David Thomson seems to me to have a deeper understanding of media and its impact on humanity than Marshall McLuhan. David Thomson wrote a book called Have You Seen? which consists of one thousand one page film reviews. I decided to watch all the films in that book I had not seen before, and I decided to watch them mostly in chronological order. I started in 1895, and I did a little background reading on each year as I moved forward. 1895 marked the height of Oscar Wilde's success as well as his downfall. As I moved forward through the decades, I found myself getting caught up in the historical sweep.
I've now reached 1944. As part of my background reading I read the chronologically arranged Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. In 1944 Williams published The Wedge, and Louis Zukofsky helped him with arranging and editing the poems. Reading the poems and the notes, especially Williams' response to Wallace Stevens' notion of "anti-poetry," the vastness of literature struck me. One can spend a lifetime studying an author and still have so much to learn about them. "Remove infinity from it, and infinity still remains," as the Upanishads say. I recall a story about someone introducing a scholar to Robert Frost as "a Hawthorne man." Frost replied, "Why not be your own man?" I think I see Frost's point, but I can also understand the yearning for scholarship, for understanding the contexts of literature.
William Snodgrass wrote,
"I haven't read one book about
a book"
but I love books about books. I've devoted a fair chunk of my life to understanding Robert Anton Wilson, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, etc., but I've barely scratched the surface. Oh well, I do look forward to 1945 and the end of the war.
No comments:
Post a Comment