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Michael Silverblatt fanboy report
Sep. 24th, 2007 06:28 pmToday's Bookworm shows: Allen Kurzweil, Curtis White, Jonathan Dee, Oliver Sacks (all from 2002).
Sacks and Silverblatt talk about science writing as phenomenological poetry, which reminds me of the little book about geographical topography that I bought at the now-vanished-beneath-gentrification Oak Bay Bookstore, every line of which reads like thoughtful natural poetry.
It seems to me that the brief moments of transcendence I get from encounters with natural beauty in this town are something like the GST cheque. A small allotment of a thing needed in much greater quantities, coming at intervals just close enough to forestall complete despair, keeps you going on just enough that you do not have to consider the changes necessary for you to go on with joy and satisfaction.
In my youth, I used to find out about authors not by reading their work, but by reading biographies of them. In this way, I learnt about the details of their lives, and usually some aspects of a critical analysis of their body of work, but I had almost no contact with their actual style. Instead, I became intimate with the particular voice of biography, which actually may have made the literary work -- more complex in style, less immediate in detail -- more difficult to engage with.
I'm all about the mediation.
{rf}
Sacks and Silverblatt talk about science writing as phenomenological poetry, which reminds me of the little book about geographical topography that I bought at the now-vanished-beneath-gentrification Oak Bay Bookstore, every line of which reads like thoughtful natural poetry.
It seems to me that the brief moments of transcendence I get from encounters with natural beauty in this town are something like the GST cheque. A small allotment of a thing needed in much greater quantities, coming at intervals just close enough to forestall complete despair, keeps you going on just enough that you do not have to consider the changes necessary for you to go on with joy and satisfaction.
In my youth, I used to find out about authors not by reading their work, but by reading biographies of them. In this way, I learnt about the details of their lives, and usually some aspects of a critical analysis of their body of work, but I had almost no contact with their actual style. Instead, I became intimate with the particular voice of biography, which actually may have made the literary work -- more complex in style, less immediate in detail -- more difficult to engage with.
I'm all about the mediation.
{rf}
