I'm just reading this fine thread like Musil's young person, or wandering
in the gallery, a few seconds per masterpiece.
It was our listleader who warned me, as a young person, that life is too
short to keep reading anything you are not enjoying (all those unfinished
tomes in the library of World Three), advice I have never been able to take
(since most good [and nearly -all- contemporary mainstream] poetry is so
immediately disappointing, and some -> much of what I read is in a
'foreign' language which, count 'em, after 22 years, I still find
difficult).
Last summer I finally got round to beginning _A Man without Qualities_.
What a case in point, what an initial disappointment! 'Not,' I thought,
'another fucking masterpiece by that troublesome alienated genius, the male
modernist hero.'
But later, picking the book up off the dock, beside the waiting, sun-warmed
towel, all sense of having to -persist- evaporated (although back in the
city, volume two sits on my shelf, unopened until ?).
Did Musil the writer anticipate all that? Maybe. (- Some of those modernist
genius's where so fucking persistent ...)
Which is not to say that I don't long for an immediate (and persitent)
rush, and occasionally get it ... most recently from Robertson's _Debbie:
an epic_. And I would also, btw, advocate an innovative poetics which was
generous in its immediate appointments.
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