Serviceable sentences, 42/10,000

The Tower and The Winding Stair, despite the vagaries of New Criticism an the scholarship on Yeats done under its egregious influence, will be studied increasingly as what they are, as much monuments of Romanticism in English poetry as are Jerusalem, The Prelude, Prometheus Unbound, The Fall of Hyperion, or later, Look! We Have Come Through!, The Bridge, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.
—Harold Bloom, Yeats (1970)

(Another good English Romanticism reading list from Bloom. [Previous list at Ss-34/10,000.] This one, fellow pedagogues, is a teachable sequence. It’s also particularly helpful if you were, as I was, wondering on which of Lawrence’s three great volumes of poetry—Look! We Have Come Through!; Birds, Beasts and Flowers; & Last Poems—to focus your limited time.)

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Serviceable sentences, 41/10,000

Can it be that there is an intrinsic, causal connection between long poems and wide open spaces?
—Thomas M. Disch, “Onegin’s Children [Review of David Budbill’s Judevine, Mark Jarman’s Iris, Charlotte Mandel’s The Marriages of Jacob, Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, & Frederick Pollack’s The Adventure],” The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995)

(Disch answers this, his question, in the affirmative:

The example of Vikram Seth notwithstanding, I think it more than likely. Country living promotes longer thoughts and patient, sustained achievement, such as gardeners undertake. City life is noted for its speed, excitement, and variety, and while these virtues are not antithetical to a long poem [Ashbery’s Flow Chart is a quintessential long poem in the urban manner], they may well make it harder for the urban poet to pursue the sober, steadfast pace that a long narrative poem requires. This difference is likely to be exacerbated by the different reading habits associated with the city, with its flow of new magazines, new faces, new lingos, and the country, where one may, at last, settle down with the Aeneid in all its rival translations. As we read, so may we aspire to write. Indeed, for someone harboring the ambition of writing a long poem, I can think of no more practical starting point than to change one’s address to somewhere in RFD. [emphasis mine])

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Serviceable sentences, 40/10,000

Agency and intelligence are the same thing.
—@rec0nciler, [888234752741920768], (20 July 2017)

[h/t @Outsideness. That tweet disappeared as I was making this post. Most Mormons, given our religion’s emphasis on agency & intelligence, would recognize this identity as expressing a very deep insight. A Mormon better drilled in our orthodoxy than I would be able to refine the overlap between the two through scriptural exegesis, probably citing these two verses somewhere along the way, but I am not that Mormon. I’ll just point—👇—to this sentence’s alphanumeric sum.]

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Serviceable sentences, 39/10,000

Mountains are great poets, and one glance at this fine cliff scene undoes a great deal of prose, & reinstates us wronged men in our rights.
——Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Journal R (1842-1843), in Selected Journals 1841-1877 (ed. Lawrence Rosenwald)

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Serviceable sentences, 38/10,000

There are simply too many poets and too little time to read them all.
—Thomas M. Disch, “Death and the Poet [Review of Peter Whigham’s Things Common, Properly: Selected Poems 1942-1980],” The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995)

(Here, a supplement to Ss-35/10,000 & a reminder that even if you don’t stray from the page, the work is never done.)

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Serviceable sentences, 37/10,000

One of morality’s dirtiest and most harmful little secrets is that it only constrains power where power is already weak for other reasons.
—Justin Murphy, “Feminism and the problem of supertoxic masculinity,” jmrphy.net (13 July 2017)

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Serviceable sentences, 36/10,000

But the movie can’t escape that curse endemic to big-budget Hollywood sci-fi movies: The worlds they create on screen are almost always exponentially more interesting than the stories they tell.
—Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “The ambitious War For The Planet Of The Apes ends up surrendering to formula,” avclub.com (7 July 2017)

(A follow up to Ss-35/10,000: even in the realm of screened media, the tension between watching & reading is becoming one of antithesis. Some further qualification—

Screen mediums oriented toward the presentation of worlds, like SF films or slow TV, and so made for watching or viewing, can be distinguished, à la Cavell, from those that, like live TV or streaming, present “event[s] standing out from the world,” open to a certain kind of reading: monitoring. One monitors both in hopes of a readable event occuring—e.g., the cataclysmic & apocalyptic social collapse so often represented in SF films—and in hopes of no readable events occuring—e.g., the cataclysmic & apocalyptic social collapse so often represented in SF films. Either way, one monitors at the expense of actually reading.

With respect to viewing & film, the screen is to SF films what the horizon is to environment-poems: it’s “a meeting ground between imaginative and perceptual vision.” On film, SF requires a very careful visual blend of imagination & realism, failures of which are now blamed on an imbalance of CGI & practical effects. But Ignatiy’s sentence is very precise. “Sci-fi” is already a name for hack-work in the realms of narrative & characterization, for the popularization of rudimentary SF conventions, and for their formulaic production. Sci-fi films transform SF worlds into series of events—plot points, character arcs, three-act structures, all of that Blake Snyder stuff—that stand out in such a way as to obscure the viewing process. That’s their curse. The narratives of the purest SF films, 2001, Blade Runner, Under the Skin, approximate a pure viewing experience: wandering through their environments, seeing things that you almost never see on film, in a sequence that mimics spontaneity, breaking the curse.)

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Serviceable sentences, 35/10,000

People cannot be reading Charles Dickens or Henry James or Toni Morrison and at the same time watching television or a film on VCR, though some people may claim they can do that.
—J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (2002)

(A basic truth, but a hard one that bears repeating, especially if you teach any form of reading: reading, watching, and listening—or even the media consumption habits of protestantism, paganism, and fundamentalism—compete with each other.

ADDED: In case you need to see the above point, as opposed to reading it, here you go.)

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Serviceable sentences, 34/10,000

There is no better way to explore the Real Man, the Imagination, than to study his monuments: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem; The Prelude and the Recluse fragment; The Ancient Mariner and Christabel; Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life; the two Hyperions; Don Juan; Death’s Jest-Book; these are the definitive Romantic achievement, the words that were and will be, day and night.
—Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” The Yale Review 58:4 (1969)

(In addition to an excellent reading list, this sentence makes for a decent gloss of Ss-33/10,000: the good is the words that were and are; the best is “the words that were [and are] and will be.” Our duty to the good is to look for it. Our duty to the best is to keep it, but don’t get confused. That is only our duty, and to perform it is only to commend ourselves to its guidance. Who knows what the duty of the best is, or if it even has one? The best keeps itself, possesses autonomous functions—associating, coding, coinciding, contaminating, deterritorializing, influencing, involving, latching, numerizing, participating, propagating, subsisting, tallying, territorializing, triggering, etc.—and that is why it is the best.
ADDED: an example of the autonomous glitching of the best, or the canonical: today is Bloom’s 87th birthday—who would have thought that Bloom would outlive Hartman?—a coincidence that I didn’t realize until after I posted this. Today is also, so my email informs me, the release of Deap Vally’s video for “Julian,” which contains an image of the three-volume Heritage Press edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare at 0:10.)

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Serviceable sentences, 33/10,000

Yes, we have the principle that we look for the best everywhere, that we look for the good and keep the best.
—Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “My Timely 30-Year-Old Interview,” lds.org (21 June 2017)

(This was President Uchtdorf‘s response, on a German talk show in 1987, to the question of whether Mormons, with their restrictions on alcohol, cigarettes, coffee & tea, go to the theater and movies. It is not often that the aesthetic imperatives of Mormonism—to seek after anything virtuous, lovely [i.e., the beautiful], or of good report or praiseworthy—are communicated to non-members. It’s also Mormonism’s least controversial point; even MormonismDisproved won’t argue with the 13th Article of Faith.)

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