force and full result of all.”

The Critic as Friend, Merve Emre

kept in a state … that [she] knows “so well how to make blissful.”

My hand’s your hand within this rhyme
You look at me this is all fucked up time
(Bernadette Mayer)

via AN in Mousse.