Mindy Withrow

Clippings 11: reviews and resources

It’s been a long time between Clippings. It’s just too easy to put off writing by clicking from one intriguing link to the next, so I try to limit these forays. But I’m indulging this week, since I’ve been anchored at my desk like a good little writer. I trust you earned this reward, too (and if not, I won’t tell if you click through anyway):

Hemingway as his own fable. You might think this thesis a given, but Alfred Kazin put the flesh on it back in 1964 in his Atlantic Monthly review of A Moveable Feast, which the Powell’s review of the day recently dug out of the archives. Wish I would have read this back in college when I was writing about Hemingway’s religious commitment to humanism. Also wish that reviews today were this broad and deep! For example, here is part of the introduction:

So much impulse to autobiography probably springs from some deeply uneasy sense of one’s self as detached from early kindred and natural ties. But to a writer like Hemingway the effect of such detachment is not to make oneself powerless, but, on the contrary, to be seized by the possibilities of a new subject — by the self as an aesthetic and dramatic unit whose moving, walking, eating, drinking, loving, fearing, and tasting become marvelously vivid material. People today are notoriously not more independent and self-directing than they used to be, but more personal, more concerned with the self, more solicitous of and interested in the self than people used to be. Romanticism, psychology, and middle-class solicitude for oneself have made up the background of our interest in Hemingway. And it is the intense, almost clinical accuracy with which Hemingway has been able to convey the self’s sensations, as if each were called up for some separate erogenous zone, that is behind the physical excitement with which one reads Hemingway even at his worst. Hemingway is the great modern poet of the self as all-sufficient subject. What the self thinks, wants, eats, drinks, loves, and hates, Hemingway had put into relief as sharp and beautiful as the head of a lady poised against far-off mountains and valleys in a painting of the Italian Renaissance. But to be this much concerned with the exact feel of pebbles in your boots and the shock with which your shoulder can receive the recoil of a gun, with the coldness of a martini glass in your hand and the brightness of the stars overhead as you make love, is to identify the strength of writing with the presentation of the self. So much emphasis on the self as artistic subject is to turn other people into irrelevancies and distractions.

But the subject fascinated Hemingway; his lyric imagination was bound up with it…

And he goes on to show how Hemingway became his own best material. Well worth reading, whether you love Papa or hate him.

Mygazines.com seems like a lawsuit waiting to be filed, but if it’s legal, it’s a keeper. I spent some time browsing the August 2008 issue of The Atlantic and particularly enjoyed the Wendell Berry story, “Stand by Me.” A brief excerpt that snagged me:

I sat down. He handed me the letter, and it felt heavy in my hands as a stone. After I read it — “killed in action” — and handed it back, the whole damned English language just flew away in the air like a flock of blackbirds.

It’s a great piece by Berry, and an interesting concept for accessing it. Of course, there’s always the periodical room at the library, but it seems there is never enough time for lounging there.

I read a lot of reviews, but I miss a lot more of them than I catch. The reason I just noticed this one that I missed from a Books & Culture last fall is that I purchased the book, a poetry collection called God’s Silence by Pulitzer winner Franz Wright, at the Festival of Faith & Writing in April. I’ve dipped into the book here and there, but for the most part it’s still on the To Read pile. The review, though, provides context that urges a closer look.

Finally, just for fun, check out these library circulation pockets and cards you make yourself using free templates created by a generous blogging designer. I love the idea of a genuine circulation card nestled inside each of my books—but it will never happen. Too many books, far too little patience. (Not to mention how much writing I would have to put off and then feel guilty about.) But I can see making a few of these as gift sets or notecards for book-loving friends. Someday.

And now, back to work with you…

08. August 2008 by Mindy
Categories: Clippings | 1 comment