I want to paste in one of those cheesy "Greetings from NYC!" postcard images, but am using an unfamiliar computer etc. Any way, greetings from New York... Little to report here, outside of the purely personal vacationesque; the Dada show at MOMA (which Tom Orange posted some excellent reports on when it was at its originating venue of the National Gallery) is fantastic; that's the only word that describes it. And P., God bless her, is at four already showing excellent taste in films. She sat thru all 20 minutes of the wonderfully disjunct Entr'acte without a peep, & was chatting about it the rest of the day.
For those of you worrying about my packing, I decided against both von Doderer & Middleton, & took the (rash?) step of packing John Peck's Collected Shorter Poems & the 1st 2 volumes of Ruskin's Modern Painters, volume 1 of which I finished earlier today. Prompted by Quentin Bell's reminiscence of reading nothing but Ruskin for a year, & Guy Davenport's experience of rereading the entire corpus while reviewing the Tim Hilton biography, I've decided to make a good-faith effort at reading through the 75-85% of Ruskin's works that currently bow my shelves; & from the beginning. I'm tempted to blog Ruskin, or at least post a set of observations on each text as I finish it.
John Peck - now there's something else indeed. Superlatives fail me, so I'll wait till I'm at home with a comfy keyboard before I try to do this guy justice.
4 comments:
yes! blog ruskin. then i will have insightful, intelligent comments in class :)
no but it would be fun to see you read what i'm (supposed to be) reading.
the bio is good so far, very interesting.
have fun--
DO post your thoughts on reading Ruskin, Mark. Regarding JR's works, what are you wanting?
T. Wood
Mark, apropos your dislike of travel, and given our shared admiration for Ruskin, I thought the following refelection might give you a crumb of comfort:
"Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel."
Mark,
There are days when I think Peck is the least-recognized great poet in America. And most of my friends are unrecognized poets.
Will send you an email with a few other comments on him.
Bob
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