The New York Review Of Books -- December 19, 2024

 

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The Book Page

9:55 p.m. CST. Friday night. I'm reading the current issue of The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024, and watching 60's and 70's folk music. Memories. 

Never quit reading. 

"You Only Live Twice," Alexander Leggatt, an essay on two books, both from the Yale University Press, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips, 218 pp; and, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, Marjorie Garber, 2023, 392 pp. 

I would have no interest in reading the first book, the one by Leggatt, but the second one is intriguing. Bloomsbury is a metonym for Virginia Woolf and her crowd. I've gone through "my Shakespeare phase" multiple times, and "my Virginia Woolf phase, both several times. At one time I had extensive libraries of both but have since culled the shelves and only a dozen or so of each have survived. I'm tempted to order the book, hardcover, list price $35, but 36% off at Amazon, $22.50, and free shipping. At $22, practically being given away. But it appears to cover what I've covered before -- except for the last section on Shakespeare and the theater. 

It turns out Ms Woolf preferred Shakespeare read to Shakespeare acted, and I agree. I find Shakespearean stage places -- the tragedies -- boring and slow and unnatural. When one reads Shakespeare, Woolf says the reader has "special privileges. He can pause; he can ponder; he can compare .. He can read what is directly on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written." She wrote in her diary: "Shall I read King Lear? Do I want sucha strain on the emotions: I think I do." One senses that for her the private experience of reading King Lear was more emotionally demanding than seeing it on the stage. And private reading can produce a deep response whose effect an outsider can only guess at.

Speaking of "a deep response whose effect an outsider can only guess at" takes me to an essay in the same issue, "Lebanon's Year of Living Ambiguously," Charles Glass. After reading the essay, I wrote at the top, "probably one of the saddest essays I've ever read."

Who is Charles Glass? A former Chief middle East Correspondent for ABC News and the author of They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France (sounds intriguing, interesting) and Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. Much could be said. 

For the archives. Nothing to do with the Bakken.