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("Posted" from the porch steps of the Brooksville Public Library - closed, but blessedly wi-fi'd)
Here in Maine with no instant internet to check for mail and links, I am thrown back on the entertainment of my younger days: reading articles in the paper and magazines. And I realize that this is where I got much of my "liberal arts" education. As a teen, sprawled out on the floor of the family den (no, we weren't a Pride of Lions - the room that wasn't the livingroom, which contained the TV, was called the den) I'd pore over the Arts section of the Sunday NYTimes, which was mostly about theater then, with just a couple of pages devoted to Movies. A critic would explain his opinions in the context of other plays he'd seen, and so I'd learn about them, too. Ditto the Book Review section (which had a lot more fiction reviews); if I hadn't read a book (and mostly I hadn't) I'd read about it.
Fortunately, we brought up with us some of the New Yorker magazines I never have time to read at home (clearly because I'm on the internet all the damn' time. And not reading lengthy articles, either. I hate reading long text of any kind online. Not just hard on the eyes, but the posture's all wrong. Long articles must be read while one is sprawled in a chair sideways, preferably with a piece of fruit in hand - or with elbows propped on a table, paper catching occasional dribbled bits of sandwich. I can sit for a long time with that.
So I've just read Adam Gopnik's piece in the June 9&16 issue on G. K. Chesterton. And now I know not only how he fits in with Shaw (and Borges), but about the "two great tectonic shifts in English writing": 18c - Addison & Steele turned "the stop-and-start Elizabethan-Stuart prose" into "smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style" [ohhhh! so that's why they're important! No one ever explained that to me] with "every sentence crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon," to be replaced after WWI with "a new form of aerodynamic prose" making "what had seeming charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before... sound like puff and noise." Well. That explains a lot.
Gopnik also tackles Chesterton's dire anti-Semitism - also picking up the context of his Victorian Medieval Fantasy in the light of William Morris's - reminds me of how Georgette Heyer's perfect imaginary Regency owed much to her Edwardian childhood - but delivers positively Chestertonian zingers when discussing Ch's famous writing stemming from his conversion to Catholicism: "[N]obody has to argue so strenuously for what he actually believes. Nobody gets up on a soapbox, and shouts about the comfort of his sofa and chairs . . . Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who ha just made his first trip to the pst office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will sent it...literally anywhere you like...!"
Chesterton is also, clearly, the anti-Interstitialist, saying, "All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another." But he also wrote, ""'My country, right or wrong . . . is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"
The whole article is probably online somewhere. If you find it, post the link.
Here in Maine with no instant internet to check for mail and links, I am thrown back on the entertainment of my younger days: reading articles in the paper and magazines. And I realize that this is where I got much of my "liberal arts" education. As a teen, sprawled out on the floor of the family den (no, we weren't a Pride of Lions - the room that wasn't the livingroom, which contained the TV, was called the den) I'd pore over the Arts section of the Sunday NYTimes, which was mostly about theater then, with just a couple of pages devoted to Movies. A critic would explain his opinions in the context of other plays he'd seen, and so I'd learn about them, too. Ditto the Book Review section (which had a lot more fiction reviews); if I hadn't read a book (and mostly I hadn't) I'd read about it.
Fortunately, we brought up with us some of the New Yorker magazines I never have time to read at home (clearly because I'm on the internet all the damn' time. And not reading lengthy articles, either. I hate reading long text of any kind online. Not just hard on the eyes, but the posture's all wrong. Long articles must be read while one is sprawled in a chair sideways, preferably with a piece of fruit in hand - or with elbows propped on a table, paper catching occasional dribbled bits of sandwich. I can sit for a long time with that.
So I've just read Adam Gopnik's piece in the June 9&16 issue on G. K. Chesterton. And now I know not only how he fits in with Shaw (and Borges), but about the "two great tectonic shifts in English writing": 18c - Addison & Steele turned "the stop-and-start Elizabethan-Stuart prose" into "smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style" [ohhhh! so that's why they're important! No one ever explained that to me] with "every sentence crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon," to be replaced after WWI with "a new form of aerodynamic prose" making "what had seeming charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before... sound like puff and noise." Well. That explains a lot.
Gopnik also tackles Chesterton's dire anti-Semitism - also picking up the context of his Victorian Medieval Fantasy in the light of William Morris's - reminds me of how Georgette Heyer's perfect imaginary Regency owed much to her Edwardian childhood - but delivers positively Chestertonian zingers when discussing Ch's famous writing stemming from his conversion to Catholicism: "[N]obody has to argue so strenuously for what he actually believes. Nobody gets up on a soapbox, and shouts about the comfort of his sofa and chairs . . . Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who ha just made his first trip to the pst office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will sent it...literally anywhere you like...!"
Chesterton is also, clearly, the anti-Interstitialist, saying, "All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another." But he also wrote, ""'My country, right or wrong . . . is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"
The whole article is probably online somewhere. If you find it, post the link.