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The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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Joyce] is an instrument through which the past can speak. Joyce's past, like Homer's, is not history. If the success of man as a political, companionable animal whose culture has thus far progressed to families living in cities, that achievement of humanity is dying, Joyce saw. Life at family level goes on pretty much as in the bronze age. Man's idea of God, though, is in trouble; his idea of the state is in trouble; and an awful restlessness begins to disturb the inert, paralyzed, darkened life of the people. Ulysses was written between 1914 and 1921, dates that end a world."

The museum, twentieth-century parody of a temple, is all that we have, physically, of the past; and Joyce begins Finnegans Wake in a museum. The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown." Masque of the Red Death") : the grotesque, and a Greek female head: the classical. A thorough inspection of Poe's work will disclose that he performs variations and mutations of these three vocabularies of imagery. We can readily recognize those works in which a particular idiom is dominant. The great octosyllabic sonnet "To Helen," for instance, is classical, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is grotesque, and the poem "Israfel" is arabesque. But no work is restricted to one mode; the other two are there also. We all know the beautiful "To Helen," written when he was still a boy: Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicaean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary , way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And tne grandeur that was Rome. Lo ! in yon brilliant window niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand ! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land! Yet it was the seeding of all sorts of things, of scholarship, of a stoic sense of pleasure (I think we were all bored and ill at ease when we went on official vacations to the mountains or the shore, whereas out arrowhead-looking we were content and easy), and most of all of foraging, that prehistoric urge still not bred out of man. There was also the sense of going out together but with each of us acting alone. You never look for Indian arrows in pairs. You fan out. But you shout discoveries and comments (“No Indian was ever around here!”) across fields. It was, come to think of it, a humanistic kind of hunt. My father never hunted animals, and I don’t think he ever killed anything in his life. All his brothers were keen huntsmen; I don’t know why he wasn’t. And, conversely, none of my uncles would have been caught dead doing anything so silly as looking for hours and hours for an incised rim of pottery or a Cherokee pipe. Narrative Tone and Form: a quintessential literary essay discussing tone & stylistic innovations/experimentations in the works of such diverse writers as Flaubert, Kafka, Wittgenstein & Gertrude Stein, moving on to an analysis of Iliad& Odyssey, and finding analogies from the art world, ending with a discussion of architectonic form. And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing. My family, praises be unto the gods, never inspected anything that we enjoyed doing; criticism was strictly for adversities, and not very much for them. Consequently I spent my childhood drawing, building things, writing, reading, playing, dreaming out loud, without the least comment from anybody. I learned later that I was thought not quite bright, for the patterns I discovered for myself were not things with nearby models. When I went off to college it was with no purpose whatsoever: no calling in view, no profession, no ambition.

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I always seemed to find myself book browsing on rainy afternoons when I would wander up the book shelved hallway into my bedroom where, lying aslant my bed, I'd dip into the bottom shelf of my large bookcase there, in the semi-darkness, and lazily cruise in and out of various volumes.Volumes of essays. Persephone's Ezra: a tour de force, anybody reading The Cantos ought to read it. Davenport's felicity for classical myths & literature finds a natural affinity in Pound's Cantos. It is probably now well accepted, though it is still important to argue, that a lot of our “geography” is in the mind. That is to say we carry around with us mental images of the world, of the country in which we live (all those image of the North/South divide), of the street next door. The New Yorker’s mental map of the USA, Ronald Regan’s imagination of the world, became popular posters. In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America’s major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism. The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays by Guy Davenport – eBook Details Guy Davenport is at home in the classical world of antiquity & is happiest when they find correspondences in the modern world, that's why, writers-poets like Pound, Joyce, Olson, Zukofsky, Welty, etc, find glowing treatment in this book. A single review can't really do justice to forty essays; hence, out of necessity, I'm giving you the highlights:

Wie alles Metaphysische ist die Harmonie zwischen Gedanken und Wirklichkeit in der Grammatik der Sprache aufzufinden. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. (Wittgenstein, Zettel, 5 5 ) In her chapter of the Secondary Geography Handbook, Massey explains her understanding of a geographical imagination. As a critic, Davenport shines as an intrepid appreciator, an ideal teacher. By preference, he likes to walk the reader through a painting or a poem, teasing out the meaning of odd details, making connections with history and other works of art. His must-have essay collections, The Geography of the Imagination and Every Force Evolves a Form, display his range: With a rainwater clarity, he can write about the naturalist Louis Agassiz or ancient poetry and thought…He can account for the importance of prehistoric cave art to early modernism or outline the achievements of Joyce and Pound. He can make you yearn to read or look again at neglected masters like the poets Charles Olsen and Louis Zukofsky and the painters Balthus and Charles Burchfield. He can send you out eagerly searching for C. M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. In all this, his method is nothing other than the deep attentiveness engendered by love: that and a firm faith in simply knowing things. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, ‘a perfect balance of spirit and information.”The schoolroom was its own place, our home another, the red fields of the Savannah valley another, the cow pasture another, uptown, the movies, other people’s houses: all were as distinct as continents in disparate geological epochs. The sociology of the South has something to do with this, I think. All occasions had their own style and prerogatives, and these were insisted upon with savage authority. At Grannyport’s (thus her accepted name after its invention by us children) one never mentioned the moving pictures that played so great a part in my life, for Grannyport denied that pictures could move. It was, she said, patently illogical (she was absolutely right, of course, but I didn’t know it at the time), and no dime could ever be begged of her for admission to the Strand (Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers) or the Criterion (Flash Gordon, Tarzan) for these places were humbug, and people who went to them under the pitiful delusion that pictures can move were certainly not to be financed by a grandmother who knew her own mind. A common trait: as critics, both keep their selves out of the picture— the subject is their focus. Other than sharing a few anecdotes, Davenport completely erases himself from the scene: "Talking about oneself, said Menander, is a feast that starves the guest, and I hope in this essay to keep to the subject I was invited to consider." Despite his formidable erudition, Davenport comes across as affable & modest: "My writing is primitive and contrived, and I have never written about myself in any conscious way."(!) Whitman: a stellar essay, written with verve & feeling. "Whitman," Kafka told his friend Gustav Janouch, "belongs among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric.(...) He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization, which are apparently entirely contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: 'Life is the little that is left over from dying.' So he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. . . . He was really a Christian and with a close affinity especially to us Jews-he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity." The Geography of the Imagination offers take-to-a-desert-island levels of companionship. Davenport is simultaneously a reliable and marvelously unpredictable friend.” Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York: Dover, 1 966), p. 275 .

It was wonderful learning about some new poets: Ronald Johnson features on my immediate horizon and I may now have sufficient impetus to purse Hugh Kenner's magnum opus. Yet questions remain, even-hound. Why exactly Eudora Weltry? I appreciate the situating of her plotlines into a Persephone tradition but still? Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, edited by the Antipode Editorial Collective (Wiley, 2019) In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. Davenport provides links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. And pretty much everything in between. Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. That Faire Field of Enna: an essay on the mythical matrix across Eudora Welty's fiction. Gass & Davenport have both endorsed her highly: "If one were asked what absolute distinction makes Miss Welty's fiction different, the answer would not be her alert, perfectly idiomatic, honest prose, nor her immense understanding of character, nor her transmutation of fact into universal symbol, but her unique study of inarticulateness." In his Paris Review interview, Davenport said: "She is the only writer we have who writes like Joyce." When, in later years, I saw real archaeologists at work, I felt perfectly at home among them: diggers at Mycenae and at Lascaux, where I was shown a tray of hyena coprolites and wondered which my father would have kept and which thrown away, for petrified droppings from the Ice Age must have their range from good to bad, like arrowheads and stone axes.

The remainder of the twentieth century (most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome) might profitably be spent putting together the human achievements which tyranny has kept behind walls." As a critic, Davenport shines as an intrepid appreciator, an ideal teacher. By preference, he likes to walk the reader through a painting or a poem, teasing out the meaning of odd details, making connections with history and other works of art. His must-have essay collections, The Geography of the Imagination and Every Force Evolves a Form, display his range: With a rainwater clarity, he can write about the naturalist Louis Agassiz or ancient poetry and thought... He can account for the importance of prehistoric cave art to early modernism or outline the achievements of Joyce and Pound. He can make you yearn to read or look again at neglected masters like the poets Charles Olsen and Louis Zukofsky and the painters Balthus and Charles Burchfield. He can send you out eagerly searching for C. M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. In all this, his method is nothing other than the deep attentiveness engendered by love: that and a firm faith in simply knowing things. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, 'a perfect balance of spirit and information." Davenport was a classicist by training and shared a lot of the same turf as the mythologist Joseph Campbell (both have a strong interest in Joyce and wrote heavily about myth's survival under the cover of what was passing for modernity), but honestly Davenport is the more interesting and varied writer, and funnier. Guy Davenport’s genius merits awe, but inspires excitement. His writing reminds us that our time is finite, and that the world’s offerings are infinite. Reading these essays will make you feel more alive.”

Tchelitchew: an artist whose painting Cache-Cache turned up earlier on with reference to Finnegans Wake, finds a full chapter here: "Cache-Cache inspired parts of Eliot's Burnt Norton; William Carlos Williams's Paterson owes much to "Phenomena"; and some of the most mysteriously beautiful passages in Cocteau's Leone derive from Tchelitchew's doubled images." Broadly, this collection of forty essays becomes an attempt to map the creative imagination through time & space across various humanities: literature, art, & philosophy (and science too!*). This erudite work would help greatly as a reference book too. Nothing characterizes the twentieth century more than its inability to pay attention to anything for more than a week."

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He suggests that ‘the geography curriculum remains fundamentally a reflection of the adult geography of places and the environment’ and continues, ‘to put it starkly, the programme of study for primary education, by omission and inhibition, convey an impression of a western, white, middle class, academic geography, which observes the local area, other places and environmental matters’.

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