Reading and Watching
Mar. 12th, 2019 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee341.
It suddenly occurred to me that Goose is not masquerading as a cat. All cats are flerken. There is no cat.
2.
Knowing the Past by Suzy Anger
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Welp, this really clarified for me that I am extremely disinterested in epistemologies of knowing and hermeneutics. I appreciate Anger's opening essay as it lays out the issues the academy was facing at the time of publication; I think the project of finding some middle ground between "nothing is really knowable, all knowing just projects ourselves and our biases" and "we can know a thing as it really is" is a useful one. But boy is that middle ground pretty boring.
There is one truly delightful essay about Matthew Arnold and his move from poet to critic that is cleanly and clearly written, illuminating, almost jargon free, and possessing a clear sense of humor (I chortled aloud at least three times!). There's another essay about viewer response to an artist's paintings, an essay about Dickens's autobiographical details and how those play out in his work, and another about Edith Simcox's unrequited love for George Eliot that were sufficiently interesting.
If you are super into words like ontological and proleptic, this may just be the volume of criticism for you!
View all my reviews
3.
POSSESSION by Angela Ball
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I did not like this as well as The Museum of the Revolution; it doesn't feel like as cohesive a collection of poems to me.
That being said, there are a couple of poems that are deeply, deeply beautiful. My favorite is "A Language" which reads in part:
I know a time when a bridge
fell, heavy with traffic in a winter
dusk--a fracture and the two sides
sheared away. Each person on the bank
with the secret thought--"I was right
not to believe in it."
So in the middle of the night
I rest my hand on your hip
to have it apprehend a quiet
form, a body, whole.
View all my reviews
It suddenly occurred to me that Goose is not masquerading as a cat. All cats are flerken. There is no cat.
2.
Knowing the Past by Suzy AngerMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Welp, this really clarified for me that I am extremely disinterested in epistemologies of knowing and hermeneutics. I appreciate Anger's opening essay as it lays out the issues the academy was facing at the time of publication; I think the project of finding some middle ground between "nothing is really knowable, all knowing just projects ourselves and our biases" and "we can know a thing as it really is" is a useful one. But boy is that middle ground pretty boring.
There is one truly delightful essay about Matthew Arnold and his move from poet to critic that is cleanly and clearly written, illuminating, almost jargon free, and possessing a clear sense of humor (I chortled aloud at least three times!). There's another essay about viewer response to an artist's paintings, an essay about Dickens's autobiographical details and how those play out in his work, and another about Edith Simcox's unrequited love for George Eliot that were sufficiently interesting.
If you are super into words like ontological and proleptic, this may just be the volume of criticism for you!
View all my reviews
3.
POSSESSION by Angela BallMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I did not like this as well as The Museum of the Revolution; it doesn't feel like as cohesive a collection of poems to me.
That being said, there are a couple of poems that are deeply, deeply beautiful. My favorite is "A Language" which reads in part:
I know a time when a bridge
fell, heavy with traffic in a winter
dusk--a fracture and the two sides
sheared away. Each person on the bank
with the secret thought--"I was right
not to believe in it."
So in the middle of the night
I rest my hand on your hip
to have it apprehend a quiet
form, a body, whole.
View all my reviews
