Not exactly P. From a wonderful piece by Howard Jacobsen

[Mark Kohut]

Yes to blinding omni-awareness, nice phrase and as I've stated here before
(forgive ye of long standing) when you read, say,
the sonnets with the full Arden annotations, you see how he was so
organically in touch with language that there are root resonances in the
subtexts that NO ONE, NOT EVEN HE could consciously plant....but his
language was like the plant life around Stratford to him, he knew it as
natural, he got every flower detail right every time he alluded to one, J.
Bate is always saying, a Shakespeare scholar who lives in Stratford because
shakespeare.

On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 10:49 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Maybe not interested in academic mapping but he does have moments of such
> BLINDING omni-awareness that seem to be totally new to the time, but that's
> because when that sort of spirit shows up it is always totally new to the
> time. Eternally. Our main squeeze obviously also one of those such brand
> new (or at least eternally rare) incarnations of the human mind. (Have any
> of you guys read the HBloom book about Shakespeare inventing modernity or
> the modern consciousness or some such?) Art (especially literature maybe)
> is just enough of an established commercial and academic industry--and the
> current art industry is, by nature of our being alive to see it, so close
> to our experience--that we see a lot of good art the quantity of which
> dilutes the shock of the holy art. This is probably always going on, I'm
> guessing.
>
> On Feb 5, 2016, at 7:06 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  in The Guardian about *The Merchant of Venice* about which
> he has written the novel in the new series of reimagining Shakespeare's
> works.
> "letting language do its own remembering"....THAT is wonderful.
> "unworked significance and unsorted old material" ---just right. He is a
> very good novelist and knows.
>
> Applies, I would suggest, to our favorite writer here.
>
> Also, if you haven't read or watched this play since high school or
> college, I recommend it as who wouldn't but you might be surprised in your
> maturity.
>
>
> "I am not convinced that Shakespeare was ever interested in such abstract,
> academic mapping [scholars finding doubling, mirroring, etc.]  But it is
> part of his greatness to allow unworked significance and unsorted old
> material to have their way without him in a play. DH Lawrence wrote
> astutely about what happens to a living work when the artist puts his
> finger in the pan, forcing its outcome. It ceases to be a living work. And
> Shakespeare was a writer in Lawrence’s sense, ideology free, allowing
> characters to find their true selves in interaction with one another, and
> letting language do its own remembering."
>
>
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