+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 08/29/2008
Of the writers I care most about who have died during my reading life (Faulkner doesn’t count – I was 9), the one I miss most, because he probably still had the most to give had he been granted a reprieve, was the poet L.E. Sissman. Beckett was 83; Bellow, 89; Guy Davenport, 77; Nabokov, 78. Sissman was 48 when cancer killed him in 1976. He had published, in the words of his friend John Updike, four...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 07/24/2008
“Miserable as our century is, we can still boast that for seventy-five years of it we had P.G. Wodehouse, the Meander of our time…” I thought of Guy Davenport’s generous assessment on Tuesday when a reader confessed he was unable to read Wodehouse, finding him alien, off-putting and, most slanderously, not funny. I’ve not read Wodehouse lately. One reads him medicinally and I’ve felt rather well of...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 07/10/2008
I woke earlier than usual Wednesday morning. The kids were sleeping and my wife had already left for the gym. I sat on the couch with the first cup of coffee, cat on my shoulder, feeling unusually bright-eyed, and opened Guy Davenport’s The Cardiff Team to the title story: “If it happens that Nature, when we get up one morning and start our day, hands us exactly what we were of a mind to do, our praise...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 07/07/2008
Thanks to Brian Sholis for alerting me to a brief reminiscence of Guy Davenport, “Learning from Lexington,” by Marjorie Perloff in the July/August issue of Poetry . Here’s how she concludes: “Writing, for Davenport, was its own best pleasure. And, in any case, he quipped, writing poetry is much easier than reading it.”
+Vote!
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 07/05/2008
... get to know Guy Davenport: “A difference of imagination” . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) I regret never meeting Davenport. My late friend, the composer John Davison, had known him since at least the time when Davenport taught at Haverford.
+Vote!
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 07/05/2008
That it is, in many, many ways. "Finding," by Guy Davenport, by way of Wyatt Mason. The most obviously film-related bits surface about a third of the way in - but read on, see what else you find....
1Vote!
Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 07/04/2008
> > · · · · · · · · · · · · · There must I begin to be: Guy Davenport's heretical fictionsBy Discussed in this essay:The Death of Picasso: New & Selected Writing, by Guy Davenport. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003. 380 pages. $26.One consistent feature of truly innovative writing has been how it lays claim to a previously overlooked milieu, turning what once was tedium or even taboo into appropriate material...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 06/20/2008
Almost 40 years ago, on Dec. 10, 1968, Thomas Merton was electrocuted by an electric fan as he stepped from his bath in Bangkok, Thailand. Judging from his books, from the many photos of him I’ve seen, from biographies, and from Guy Davenport’s reminiscences, written and in conversation, Merton was an earthy, deeply human man, not a sanitized saint. In photos, particularly those taken by his friend...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 04/24/2008
Among its other disadvantages, the automobile seriously compromises visual acuity. Even a driver not listening to the radio, talking on a cell phone, berating the kids, looking for the dry cleaner’s or painting her nails is likely to miss the conceptual sweep of a cityscape, not to mention all the interesting details. Convenience and speed trump connection and understanding every time we get behind...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 04/14/2008
One of the qualities I most admire in a writer, especially a nonfiction writer, is deft characterization – the economically artful portrayal of a specific man or woman. As a writer of features for newspapers and a wire service for many years, I worked hard at delivering human essence with a minimum of words. The work involves an instinct for significant, revealing detail – learning it and describing...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 04/02/2008
The apartment we rented on the third floor of a rambling Victorian hulk in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was crowded with mice. With the coming of fall, they moved indoors for warmth and food. I remembered Guy Davenport setting out bowls of sugar water to attract bees and wasps, and secretly I enjoyed the company of rodents, but my wife was seriously repulsed. We were newly married and I hadn’t yet shed...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 03/26/2008
About three years before his death in 2005, Guy Davenport wrote an introduction to a collection of photographs, A Palpable Elysium , by his old friend the poet and publisher Jonathan Williams. Since the nineteen-fifties, Williams had traveled the United States and occasionally elsewhere, taking pictures of artists renowned and obscure, from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to Edgar Tolson, a...
+Vote!
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 03/25/2008
Certain long-ago encounters with books, magazines and even newspapers carry with them, in memory, a sort of golden aura. One fondly recalls the work and the setting in which it was first enjoyed as “spots in time,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase, charged with an ineffable glow of pleasure. I remember, in 1985, reading Gary Giddins’ hommage to Jack Benny, “This Guy Wouldn't Give You the Parsley Off His...
