The Reading Room

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CowperKettle

5:09 AM

@verbose Whom would you pick as your two or three most fave US poets of the 20 century?

3 hours later…

verbose

7:55 AM

@CowperKettle For poets from India writing in English, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, and Vikram Seth. For Anglo-American poets, there are so many. Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, H. D., perhaps?

But once I pick those three, I feel sad about leaving out some others. Henry Reed, for example, or Philip Larkin.

So I guess I can't pick just two or three. When I was in college I was very taken by T S Eliot and W B Yeats, but the older I've gotten, the less I like their poetry.

Their casual antisemitism, their conservatism that verged on fascism, aren't things I recognized as a callow undergraduate.

Really my happy place is the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Give me a book of Wyatt, Jonson, Donne, Spenser, Sidney, or even lesser knowns like Louck and Fulke-Greville, and I'm clam-like. I'm not saying I subscribe to, say, Spenser's politics, but I'm remote enough from questions like whether the established church should be high or low that I can read Spenser without worrying about it.

I can't read Eliot without being worried about it.

verbose

8:26 AM

H'm apparently since 2017 there's a dispute about whether it really was Anne Lock (Locke, Lok, Louck, etc; spellings vary) wrote A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner. Some folks claim that the "friend" she says gave her the sequence was not her way of keeping herself anonymous, but actually Thomas Norton.

Well, "some folks" being Steven May. I've read some of his work but not the Lock authorship articles. Alas, they're paywalled.

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

10:55 AM

@verbose Thank you!

First flowers, probably transplanted by eager dwellers out of their pots.

This photo I took today while riding past a 5-storey Soviet-times building.

Khrushchevka

A khrushchevka (Russian: хрущёвка, tr. khrushchyovka, IPA: [xrʊˈɕːɵfkə]) is a type of low-cost, concrete-paneled or brick three- to five-storied apartment building which was developed in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, during the time its namesake Nikita Khrushchev directed the Soviet government. Khrushchevkas are sometimes compared to the Japanese danchi, similar (often government-sponsored) housing projects from the same period, which by some accounts were directly inspired by them.An updated high-rise version, the brezhnevka, was built in the 1970s and 1980s and included many upgrades...

Bookworm

11:18 AM

Q: Does Hippolyta love Theseus in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream?"

In Act 1, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta speak about the four days before their marriage. THESEUS: Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires Like ...

5 hours later…

Bookworm

3:54 PM

Q: Why Smiley thought of death here?

From John Le Carré's Smiley's People: “Fine, thank you. How’s—” He struggled without success to remember the name of Lacon’s wife. “Abandoned me, dammit. Ran off with her pesky riding instructor, blast her. Left me with the children. The girls are farmed out to boarding-schools, thank God.” Le...

john-le-carre smileys-people

4 hours later…

Bookworm

8:05 PM

Q: Was Akutagawa's Shōgun ("The General") ever censored in Japan? If so, how?

I know books which criticize the military were censored in Japan during the interwar period. I'm wondering if this specific story was censored, and if so, roughly when/for how long? Also, what did the censorship look like (since it's a short story that shows up, usually, in collections - were the...