The Mumpsimus

Guy Davenport, illustration from Apples & Pears I've just begun reading Andre Furlani's Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After , a magnificent book (so far), and went to track down one of the items cited there, a 2002 interview by B. Renner for the website Elimae . Alas, the site seems to have died, but god bless the Wayback Machine: here it is, cached. The interview is not as meaty as some others, for instance Davenport's Paris Review interview , but it's always interesting, and I was particularly struck by this: DAVENPORT: At Duke I took Prof Blackburn's Creative Writing course (Bill Styron and Mac Hyman were in the class) and got the wrong impression that writing is an effusion of genius and talent.  Also, that writing fiction is Expression of significant and deep inner emotion.  It took me years to shake off all this.  Writing is making a construct, and what's in the story is what's important.  And style: in what words and phrases the story is...

Guy Davenport; photograph by Jonathan Williams Counterpoint Press has just released The Guy Davenport Reader , edited by Davenport's literary executor,  Erik Reece . It's a good, basic overview of Davenport's work, and a nice opportunity to review some of the highlights of that work. Davenport was one of the greatest of American writers, and a single 400-page book can only offer a brief taste of his large and eclectic oeuvre , but it seems to me that the Reader  achieves what it sets out to achieve: to bring together various genres of Davenport's writing (fiction, essays, poetry, translations, journals), and, in Reece's words, "to make an argument for the extraordinary range and even, yes, the accessibility of this remarkable writer." Accessibility  is, of course, in the mind of the perceiver, and poses particular problems with Davenport's work, a fact that befuddled reviewers pointed out with every book he published. As a Rhodes Scholar, he wro...

The latest Strange Horizons has a marvelous essay by Abigail Nussbaum on Anna Kavan's novels Ice and Guilty : Ice's plot doesn't so much progress as spiral inwards, tightening in on the moment in which the encroaching ice leaves only the narrator and the woman alone in the world. Even this point of convergence, however, isn't the novel's purpose -- indeed, the story ends ambivalently, holding out the possibility of yet more iterations of the narrator's story to come. Ice is an exercise in sustaining an emotional tone -- an oppressive, terrifying, senseless one. It succeeds at this task admirably, making for a reading experience that is not so much pleasant as irresistible, and an emotional impact that proves very difficult to shake off. (For another view of Ice , see L. Timmel Duchamp's essay from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet .) Also in this issue of Strange Horizons is my latest column . This one is about Guy Davenport's story "B...

Another life to celebrate. Guy Davenport has died . Regarding the recent death of Will Eisner , Matt Peckham said , "Mourners, omit mourning -- celebrate Eisner's work and all that he did to legitimize 'sequential art' as a groundbreaking and illimitable cultural activity." Matt suggests melancholy is a more accurate and appropriate emotion when learning of the death of someone who has lived a long, full life. I agree. But there has been an awful lot of death recently -- the deaths of so many people because of the tsunami and earthquake, deaths because of war and conflict, along with the deaths of individuals whose words we know, whose ideas have shaped our own, whose images have accompanied us in our imaginings. Our mourning, of course, should be for the tens and hundreds of thousands of people whose names and faces we do not know, the children, the young people just beginning their lives, the families shattered or destroyed, the incomprehensible ache t...