and
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes (lectures 1927; book 1955).
I won't pause in the Strachey, in which I am approaching page 800 with only 300 beyond that to go, to read these instead, but I will reproduce here the following wonderful paragraph from the Xanadu book (and how delightful to receive these lovely heavy silk-covered volumes from an era when books were revered):
"I propose to tell the story, so far as I have charted its course, of the genesis of two of the most remarkable poems in English, "the Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." ... [W]e shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus--with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons, and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the daemons of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus; haloes and hurricanes; lightnings and Laplanders; meteors, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons and spectres, and slimy seas; wefts, and watersnakes, and the Wandering Jew. Beside that compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodical. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry. And in that paradox lies the warrant of our pilgrimage.
I'm having a great time tossing in a personal order or two along with all the customer orders to augment my reading. No contemporary titles, but old old books by and about obscure literary personages of bygone years, wonderfully cheap because unsought for, but always handsome. Now I need an old dark tall set of shelves to display them on, instead of my stacked wooden fruit crates, which are charming and which suit my ragged poetry and poetics circa 1950-2007 very well. But the gilt-stamped Victoriana, not so much.
2 comments:
How interesting, the difference in how we choose what we'll read.
Working here in the public library book mind, I read mostly new things. Put holds on them as the library places its orders, and mow my way through them as they arrive. This is going to have to change when I migrate to the northwest, likely some place with a smaller library collection, and certainly I'll no longer have the power to get the library to buy what I want to read.
Karen, what are you reading? We'll put it in the sidebar...
I tried to leave a response last night, but the substitute laptop I was using made it evaporate! As I was saying...
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Red Hot Typewriter: The life and times of John D. MacDonald, , by Hugh Merrill; Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
Gilbert goes to and from work with me every day on the train. I'm nearly finished with it, but think I may need to start it over again right away... for its mood-enhancing properties. Merrill's book stays by the bedside, so I can read a page or two before sleep. Chandrasekaran's book has been on the back burner (I needed a break) while I finish the others, and is waiting to be returned to my tote bag. (It is an amazingly engaging read... considering the topic-- our incompetence in Iraq.)
Post a Comment