Spinoza: read when I was 11. Didn't understand anything but felt that something was going on...knew it! More or less the opposite of how I read post avant verse. Understand everything (so damn trite) and know that nothing is going on.
The anthology of English Literature we were, somehow, graced with in high school. "The Eve of St. Agnes" memorized. First two books of "Paradise Lost" memorized. Memorized a lot of "Don Juan" and would amuse myself with all of this hoping, somehow, there would be someone else who was amused.
My draft notice -- read whimsically and then whimsy maintained in horror. Accounting for my sensibility, loneliness and innate cheerfulness.
Actual scholarship anent British Literature -- hundreds of volumes taken home and read with endless delight.
The occasional fellow with insight and a damn fine prose style (Hugh Kenner -- miss you, buddy!).
The letter from my Great Aunt I read after her death -- the passage about her sister who hanged herself in the barn in West Grove, Pa in 1944 -- an event mentioned by my mother but never with any least allusion to any reason. Turned out she was in the OSS in Italy, had been raped and tortured then rescued and sent back insane. This provided insight into the Irish Catholic way of Secrets:
scaring the hell out of me and dreading a final after death revelation that Irish Catholicism is all true.
Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Here are five.
1. Michael Rumaker, *The Butterfly*. I didn't know until just now
(thank you Wikipedia:-) that it was about his affair with
early-in-her-life Yoko Ono. I gravitated even in early college to
stories of the institutionalized young man who came back into the world
wobbling like a colt. The bildungsroman as psychohistory. Rumaker had a
story in the Evergreen Review sometime later, "Gringos," that I remember
was a damnsight nastier. I didn't know he is gay until I read the Wiki
article. BFD.
2. John Berryman, *Love and Fame*. I am supposed to hate this as
self-indulgent slop. It isn't and I didn't/don't. It gave me the
courage to start writing from my own viscera and to tell graduate
English, three years from the end, that I am the wholly own subsidiary
of no thought process but my own ego. In other words, a dangerous book.
3. Thomas Pynchon, *V*. Not the great American novel, just the great
New York novel of malaise. I haven't read it in years and need to go
back to the historical chapters. In other words, I learned all the
wrong things from it except about how horrid it is to talk across 14th
Street in a cold night.
4. R. P. Warren, *All the King's Men*. I used to reread this every
year. I just reread it again last summer. Whole phrases and paragraphs
had become part of me and I didn't know it. For me today at the end of
the American Disperiment: how good men and women bewhore themselves from
attraction to gods, daddies, and demon lovers; and how formerly good men
succumb to their own charisma and discover not a will to power but a
will to crush.
5. Eliot Weinberger, *Works on Paper*. If only for two essays: one on
Naropa, exposing the sucker-bait mentality that got men such as Ginsberg
to follow a manipulative fraud like Trungpa Rinpoche; and "Kampuchea,"
the most horrific essay I've ever read: really also about people
deluding themselves. How else are governments produced?
6. Mark Doty, *Firebird: A Memoir*. After hearing Doty read back in
early 2001 I went on a reading binge which included his prose writings.
*Firebird* taught me about the fragility a stray gene or chromosome. I
discovered I *was* Doty, growing up as the school sissy and poof: all
the old crap. Playacting, dress-up, fantasy life in lieu of real one,
parents said I should've been a girl, i.e., instant target. But
dangerously straight. If I'd been gay, with my gift for excess I'd have
died years ago. That's how *Firebird* influenced me: it made me feel
alone and fortunate.
Have I "learned" anything? Marginally.
Ken
--------------------
Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
There's a lot of wisdom here among the employees,
Some of us have street smarts and some have Ph.Ds.
We're all bored and tired but we've all learned ways to cope
Some of us drink after work, the rest of us smoke dope.
--Austin Lounge Lizards, "Industrial Strength Tranquilizers"
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