As you can guess, martin, I tend to agree with you about these writers,
especially Vendler (but it may be that that's a matter of (my) taste.
As to Derrida, I'd recommend some of the later smaller books, although
I loved the one with 'Plato's Pharmacy' (I think it was titled) in it
(still in a box; can't remember the full title). And of some later
ones, the one on Nietzsche, Archive fever, etc. I mean, they are
charming among other things....
Doug
On 29-May-05, at 5:24 PM, MJ Walker wrote:
> That's interesting, Eileen. What I have read by Vendler, admittedly not
> much (mostly in the NYRB), has got on my nerves a bit, very
> professorial, and her taste in modern poetry seems to me abysmal. Ricks
> , yes but - too, tooo. Worth revisiting, though. Perloff can be
> brilliant, certainly, and I was led to certain writers & works by her
> (I
> remember a wonderful piece on Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska book as modernist
> manifesto cum collage). Donahue I used to read quite a bit, but his
> Catholic moralistic bias began to get on my nerves. The others are
> unknown to me - perhaps the odd article by Lehman on the New York
> school. "For the pleasure of their pleasure" is very well put, wish I'd
> said it. Fred Pollack mentions James Wood, I see - what I've read
> hasn't
> sustained itself in that imperfect organ my imaginative memory. But I
> read him when I can. I'm definitely going to try Derrida again, Doug,
> since you recommend him so firmly - I think I'm just too dumb to get
> it,
> though. Verkalkt! What I liked about Paglia is that it was a chatty
> bisexually provocative version of Praz's *Romantic Agony* - but the
> latter can still draw us back for the urbanity of its style and sheer
> useless-information value, while Paglia has aged badly in that one is
> tempted to say "Been there, done that" & let bygones be begones. Now
> another name occurs - Calvino's lectures are magisterially mercurial.
> And for mandarin obscurity (to me, of course) there's a book I
> sometimes
> dip into, shaking my head in confusion, by the author of *Paradiso*.
> Mark knows whom I mean.
> mj
Douglas Barbour
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I think the land knows we are here,
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