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hawkwing_lbBooks 2012: 16-18
nonfiction
16. Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition. WW Norton, London & New York, 1993. Selected and edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.
A selection of Rich's poetry and prose intended for use in a classroom setting. The poetry is interesting; the prose a fair sampling. But. I think Rich's work - her development, her scope - is diminished by being anthologised in such a limited fashion, and I'm deeply suspicious of the limitations imposed by "critical anthologies" themselves.
(Speaking as someone who has never sat through college English.)
There's also a selection of criticism of Rich, which makes me feel stabbity towards the 1960s and 1970s.
17. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir: with a biographical sketch by G.H. von Wright. Second edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984.
A very short sketch of one professor of philosophy's experience of one of the most radical philosophical minds of the age. 134 pages long, including c. 50 pages of additional notes and the letters of Wittgenstein to Malcolm.
18. Tillie Olsen, Silences. Virago Press, London, 1980.
Reading Olsen's book alongside Malcolm's makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Olsen takes as her subject the silences of literature - writers whose circumstances constrained their work, who wrote and fell silent. Her examination of the writers and their reasons for their silences is illuminating: their social circumstances, their economic circumstances, in some cases their psychological circumstances. The constraints that all of these, most of all in the case of women off all classes and working class men, the first two, placed upon their art and their craft.
Wittgenstein was never silenced by social or economic considerations: the opposite. So it's an interesting exercise in comparison.
I've been reading a great deal of not-my-research nonfiction lately. It has become more relaxing than many fictions. I wonder why this is?
nonfiction
16. Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition. WW Norton, London & New York, 1993. Selected and edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.
A selection of Rich's poetry and prose intended for use in a classroom setting. The poetry is interesting; the prose a fair sampling. But. I think Rich's work - her development, her scope - is diminished by being anthologised in such a limited fashion, and I'm deeply suspicious of the limitations imposed by "critical anthologies" themselves.
(Speaking as someone who has never sat through college English.)
There's also a selection of criticism of Rich, which makes me feel stabbity towards the 1960s and 1970s.
17. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir: with a biographical sketch by G.H. von Wright. Second edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984.
A very short sketch of one professor of philosophy's experience of one of the most radical philosophical minds of the age. 134 pages long, including c. 50 pages of additional notes and the letters of Wittgenstein to Malcolm.
18. Tillie Olsen, Silences. Virago Press, London, 1980.
Reading Olsen's book alongside Malcolm's makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Olsen takes as her subject the silences of literature - writers whose circumstances constrained their work, who wrote and fell silent. Her examination of the writers and their reasons for their silences is illuminating: their social circumstances, their economic circumstances, in some cases their psychological circumstances. The constraints that all of these, most of all in the case of women off all classes and working class men, the first two, placed upon their art and their craft.
Wittgenstein was never silenced by social or economic considerations: the opposite. So it's an interesting exercise in comparison.
I've been reading a great deal of not-my-research nonfiction lately. It has become more relaxing than many fictions. I wonder why this is?
