In the New Yorker...

[serious crayons]

And now we're into that awkward situation of leapfrogging discussion topics!

I never think of that as a big problem, do you? Usually they're pretty easy to follow because people quote each other, and eventually one or another topic fizzles out.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I haven't read them, so I wouldn't know. But I would imagine hanging out with people who'd like to drink your blood would make you angsty.

I should have said the Twilight movies, and even those I only know about from the mainstream media. I suppose being in love with somebody who wants to drink your blood would tend to make one angsty. 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Wow, John, I didn't realize that Ennis had so many literary ancestors! If the New Yorker was writing about Ennis today, I wonder if it would describe him as sheepish, sheepy or sheepsty!

And now we're into that awkward situation of leapfrogging discussion topics!

 

Samuel Palmer

Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep
c.1831–3


http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/palmer-moonlight-a-landscape-with-sheep-n03700

Samuel Palmer was fascinated by the atmospheric effects that could be achieved in black and white. In the early 1830s, while living in Shoreham, Kent, he produced a series of monochrome works in pen and ink. This is one of his more poetic works, featuring shepherds tending their sleeping flocks of sheep by moonlight. When the picture was later engraved, it was accompanied by these lines from John Milton's Comus (1637):


Evening late, by then the chewing flocks
Had ta'en their suppers of the savouring herb
Of knot-grass dew-besprent


Palmer's work at Shoreham is intensely personal, but has a mystical, even visionary quality comparable to that of William Blake (1757-1827). He was part of a circle of artists, followers of Blake and known as the 'Ancients', including George Richmond (1809-96), Edward Calvert (1799-1883) and Francis Oliver Finch (1802-62). They shunned the contemporary world and retired into a world of music, nostalgia and dreams. The Ancients would stroll together in the countryside by night, gazing at the stars, and were known among the local villagers as 'Extollagers'. The Darent valley appeared to Palmer a perfect, neo-Platonic world and he called it the 'Valley of Vision'. In his pictures he attempted to create an image of pastoral contentment, unaffected by the reality of labour. The characteristic rounded hills of Shoreham, visible in the background of the picture, and the crescent moon were later adopted as motifs by artists of the mid-twentieth century. Often inspired by Milton's poetic evocations, moonlight was a recurring feature in Palmer's work, representing a divine presence in nature.

The Shoreham works are characterised by a deliberate archaism or primitivism. Stylistically they were influenced by the work of such Northern European artists as Breughel, Dürer, Lucas Van Leyden and Giulio Bonasone. They were also partly inspired by Blake's illustrations to Ambrose Philips' imitation of Virgil's First Eclogue (1821). Palmer could have been describing his own work when he wrote of the Blake engravings: 'They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitist pitch of intense poetry…There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul' (A.H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, 1892, pp.15-16).

This work may have been one of a group of what Palmer referred to as 'blacks' which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832.

Further reading:
Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing and David Rosand, Places of Delight: the Pastoral Landscape, exhibition catalogue, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC 1988, no.100, reproduced p.195.
Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, Cambridge 1988, pp.85-6, no.143, reproduced p.85.
James Sellars, Samuel Palmer, London 1974, pp.77-79, reproduced p.79.

Frances Fowle
December 2000

[Jeff Wrangler]

Well, wonder of wonders, I am actually caught up on my New Yorkers!  With not much to do this past weekend except this weekend except read, I read everything--or everything that interested me--in the July 3 issue. I found Adam Gopnik's piece on Hemingway very interesting (more on that on my blog).

[serious crayons]

Well, wonder of wonders, I am actually caught up on my New Yorkers!  With not much to do this past weekend except this weekend except read, I read everything--or everything that interested me--in the July 3 issue. I found Adam Gopnik's piece on Hemingway very interesting (more on that on my blog).

Would you mind reading all of mine so I could say the same? The pile on my dining-room table is a foot tall.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Would you mind reading all of mine so I could say the same? The pile on my dining-room table is a foot tall.

   Sorry, but I've read them all, already. 

[Front-Ranger]

I woke up very early this morning and started reading Adam Gopnik's article on the new Hemingway bio. He's such an amazing writer. . . I'm talking about Gopnik here. I didn't read any Hemingway in school that I can recall. In my 30s I read Across the River and Into the Trees about an old veteran and his young girlfriend in Venice. It made a deep impression on me. It helped me understand my father better. At the same time, it seemed like a parody of Hemingway.

It was his thirteenth novel and his last full-length work before his death. In many ways, its style was similar to Brokeback Mountain. I wonder how Annie Proulx would feel about that statement? Hemingway lived in Ketchum, Idaho for a while. I used to go skiing in nearby Sun Valley and dated the son of Hemingway's doctor. Twice I went to a cabin up in the panhandle of Idaho that Hemingway had stayed at for fishing trips.

I remember the book as being at the same time very boring and very fascinating. The symbolism eluded me until I actually marked up the story with color-coded notes. It inspired me to start writing a book about unpacking the meaning in such novels, called How to Read a Book. That's one of the handful of books I've never finished.

[Front-Ranger]

"The self-recognition of breakage is the form of bravery available to real people."

He also mentions a parody done by E. B. White called, "Across the Street and Into the Grill".  It's pretty good.

[Jeff Wrangler]

He also mentions a parody done by E. B. White called, "Across the Street and Into the Grill".  It's pretty good.

I thought so, too. 

[serious crayons]

At the same time, it seemed like a parody of Hemingway.

At this point, Hemingway seems like he might always be a parody of himself. But I haven't read enough of him to say for sure.

Hemingway lived in Ketchum, Idaho for a while. I used to go skiing in nearby Sun Valley and dated the son of Hemingway's doctor.

I lived in Ketchum for two summers in college, just for fun. I worked in restaurants and bars and, briefly, for a maid service. Both times I drove out with a girlfriend. Both times, at the end of the summer, when I flew back to Minnesota for school, they stayed.

The whole time I was there I hardly met anyone from Idaho. Almost everyone was from California. There were also a handful of Minnesotans, including, coincidentally, some I'd gone to high school with. Anyway, though, at some point I talked to an Idaho native who went to school with Hemingway's granddaughters: Mariel, Margaux and, I think, Muffy.

Mariel has since made a film about  battling her family's tendency toward mental illness, addiction and suicide (like Ernest, Margaux suffered all three, and there may have been others) by living this super-healthy lifestyle. I've wanted to see it, mainly to see if I could recognize locations (it was filmed in Ketchum) but can't find it to stream. I haven't been back since 1981, so it's probably changed a lot. Back then, nearby Hailey was a cheaper, sort of blue-collar community. Then Bruce and Demi moved there.

It inspired me to start writing a book about unpacking the meaning in such novels, called How to Read a Book. That's one of the handful of books I've never finished.

I have a book called "How to Read Like an English Professor" or something like that. It's pretty good. If you like, I'll send it to you.