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truepennyI haven't been doing the 52 book challenge thing because, for some inexplicable reason, it invokes my inner two-year-old, who stamps her foot and shouts, Shan't!
But, as I was reorganizing the paperbacks today (which I've only been meaning to do for, oh, a year and a half? something like that), I was struck again by how many books I own that I have not read. And since I do not actually consider this a desirable state of affairs (a buffer is one thing, but trust me, nobody needs a buffer the size of New Hampshire), I am making a challenge to myself:
Read. The. Damn. Books.
It's not like I bought them because I thought they'd be boring or something.
And since one of the best reasons (not the best, but one of them) to read a book is to be able to talk about it afterwards, I shall fall in line with the book challenge I'm not doing, and write them up when I've read them.
There are more than fifty-two of them.
The first book, serendipitously (for lo, serendip* is my word for the day), is one I started a while back and finished last night.
UBC #1:
Maddox, Brenda. Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats. 1999. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
I hadn't known very much about Yeats--20th century poet; "things fall apart / the center does not hold"; the idea that history has 2,000 year cycles; I suspect if pressed, I could have dredged up the fact that he was Irish. I had no idea he was, as I said in an earlier post, mad as a fish. Also,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
angevin2, mad as a box of frogs. Also one of the most selfish and self-indulgent men ever to write brilliant poetry.
The book suffers a little from lack of focus--only about half of it really goes with the title. The first part--dealing with Yeats's bachelor life and the first two years or so of his very late marriage--and the short intermission-like section on Yeats's mother are very much about Yeats's ghosts, both in the sense of the way his parents' failures shaped and haunted him, and in the quite literal sense that Yeats and his new wife, starting on their honeymoon, spent those two years in an obsessive and exhaustive pursuit of knowledge through automatic writing, with his wife, Georgie, as the medium.
The second part of the book is a much more conventional biography, detailing Yeats's affaires (both de coeur and de corps) with various women during the last fifteen years of his life. The common thread between the two halves is not ghosts, but Yeats's sexuality.
Which is not to say it wasn't compelling reading, just that, as an enterprise, the book is not entirely coherent.
It also suffers a little, I think, from Maddox's resolute and adamantine rejection of the spiritualism so vital to the subject of her book. Which is to say, not that I think she ought to have embraced Yeats's beliefs before she wrote about them (because nobody ought to have to do that) but that she's so determined to deny any truth or honesty in the belief system that she makes it difficult to understand how Yeats and Georgie thought about and interpreted what they were doing. She won't ever unbend enough to see things through their eyes; we're always kept at a remove, looking down with slightly pitying interest at the fool Yeats is making of himself. Maddox pays lip service to the idea that Georgie wasn't manipulating him consciously, but it's lip service only. Her own beliefs clearly run the other way, even though she does not make the argument in her text.
She castigates the team of scholars who transcribed the reams and reams of automatic writing for treating the various personalities as if they were "real"--I put "real" in quote marks because, if they aren't real, what are they? Especially when you've closed the door on the argument that Georgie simply and consciously made them up--Maddox explicitly says she doesn't think that's the case. But she (Maddox) treats the personas as if they are just make-believe, as if talking about them as if they were "real" would be the same level of foolishness as fantasy authors (as a purely random example *g*) pretending that the worlds or the languages or the people they invent are "real."
Now, I'm not crusading for the "reality" of the personas Georgie Yeats manifested in her automatic writing. But I think the situation is complicated and difficult, and Maddox's black-and-white view of Yeats's spiritualist and occultist activities merely makes things more confusing for someone trying to understand Yeats and Georgie and how they understood themselves. A militant defense of our own rationality only gets in the way.
But, as I was reorganizing the paperbacks today (which I've only been meaning to do for, oh, a year and a half? something like that), I was struck again by how many books I own that I have not read. And since I do not actually consider this a desirable state of affairs (a buffer is one thing, but trust me, nobody needs a buffer the size of New Hampshire), I am making a challenge to myself:
Read. The. Damn. Books.
It's not like I bought them because I thought they'd be boring or something.
And since one of the best reasons (not the best, but one of them) to read a book is to be able to talk about it afterwards, I shall fall in line with the book challenge I'm not doing, and write them up when I've read them.
There are more than fifty-two of them.
The first book, serendipitously (for lo, serendip* is my word for the day), is one I started a while back and finished last night.
UBC #1:
Maddox, Brenda. Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats. 1999. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
I hadn't known very much about Yeats--20th century poet; "things fall apart / the center does not hold"; the idea that history has 2,000 year cycles; I suspect if pressed, I could have dredged up the fact that he was Irish. I had no idea he was, as I said in an earlier post, mad as a fish. Also,
angevin2, mad as a box of frogs. Also one of the most selfish and self-indulgent men ever to write brilliant poetry.The book suffers a little from lack of focus--only about half of it really goes with the title. The first part--dealing with Yeats's bachelor life and the first two years or so of his very late marriage--and the short intermission-like section on Yeats's mother are very much about Yeats's ghosts, both in the sense of the way his parents' failures shaped and haunted him, and in the quite literal sense that Yeats and his new wife, starting on their honeymoon, spent those two years in an obsessive and exhaustive pursuit of knowledge through automatic writing, with his wife, Georgie, as the medium.
The second part of the book is a much more conventional biography, detailing Yeats's affaires (both de coeur and de corps) with various women during the last fifteen years of his life. The common thread between the two halves is not ghosts, but Yeats's sexuality.
Which is not to say it wasn't compelling reading, just that, as an enterprise, the book is not entirely coherent.
It also suffers a little, I think, from Maddox's resolute and adamantine rejection of the spiritualism so vital to the subject of her book. Which is to say, not that I think she ought to have embraced Yeats's beliefs before she wrote about them (because nobody ought to have to do that) but that she's so determined to deny any truth or honesty in the belief system that she makes it difficult to understand how Yeats and Georgie thought about and interpreted what they were doing. She won't ever unbend enough to see things through their eyes; we're always kept at a remove, looking down with slightly pitying interest at the fool Yeats is making of himself. Maddox pays lip service to the idea that Georgie wasn't manipulating him consciously, but it's lip service only. Her own beliefs clearly run the other way, even though she does not make the argument in her text.
She castigates the team of scholars who transcribed the reams and reams of automatic writing for treating the various personalities as if they were "real"--I put "real" in quote marks because, if they aren't real, what are they? Especially when you've closed the door on the argument that Georgie simply and consciously made them up--Maddox explicitly says she doesn't think that's the case. But she (Maddox) treats the personas as if they are just make-believe, as if talking about them as if they were "real" would be the same level of foolishness as fantasy authors (as a purely random example *g*) pretending that the worlds or the languages or the people they invent are "real."
Now, I'm not crusading for the "reality" of the personas Georgie Yeats manifested in her automatic writing. But I think the situation is complicated and difficult, and Maddox's black-and-white view of Yeats's spiritualist and occultist activities merely makes things more confusing for someone trying to understand Yeats and Georgie and how they understood themselves. A militant defense of our own rationality only gets in the way.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 07:42 am (UTC)I was a poetry major. Started out loving Yeats, but by my senior year, I knew enough about his life to hate him. Hopefully, I'm older and wiser now and can read books/poems written by imperfect people. :) If not, a little internet research, and I could probably throw out half of my unread books pile.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 01:14 pm (UTC)Also, in spite of a BA in English, I didn't know most of this info about Yeats. Thanks for the review and the data! Saved me the trouble of sifting through for the good tidbits...
no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 01:27 pm (UTC)And a degree in English means less than one might think. (::cries::) After all, I have a Ph.D., and I didn't know any of this stuff about Yeats.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 02:05 pm (UTC)Rhetoric at dawn! twenty paces!
no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 07:42 pm (UTC)I agree with you about the "secret life," thing, though--since one of the recurrent motifs is Yeats's complete and utter inability to keep a secret.