Young's Debs wow, due diligence on _Anniversaries_
peterthooper at juno.com
peterthooper at juno.com
Thu May 2 02:52:49 CDT 2019
Many fine reading recs from this list: particularly Marguerite Young, the one mentioned was Miss Macintosh but my gaze glanced off of that and latched onto _Eugene Victor Debs: Harpsong for a Radical_ - would that she would've lived to finish it, aye, and publish the mysterious bio of James Whitcomb Riley that she shelved to write about Debs.
Florid? Copious? Evocative? Check, check, check.
heck, also a pleasure to Double-check some of those long sentences every now and then & think I've caught one that doesn't parse. Once again proving the evergreen truth that one should never skimp on commas.
Though it's always pretty clear what she's driving at anyway.
But as EVDHfaR was written last chronologically, is it possible that the Riley book might have evinced more youthful vigor and fewer questionable phraseologies?
Though it was mentioned in her Dalkey interview, it's not been published, but I'd sure purchase a copy.
A bunch of her writing was stolen from her, though.
But anyway, frequent mentions here of _Anniversaries_ - thanks, Mark, and going back a ways, Kai - call for a little bit of investigative legwork...
Fact: Uwe Johnson was in the Group 47. Their thesis, according to Wikipedia, was that genuine artistry is always the same as the opposition to Nazism. I think Gunter Grass a-and that Heinrich Böll were also members.
Meetings sound kind of rigorous: a piece of one person's writing would be soundly thwacked by all in attendance. And if you were the guest of honor, you'd have to sit there and take it like a Mensch. No wonder Uwe Johnson moved to New York!
Just kidding, obviously.
Fact: in Germany an author is called a Schriftsteller.
Group 47 was inspired by the Spanish Group 98.
if there were a US group, which year would it be?
Fact: Nook books has an 88 page free sample of the translation
The preface talks about how he claimed to've met Gesine Cresspahl out walking and convinced her to be the subject of his book.
This contrafactual vividity ("he's not mad, he's a-makin' pottery," as Mr Dooley put it) speaks to an investment in his work similar to that described of Pynchon in Manhattan Beach talking and laughing in his apartment with the characters in GR. So maybe there's a linkage of sorts.
Also, Gesine Cresspahl almost rhymes with Maxine Tarnow. (Just being silly now)
So she's out at the Jersey Shore swimming without her daughter, and wondering if there were Jews allowed to vacation at the similar beach town of Jerichow in Germany prior to Nazism. She's inhabiting her present and past, and there are similarities. Kind of a quiet way to begin a book, but really not bad (IMHO)
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