The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays: 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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Now, the Davenport with its 40 essays has lain there neglected for some years, browning with age like a slow cooking piece of toast. Louis Agassiz : Apparently, the Comparative Method is his heritage which Pound then applied to literature. A brilliant essay, one of the longest & choc-a-bloc with quotable quotes. All those who pit scientists and humanists against one another/as poles apart, should read this essay: "One of the most provocative books on the biology of sex is by a poet, Remy de Gourmont; one of the finest on art, by a scientist, Leo Frobenius." However, this essay is mute on the racism controversy linked to Agassiz All of us carry such images, they may sometimes be in conflict or even be the cause of conflict, and digging these things up and talking about them is one good way in to beginning to examine what it means to think geographically’ He suggests that ‘the geography curriculum remains fundamentally a reflection of the adult geography of places and the environment’ and continues, ‘to put it starkly, the programme of study for primary education, by omission and inhibition, convey an impression of a western, white, middle class, academic geography, which observes the local area, other places and environmental matters’. Lccn 91053116 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL1567553M Openlibrary_edition

No one writes like Guy Davenport. He’s a genius, sure, but also a delightful, generous example of how exhilarating the life of the mind can be. These inventive and harmonious essays are a dazzling reminder that great writing is also great fun.” Nor could we mention looking for arrowheads–the thought that her daughter, son-in-law, and their children walked all over fields and meadows in public would have sent Granny Fant to her bed with a vinegar rag across her forehead. My point is that throughout my childhood place determined mood and tone. My schoolteachers knew nothing of our archaeology. Certainly the Misses Anna and Lillie Brown would somehow disapprove; they were genteel. I cannot remember any mention whatever of history in grammar school. All we learned of the Civil War is that our principal, Miss May Russell, was taken from her bed and kissed as an infant by the notorious renegade Manse Jolly, who had, to Miss May’s great satisfaction, galloped his horse down the length of a banquet table at which Union officers were dining, collapsing it as he progressed, emptying two sixshooters into the Yankees and yodeling, “Root hog or die!” This was the rebel yell that Douglas Southall Freeman gave for a recording and dropped dead at the end of. This grotesque fact would not have fazed Miss May Russell; what finer way would a gentleman wish to die? We all had to learn it: the root is pitched on a drunken high note in the flattest of whining cotton-planter’s pronunciation, the hawg is screamed in an awful way, and the aw dah is an hysterical crescendo recalling Herod’s soldiery at work on male infants. We loved squawling it, and were told to remember how the day was saved at Bull Run, when Beauregard and Johnson were in a sweat until the Sixth South Carolina Volunteers under Wade Hampton rode up on the left flank (they had assembled, in red shirts, around our own court house and marched away to Virginia to “The Palmyra Schottische”). Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay. It all added to the melancholy atmosphere of shadowy room, cloudy weather and addicted mind. This is a translation from an archaic Chinese text, explaining that poetry is a voice out of nature which must be rendered humanly in­ telligible, so that people can know how to live. 3Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 1 04. Before the internet, Google, and hyperlinks, Guy Davenport was the original polymath, perhaps the last great American polymath, who provided the links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. And pretty much everything in between. Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. He serves as our guide through the jungles of history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking.Narrative Tone and Form: a quintessential literary essay discussing tone & stylistic innovations/experimentations in the works of such diverse writers as Flaubert, Kafka, Wittgenstein & Gertrude Stein, moving on to an analysis of Iliad& Odyssey, and finding analogies from the art world, ending with a discussion of architectonic form. Being fair, I likely rounded up as I think this would've been pristine were it 31 or 32 essays rather than 40. Many reviewers have noted that this is a master class of sorts; well, it is of a certain reading/poetic ideology. Yeah, I used that word. While Davenport confesses to subsisting often on fried bologna, canned soup and candy bars, his reclusive career is one to be celebrated. There may be cost to such a choice. Davenport is a follower of Ezra Pound. This extends to the authors elected to his poetic canon in the ABC of Reading and Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. This is sort of accepted without question. No need for everyone to learn Provencal but maybe someone should consider the merits of Auden or Gruppe 47? When, in later years, I saw real archaeologists at work, I felt perfectly at home among them: diggers at Mycenae and at Lascaux, where I was shown a tray of hyena coprolites and wondered which my father would have kept and which thrown away, for petrified droppings from the Ice Age must have their range from good to bad, like arrowheads and stone axes.

Charles Ives: Davenport calls him the "greatest (American) composer" ever & writes, "he considered Browning to be the great modern poet, and wrote a handsome, majestic overture in his honor- in twelve-tone rows, a dozen years before Schoenberg invented them."! And there's more: I always seemed to find myself book browsing on rainy afternoons when I would wander up the book shelved hallway into my bedroom where, lying aslant my bed, I'd dip into the bottom shelf of my large bookcase there, in the semi-darkness, and lazily cruise in and out of various volumes.Volumes of essays.In her chapter of the Secondary Geography Handbook, Massey explains her understanding of a geographical imagination. That Faire Field of Enna: an essay on the mythical matrix across Eudora Welty's fiction. Gass & Davenport have both endorsed her highly: "If one were asked what absolute distinction makes Miss Welty's fiction different, the answer would not be her alert, perfectly idiomatic, honest prose, nor her immense understanding of character, nor her transmutation of fact into universal symbol, but her unique study of inarticulateness." In his Paris Review interview, Davenport said: "She is the only writer we have who writes like Joyce." Broadly, this collection of forty essays becomes an attempt to map the creative imagination through time & space across various humanities: literature, art, & philosophy (and science too!*). This erudite work would help greatly as a reference book too. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. Masque of the Red Death") : the grotesque, and a Greek female head: the classical. A thorough inspection of Poe's work will disclose that he performs variations and mutations of these three vocabularies of imagery. We can readily recognize those works in which a particular idiom is dominant. The great octosyllabic sonnet "To Helen," for instance, is classical, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is grotesque, and the poem "Israfel" is arabesque. But no work is restricted to one mode; the other two are there also. We all know the beautiful "To Helen," written when he was still a boy: Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicaean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary , way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And tne grandeur that was Rome. Lo ! in yon brilliant window niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand ! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land!

Now, today, all - poems, essay and book itself - have undergone their obscure little resurrection from their entombment on the bottom shelf. Extracts from Professor Simon Catling’s inaugural professorial lecture ‘Curriculum Contested: Primary Geography and Social Justice’ Guy Davenport's style is a captivating blend of scholarship & sophisticated charm. This book is truly a reader's delight—leading them on to more books, more art, more philosophy. Isn't that what the best of books do? A keeper surely! Book Genre: Art, Books About Books, Criticism, Essays, History, Language, Literary Criticism, Literature, Nonfiction, Philosophy, WritingWe new-world settlers, then, brought the imagination of other countries to transplant it in a different geography. We have been here scarcely a quarter of the time that the pharaohs ruled Egypt. We brought many things across the Atlantic, and the Pacific; many things we left behind: a critical choice to live with forever." Nothing characterizes the twentieth century more than its inability to pay attention to anything for more than a week."