(Original review, 1981-03-20)
I have to admit that sometimes I use words rather loosely. For me it
is ok to call something surreal even if it does not really refer back to the
principles and ideas of surrealism. Likewise 'close reading' which I probably
do not really do. But the more you pay attention to a text, in my view, and if
it merits, in your own view, that attention, the more intensely you are to
appreciate it, and still enjoy it too. I am rather old and over on the NYT Book
Review I get frustrated and daunted at all those recommendations of what sounds
like great books, but I know I literally don't have enough lifetime to read so
many, and that for me there is a great deal to be said about lingering over
single books and trying to think more about them as Literature than just
popping another book into the hopper. As I said earlier in the comments, for
me, often the book or author seem to choose me rather than me the book. It's
not really close reading per se and involves me often in reading articles or
even books, like the one I am reading now “Byronic Heroes: Types and Prototypes”.
And also discussing things over on another review. I didn't really have a
structural concept of Dark Heroes involving Satan and Will until someone forced
me to try to organize it in my own mind, and again when someone said something,
than the idea hit me like a falling beam. I am trying to rally myself to write
about why I think it is right to read intertextually if not
deconstructively (another word that I use very loosely). For me if you get a
good idea, it's worth trying to track and pin it down, even if it turns out not
such a great idea.
During many years I used to read Art Forum, and I realized that if
the works of artists, great and small, REALLY was having the effect on viewers,
or one me in particular, then we and they would be transcended human beings
with vast cognitive and perceptual capacities, yet we clearly don't. That 'the
implicate resonance of Dodo's brush marks sequentially harmonized with the
viewer's eye movements across the intervening dimensional space of Dodo's
virtually empty canvas ....' didn't mean anything but that people had trained
themselves to write like that for page after page. I have no doubt that for the
most part if someone had mixed up the articles no one would ever have known.
But I did learn a lot about abstract and modern art and learned to, I hope, at
least partially to filter out the meaningless bullshit and keep some of the
illuminating (usually not using Art Forum as a source) and do it with an open
mind. For example, reading Mondrian's own writings was hard, but worth it.
Anyway you won't lose anything reading Empson.
