Expeditions into the Interior

Anthony Madrid comes up with a cool idea:

There should be a magazine called Expeditions into the Interior, and the way it would work would be for people to accept assignments to report on all these old books of poetry that nobody wants to read but which might have good shit in ’em. For example, Melville’s Clarel. Who’s gonna read that. Nobody. But what if I was gonna give you fifty bucks. We’ll give you fifty to read it and write about it in fluent Caveman. All you gotta do is say what you saw. Point to some good lines. That’s it. But. If you accept the assignment and you don’t write anything? Yeah, that’s a $100 penalty. This is how we’re gonna pay our responsible writers. It’s also how we’re gonna finally find out if there’s anything in John Gay’s Fables. Or in the Thebiad. Or just all that stuff.

A Saving Mutiny

Spurred by Helen Vendler's chapter on Alexander Pope that appears in her book Poets Thinking, Timothy Donnelly unpacks Vendler's notion of "quasi-intelligibility":

For as long as I can remember I’ve been sensitive to the distance between an object of thought or perception and any given way of expressing it, knowing that the most efficient, utile, or commonplace way of putting it might be appropriate for the daytime, so to speak, or in the marketplace, but at night, and in the forest, all bets were off—or else they should be. A sharpened pencil might become “a stick of gold with lead in it, excited to a point.” A glass of ice water might transform into “a liquid clearness contained in a slower liquid clearness, interrupted by solids of the first clearness.” And somehow, sometimes, to re-conceive the near-at-hand in a way surpassing that in which routine and its dry tongue compels one to experience it has seemed like more than just recreation or refreshment—it has felt like a necessary refusal, a saving mutiny.