The big good poets of French Romanticism - finally I make use of my French - for all of the good it does me

I have in front of me The Oxford Book of French Verse, first published in 1907, “Chosen by St. John Lucas,” a 500 page collection of French poems in French, with only the introduction and notes in English.  Just about half of the book covers the 19th century, and half of that is just four poets: Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset.  Those are the poets I want to linger over here.  You may note that I have skipped the Revolution and the “little bad poets of the Empire,” as the saint calls them (p. xxx).  I was going to say something dismissive, but not that cruel.  For whatever reason, Bonaparte was not good for French literature.

It roared back to life in the 1820s, first with the poets, then the theatre, and then the novel and its variants, but that will be more in the 1830s.  It began with The Poetic Meditations (1820) of Lamartine, and for him that is almost where it ended, since he used his fame to go into politics.  Inventing French Romanticism was only one of his accomplishments.

I am not entirely sure what French Romanticism is.  It is in large part an argument with French Classicism, and I am not so sure what that is.  I am reading an old school edition of Hugo’s Les feuillles d’automnes (Autumn Leaves, 1831) which includes notes about Hugo’s many violation of Classical rules, such as when he uses feminine rhymes inappropriately or puts the caesura in the wrong place.  If you say so, I think.  An advanced topic in French prosody.  Anyway, these poets are doing it wrong, however subtly, which was once pretty exciting.

My memory of the relevant English translations:

There’s a pretty good translation of Lamartine’s Meditations.

There is a functional but dull translation of Musset’s complete poems.

Given his stature, there is not much Hugo in English.

There is close to no Vigny in English.  No idea why.

A short selected Musset and selected Vigny would be valuable additions to English literature, hint hint, poetic translators.  Vigny and Musset have plays available in good English.  See Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) for some intense French Romanticism as reflected in an imaginary version of an actual misunderstood, doomed teenage poet.

I read that one in French while reading Vigny’s complete poems, now that I could.  I have also been filling in some Hugo, a tiny fraction of his thousands of pages of poems.  That would be a feat, reading Hugo’s complete poems.

Vigny wrote narrative poems, mostly in rhyming couplets.  Stories about Roland, Jesus, “The Anger of Samson,” (the death of) “Moses,” “The Death of the Wolf” – how the French love stories about wolves.  I could not believe how many children’s books there are about wolves, both funny and scary.  The hunter in the poem kills the wolf, but learns that wolves are better than people, or no worse.

Early Hugo has been a surprise and just what I expected.  He was immediately Hugolian, from the poems written when he was 18, hugely skilled, confident or a blowhard depending on one’s taste.  His first few little books, collected in Odes and Ballads (1828), are all political, legitimist, about the great fallen heroes who fought the Revolution.  I certainly learned the word for “executioner,” since it appears in every poem.  This is not the Hugo who is the champion of the powerless.  The primary victim of capital punishment he has in mind is Louis XVI.

Hugo changed quickly.  Maybe the poor are the subjects of the last half of Odes et Ballades.  I only read the first half.  Hugo exhausted me.

I have one complaint, which I can at this point make about Vigny and Hugo: they were not great rhymers.  They use lots of conventional rhymes, and there is clearly no penalty for repeating them in poem after poem – ombre / sombre (shadow / dark) , orage / nuage or orage / ombrage (storm / snow, shady), essor / trésor (flight / treasure) – that last one is the worst, since it is so phony.  The poets of a couple of a generation later wouldn’t allow this.  Paul Verlaine put an end to it.

Molière and the short French 17th century

I have one point I want to make here about French literature of the 17th century.

Molière and his company played in Paris for only fifteen years, 1658 to 1673, before he died, not onstage but almost, at the age of 51.  Almost all of his surviving comedies were written in Paris.  Some are masterpieces, some are blatant rip-offs of Italian farces; some are prose, some verse.  They form a kind of backbone of the study of literature by French children who start with one of the Italian farces, Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671, Scapin’s Pranks gets the idea across), and move towards the complex verse masterpieces like Tartuffe (1664) and The Misanthrope (1666).

I will testify that this makes a lot of sense.  I have, myself, more or less followed the French youngsters, reading through most of the prose plays.  The verse plays are next.  You do not need much French, a year of college French, to read Les Fourberies de Scapin.  Then you have read – then I had read – Molière in French!  A triumph.

That exact period, when Molière was in Paris, is a miracle in French literature.  It includes the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (1665), the first half of the Fables of La Fontaine (1668), Pascal’s Pensées (1670), and most of Jean Racine’s plays.  By 1678, just five more years – poor Molière, dead so young – I can add Racine’s Phèdre (1677), Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), and a couple more books of the Fables.  I can add a lot more than that, but these are just the big ones, the core of the 17th century, heck, of French literature, as it is read and taught now.

Twenty years.  Corneille’s plays precede Molière, and a number of important works, like Perrault’s Contes, are later.  But, I mean, wow, that one amazing stretch, 1659 (when Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules, his first important play, was produced) to 1678.  It includes so much.

In 1659, Louis XIV was 21.  He and his court were not installed at Versailles.  This is exactly the period when the old hunting lodge was being renovated, and the Versailles as we know it, with its gardens and mirrors, was created.

It was a culturally energetic period.

My impression is that, over a long period, for example the 20th century, there has been a shift in French culture and education and theater performance from Racine to Molière.   Molière seems more alive, not that there are not plenty of performances of Racine and Corneille.  Not that the poor French students do not still have to read Racine.

There were other playwrights of the period, too.  I have seen the names of some of them.  I have no idea what they wrote.  I remember reading that French playwrights commonly stole from the Spanish stage as well as the Italian, but Molière just stole from the Italians, so I don’t know who was pilfering from Lope de Vega.  English playwrights freely looted all of them.

Next I want to write about 17th century French novels, a subject about which I know almost nothing.

Poetry, theater: French literature Petrarchizes - However well one may be educated / In Greek and Latin subtleties

More from the difficult French 16th century. I won’t get to Montaigne.

3.  French classical theater, this is just what I mean when I say that 16th century French literature is in some sense too hard.  French writers were absorbing and transforming a flood of new classical texts coming to France from Italy, plus what had already been a century or two of Italian responses to those discoveries.  With the plays of Seneca as the crucial example, a new kind of French theater came into being.

The English history is a little bit later, but parallel.  In England, though, the academic theater quickly turned into a chaotic popular theater, while in France it became more of a purely courtly form.  More intellectual, specialized, and boring.

Shakespeare, or Kyd, or whoever, read Seneca and thought “Ghosts and murders!”; French writers apparently thought “Sententiae!”  The two plays I have read (in English) are not dramatic.  They are both by Robert Garnier, the most important French playwright of the century, although by no means the earliest.  I wrote about Les Juifves (The Hebrew Women, 1583) a few years ago, and have also read Marc-Antoine (1578), a tragedy about Anthony and Cleopatra, in Mary Sidney’s 1592 version.  These are plays where characters barely interact.  Anthony declaims a monologue and leaves the stage; Cleopatra ditto and ditto; Anthony returns etc.  The two characters do get to talk to each other at the very end of the play.

Sidney’s poetry is exquisite, and I assume Garnier’s is comparable, but you can’t give this stuff to high school kids, even French ones.  They are punished enough with Corneille and Racine.  The 16th century French theater is for graduate students.  I guess English is not so different – who outside of graduate school reads Gorbuduc (1561)?  Still, Garnier is contemporary with Marlowe and The Spanish Tragedy – dramatic plays.

4.  French poets are working on the same project, pulling the Italian Renaissance into French.  The parallel with English poetry is close.  The equivalent of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the first poet to bring Petrarch into the language, is Clément Marot, who I have not read.  The most important is Pierre de Ronsard, who is lying when he writes that his suffering is so powerful that he does not know how to express it, either “Tant lamenter, ne tant Petrarquiser” (Des Amours, sonnet 129) – “as lamenting, nor as Petrarchizing.”  This man knew how to Petrarchize.  He was the greatest of Petrarchizers.

One result, just like in English, was ingenious but esoteric demonstrations of poetic learning like the Délie of Maurice Scève, which I read some portion of in Richard Sieburth’s translation.  The reader is assumed to know his Petrarch, his Horace, and his Horace-via-Petrarch inside out, while also interpreting riddle-like emblems and so on.  Advanced intellectual pleasure.

By contrast there are The Regrets (1558) of Joachim du Bellay, expat poetry.  Du Bellay worked in Rome and missed France.  He wrote a 191-poem sonnet sequence on that subject, mostly in some way about life in Rome, although he makes it home at the end.  The poems are full of personality, and are almost conversational, a good trick in a sonnet.  Ronsard is a genius, but is always performing, however beautifully.  Du Bellay – well, he is performing, too, but he tricks me into intimacy.

However well one may be educated
In Greek and Latin subtleties, I think
The effect of this place is to teach something
One didn’t know before one came this way.
Not that one finds here better libraries
Than any that the French have put together,
But that the atmosphere, perhaps the weather,
Spirit away our less ethereal faculties.
Some demon or other, with his sacred fire,
Purifies even the worst of us, tempers and refines
Till our judgment is too wary to be misled.
But if one stays here too long, all one’s strength of mind
Goes up in smoke, and leaves nothing behind,
Or so little that one loses the thread.  (Sonnet 72 in C. H. Sisson)

It’s complex, but not because it is learned.  We are lucky to have C. H. Sisson’s 1984 translation of (most of) Les Regrets.  An all-time great translation, partly accomplished by a subtle mastery of slant rhymes.

Someday I should read the entire sequence in French.  I should read an entire book by Ronsard, too, Les Amours (1552) or something.  Long ago, I scoured the versions of Ronsard in English; they range from functional (the Penguin Classics edition, clearly meant for French students) to hilariously bad (there is one from the 1960s in free verse with “erotic” drawings by the author).  So without French, du Bellay yes, Ronsard no.

The great feminist rediscovery of the period is Louise Labé.  French critics spent the 1990s debating whether she existed, or was really a persona of Scève.  That’s some feminism!  Anyway, the consensus, now, is that she existed.  I should read her, too.  When you go to see Rabelais’s hospital in Lyon, look for the plaque identifying Labé’s childhood home, which is just across a little restaurant-packed plaza.

16th century French literature is too difficult - “In your throat, my Lord,” said I.

In the 16th century, the Renaissance arrives in French literature.  Everyone is absorbing and imitating the great new discoveries in Greek and Latin literature and two centuries of Italian responses to that literature.  Amazing books are written.  Modern French literature is invented.

I count five major literary events in the 16th century.  They have a minimal place in the French school curriculum.  Putting the pieces together, I understand why.  They are too hard.  Mostly too hard.  Advanced topics in French literature.

I will number them, and mention the “mostly” first.

1.  Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1558) is Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) not merely imitated in French, but consciously made French in language, obviously, but also subject, characters, and attitudes.  It is not exactly what I would call modern fiction, but it is a big step closer than Boccaccio.  I can’t really tell apart Boccaccio’s frame characters, the ones who tell the stories, but they are distinct as characters in the Heptameron.

So here we have a woman author, a princess and queen of historical significance, and seventy stories on a range of subjects and social levels, written in a range of styles, easy to arrange into a variety of school editions.  If there is even one school edition on French Amazon – very useful for this sort of thing, French Amazon – I can’t find it.  I don't get it.

2.  François Rabelais, author of Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua (1534), and three more sequels (1546-64), books unique enough that the author’s name has turned into a useful adjective for the more earthy side of existence.  Man as an ambulatory and talkative digestive and excretory system.  The language is crazy, innovative, full of new words and jokes and nonsense.  Great stuff, especially the first two novels.

English translations are always of the whole 800-page monster, but the French often seem to think of “Rabelais” as five novels.  They are published separately, and there are a number of school editions – lycée level – of either one of the first two novels or of selections from the whole thing.  Or maybe selections from the first two books, I don’t know.

Rabelais’s language is hard enough that many ordinary editions of the novels are in “modern French” translations.  I assume that is what I have read.  Although Rabelais is an advanced topic, he is introduced early.  The school editions often come with excerpts of related works, and I read two that had bits of Rabelais.  How I loved those school editions.  A terrific collège-level collection of travel writing, Les récits de voyage, which included bits of Herodotus, Joinville, and Columbus, that sort of thing, included a few pages of Chapter 32 of Pantagruel, in which a traveler gets lost inside Pantagruel’s mouth – everyone knows that Gargantua and Pantagruel are giants, yes? – and describes the “twenty-five inhabited kingdoms, not counting the deserts and one great arm of the sea” that he finds there.  It sounds nice, except for the plague caused by the time Pantagruel “ate all that garlic sauce.”  The traveler finally returns to our world:

When [Pantagruel] noticed me, he asked me: “Where are you coming from, Alcofribas?”

“I answered him: “From your throat, sir.”

“And how long have you been there?” said he.

“Since you set out,” said I, “against the Almyrodes.”

“That,” said he, “is over six months ago.  And what did you live on?  What did you drink?”

I answered: “Lord, the same as you, and of the choicest morsels that passed down your throat I took my toll.”

“All right,” said he, “but where did you shit?”

“In your throat, my Lord,” said I.

“Ha ha! you’re a jolly good fellow,” said he.  (Donald Frame’s translation, p. 241)

I have not and I think cannot read much Rabelais in French, but that I read.

The hospital in Lyon where Rabelais was a physician has been beautifully restored and turned into a City of Gastronomy, whatever that is.  You can have lunch or relax in the courtyard on a long chair while admiring this medallion of Rabelais:

Then you can retrace his footsteps to the printers which printed his books.  Those buildings are also now occupied by restaurants, probably.

The remaining three topics in 16th century French literature are: the invention of French classical theater, the invention of modern French poetry, and the invention of modern man – Montaigne’s Essays, is what I mean by that last one.

French literature from the beginning - let's get back to our sheep!

The foundation of French literature, as with English literature, lies in the 16th and 17th centuries.  French literature is perhaps even more narrow.  There is a twenty year period in the 17th century – well, I will return to that.

The origins of vernacular French literature go back to the 11th century, with some saint’s lives about which I know little and heroic epics like The Song of Roland and many other chansons de geste.  I say that as if I have the slightest idea what is in any of the chansons de geste besides Roland.  I do not.

The great, still entertaining, Arthurian poems of Chrétien de Troyes are from the late 12th century.

All of this is in Old French and, as I understand it,  is more or less unreadable for most French readers.  Looking at the text of La Chanson de Roland, I would say that Old French is nowhere as far from modern French as Old English is from modern English, but it is not nearly as close as Chaucer’s Middle English is to my English.  Somewhere in between.  Maybe like the Middle English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I can read Chaucer, but I can’t read that.

French readers, and certainly French students, read these works in modern prose translations.  The prose versions of the medievalist Joseph Bédier, for example Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900), have become classics in their own right.  I should read that someday.

I have no idea what French schools do with medieval not-quite-French literature, like the poems of courtly love cooked up by the Occitan troubadours, the poems that would migrate into Italy and eventually return to France in the 16th century.

I also have little idea when French literature becomes modern, becomes reasonably readable.  Differences of spelling aside, are writers of the early 15th century like Christine de Pisan and Froissart accessible?  They must be.  I am examining Villon’s Testament (1461), the or anyways a French text, in Galway Kinnell’s The Poems of François Villon (1965), a masterpiece of translation, and it looks readable, goosed by Kinnell’s version, certainly:

Icy se clost le testament
Et finist du pauvre Villon
Venez a son enterrement
Quant vous orrez le carillon
Vestus rouge com vermillon
Car en amours mourut martir
Ce jura il sur son couillon
Quant de ce monde voult partir.  (ll. 1996-2003, p. 152)

Heck, it’s spelled all screwy but it’s practically English.  This is Kinnell:

Here ends and finishes
The testament of poor Villon
Come to his burial
When you hear the bell ringing
Dressed in red vermillion
For he dies a martyr to love
This he swore on his testicle
As he made his way out of this world.

Yes, that’s Villon.  Half of what I am doing here is thinking about what I should read in French, what I can read.  I should read Villon’s Testament; with Kinnell’s help, I can.

Myself, I have read exactly one pre-17th century French book, The Farce of Monsieur Pathelin (1457), an anonymous popular play.  The title character is a con man and a lawyer.  I am currently reading Johannes Fried’s The Middle Ages (2009, tr. Peter Lewis), an intellectual history of the thousand-year period named in the title.  One long chapter is on “The Triumph of Jurisprudence,” about the 13th century innovation of law and lawyers that began in the papal and imperial courts and spread everywhere.  A couple of hundred years later, the lawyers have diffused among the peasantry and there are hit comedies making fun of them.

The play climaxes with a scene where the lawyer represents a shepherd in court.  Their strategy is to pretend that the shepherd has gone nuts and thinks he is a sheep, so that he responds to every question with bleating.  In good hands, this scene must be a scream.  The play is performed to this day, and this scene is the reason.  It contains one line that has become a commonplace: “Revenons à nos moutons [Let’s get back to our sheep],” which I am pretty sure I myself heard in an ordinary conversation, although with my comprehension, who knows.

All right, on to the 16th century.

Introductory methodology for a series about my French reading, which I sure hope will be more fun than what I wrote here

What I want to do is to stroll, wander, and hike through my French reading of the last couple of years, as it relates to my study of French and for its own sake.  French literature is a subject of high interest.

This is a bad idea for several reasons.  I remember the books poorly, I likely do not have them at hand for reference, and I read them in French, a language I do not understand well.

This is a good idea because it offers ample outstanding opportunities for people to correct my errors, which, I have observed, makes people happy.  It is a kind of public service.

I will likely refer, often, to the educational use of various texts, especially when they are taught, at what level in school, more than how, because I have little idea about the how.  Much of my evidence, which I guess does include quite a bit of how, comes from the superb school editions French publishers produce of a wide range of texts.  They are probably sources of dismay for French school kids, but I loved ‘em.

For quick reference, the collège is close to, in American terms, junior high and early high school, while the lycée is late high school, taught, at least in literature and the arts, at what in American terms is “university level.”  The lycée has a “literary” track that only a small number of students pursue; it is definitely at university level.

I am repeating some things I wrote a year ago (beginning here), when I looked back on my time in France and discussed how I learned and read French.  I am sure I will repeat a lot more as I write.  I will repeat that I have two reasons for tying what I am reading to the French school system: first, that the reading level of books is so clearly indicated – how helpful!, and second, that the literary and arts education is fundamentally historical, taught to at least some degree for its own sake, rather than instrumental, taught as a means to teach more important things like writing and spelling and comportment, as we do in the U.S.

The humanities are inherently historical.  Every subject becomes a humanity once it is historicized.  And anyways I always think of literature historically, so I am going to move through my French reading while moving through French literary history.  It is a way to look at what I have read, but also what I might read someday.  It is a fun way to play with books.

I guess I have gone on so long about my methodology, a more German than French way to start, that I will save the French Middle Ages until tomorrow.  Setting aside all of this throat-clearing, things should move quickly.

Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights by Paulo Lemos Horta - as interesting as it sounds

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) was pretty much what I hoped it would be – hard, really difficult.  Readers less interested in medieval conceptions of time might want to skip to Lecture IV, or V, except that one is mostly about Sartre, or VI.  I plan to look it over again and write something in early October.

Meanwhile, here’s an entirely different kind of literary criticism, Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves: Secret Author of the Arabian Nights (2017), about the translation of The Arabian Nights into French, in the 18th century, and English, in the 19th.  Literary history.  Good stuff.

A chapter by chapter summary makes it clear what is in the book.

First, two chapters on Antoine Galland and Hanna Diyab, mostly about the latter.  Galland was the first translator of The Arabian Nights (1704-17) into French.  This was a landmark translation.  For a hundred years – more – Europe read The Arabian Nights in translations of French translations.  There was a puzzle about the so-called “orphan stories,” like “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” famous stories, that had no Arabic texts.  Galland acquired these stories from the Syrian traveller Diyab.  Arabic stories told in French by Diyab and then rewritten in French by Galland.  Complicated.

Diyab is interesting enough on his own to fill the chapters.  The discovery, only a decade ago, of his memoirs make the early chapters uniquely valuable.

Chapter 3 is about the first translation of The Arabian Nights into English from an Arabian manuscript.  It was done in India by Henry Torrens, a colonial administrator in India, in collaboration with an unknown number of now-anonymous Indian scholars.  Events in India made sure that this translation was never completed.  Too bad.  It was a real translation.

The ridiculous Egyptologist Edward Lane gets the next two chapters.  An odd bird, he translated The Arabian Nights in order to fill it with his insights about Egypt.  The book is as much notes as stories, notes about contemporary Egypt.  Large parts of the original are summarized, rearranged, pushed into the commentary.  Really strange.

The final two chapters cover the minor pre-Raphaelite poet John Payne and Victorian superstar Richard Burton, the authors of the next two English translations of The Arabian Nights, using the terms loosely.  Payne barely knew Arabic but at least his book was a real translation – from French and German versions!  Burton then openly plagiarized Torrens, Lane, and Payne, rewriting their texts in his own distinctive and bizarre style.  The style is his own, that is true.  “Stealing with Style,” that’s one of Horta’s chapter titles.  It is always great fun to read about Burton, but I do it with my jaw dropped.  He is an outrageous character.

Horta’s book, full of original material from the archives, has almost nothing to say about translation itself, nothing linguistic, for example, except in the way it demonstrates how the translations were inherently collaborative, often in complex and confusing ways.  Sometimes the translations were not translations at all.

He also take the value of The Arabian Nights for granted, as do I.  The greatest insights into the texts themselves are in the first two chapters, as Horta finds sources for pieces of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” and so on.  If a description of a palace feels more like Versailles than something in Persia, well, that’s right, Diyab was presented to Louis XIV.  This is true “world literature,” whatever that might be.

Horta’s books is as interesting as it sounds.

Why conceptual art? - against "a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism"

How did we get here?  Meaning, in this week’s context, how did we get to a point where Alvin Lucier’s recording of a mechanically distorted bit of speech can be credibly placed among the most important pieces of music of the 20th century.  Why does anyone worry about, while writing a novel, the alphabeticization of the words, like Walter Abish did?   How on earth did we get to – to – to – this:

If that image does not immediately appear at the website of Jeff Koons, click on “Inflatables” – or better yet, do not.  That place is a chamber of horrors.

More to the point, why are these works so prestigious and important.  No, that is easy.  They are pres. & imp. because certain other people believe they are p. & i., but I have just moved the target of the Why? and added a Who?

I don’t know the answers.  I am always looking for evidence.  Part of my pursuit of Austrian literature was a search for clues.  I found plenty.  A lot changed around 1900 – or 1910, Virginia Woolf says everything changed in 1910.  Maybe so.

I am so glad Rise pointed me to César Aira’s essay on conceptual art.  It is worth revisiting.  Aira has a good one-word explanation: professionalization.  This is what he means:

Once a professional novelist is established, he has two equally melancholy alternatives: to keep writing the ‘old’ novels in updated settings; or to heroically attempt to take one or two more steps forward.  This last possibility turned out to be a dead end within a few years: while Balzac wrote fifty novels, and still had time to live, Flaubert wrote five, shedding blood in the process.  Joyce wrote two, and Proust a single novel, and it was a work that took over his life, absorbing it, a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism. The fact is that being able to make a living from literature was a momentary and precarious state which could only happen at a determined moment in history.

The avant garde, a focus on concept and process rather than content, is Aira’s way to break the impasse, “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture” rather than trying to outdo Proust.  Note Aira’s strong sense of progress in the arts.  One could quibble with some of Aira’s evidence.

Now, lots of people write and far more read lightly updated versions of the old novels, Flaubert and Proust for our time (or Austen and Dickens), and they can find readers, and receive awards and critical praise.  This is the big difference between literature and classical music or fine art.  The audience for new work in fiction is much larger, and the avant gardists have not captured whatever mechanism is it that distributes prestige.  Sometimes I think they have captured poetry, other times I am not so sure.  But fiction is too big. Too – no, I don’t know what.

I thought about writing this post as a series of questions.  What is innovation in fiction?  How does originality differ from innovation?  Is there a taste for innovation?  And once I answer these questions, if I can, I have to historicize them – would the answers be the same in Shakespeare’s time, or Johnson’s, or even Dickens’s?  No – so what changed, and why?  I don’t know, I don’t know.

To return to my first paragraph, since I feel bad about lumping them together for illustrative purposes – Lucier is narrow and brilliant, Abish is narrow and interesting, Koons is a con man.

Image Blogger Appreciation Day

Welcome to Image Blog Appreciation Day!  My favorites:

Will Schofield’s 50 Watts is the reconfiguration of the legendary Journey Round My Skull, a repository for the most penetrating, surprising, and perplexing images he can find, and he has a good eye.  I could look  - or, really, stare - at those 19th century Danish puppet theaters all day.  The site has become an archive of book covers, textbook illustrations, children’s books, and miscellaneous weirdness that I now find overwhelming.  He does have a Greatest Hits page.  I want to emphasize, though, the literariness of the site, the sense that the images featured on 50 Watts are collaborating with the texts I wrestle with, that Victor Hugo’s paintings or Pataphysical artifacts or French sequels to Pinocchio are part of whatever story I am trying to tell, too, if I only understood them better.

50 Watts is my most frequent source for the images I steal for my internet avatar, including my current head of wheat.  Although 50 Watts is significantly less bloggish than Journey Round My Skull, I still designate it the Greatest Blog Ever.

Jane Librizzi, proprietor of The Blue Lantern, is also a storyteller – all of these bloggers are.  Librizzi is a master of pairing text and image, whether the text is a famous poem or her own essay.  This piece on Mariana Griswold von Rensselaer is a good example.  She also understands how literature and images interpenetrate – see this expert review of Theodor Fontane  and this little biography of Djuna Barnes.

Neil Philips, of Adventures in the Print Trade, has contributed valuable comments to Wuthering Expectations now and then.  His own blog would be dangerous if I lived in England, because it is part of his shop, and if he cannot sell you the image he features, I bet he can find something just as nice.

I have borrowed an amazing linocut by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth to showcase Neil, but I want to feature a recent post titled “Keeping Impressionism at bay” in which Neil uses an illustrated book of poems to deftly summarize and challenge the standard art history narrative.  Now that is too big a subject, the useful and frustrating contrasts between literary history, art history, music history, and so on, the way the field’s tell their own stories.  Some other time.  Neil’s post is a sort of primer on the subject.

Philip Wilkinson’s English Buildings is not exactly an image blog, but in the end it functions similarly.  He helps his readers see buildings carefully, to really look at them.  Then, after looking, to learn something about the period and history of the building.  Then to look again.  Wilkinson is a widely published specialist on English architecture, and he uses the blog to explore some areas that the standard architectural histories do not emphasize.

Every blog I have listed has this in common:  they know their field, and the story people in the field tell, how this movement led to that one, and this artist influenced the other, but they understand how inadequate and limiting that story is, and they push back against it in all sorts of fascinating ways.

I would feel bad if I omitted Steerforth and The Age of Uncertainty, another great scrounger of old images.  Steerforth is opening a bookstore – best wishes!

I would feel worse if I did not mention that all of these bloggers are unusually good writers – clear in their arguments, thoughtful in their choices.  When I visit their sites, what I mostly do is look, which is right.  But I also read with real pleasure.