Christmas, as usual in my family, was bountiful, embarrassingly so. I had requested The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Norton, 2022) by Matthew Hollis, and there it was. I also asked for I Remember This Detail (Bamberger Books, 2022), edited by W.C. Bamberger. It includes forty letters written by Guy Davenport to the editor who had republished Davenport’s book-length poem Flowers and Leaves (1966) in 1989. In 2007 I reviewed Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, also edited by Bamberger, for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
From my
youngest son I got the Complete Blue Note, Riverside and Contemporary
recordings of Sonny Rollins – four discs, 321 minutes of music. My oldest son
and his wife renewed for another year my subscription to the Criterion Channel.
Michael the
Marine gave me Robert Pinsky’s translation of The Inferno and Barron’s Italian-English
Dictionary. Then came the big surprise: Michael published Anecdotal
Evidence in three beautifully typeset volumes. On the cover is a detail from
David’s The Death of Socrates.
Davenport
says in a May 8, 1997 letter to Bamberger: “All writers create their readers,
don’t they?”
6 comments:
Sonny Rollins - there'll be some good listening in that box.
I'd pony up for hardbacks of Anecdotal Evidence.
Patrick, what a wonderful day for you! Your boys know their father!
I got a nice Penguin paperback of Psellus's Fourteen Byzantine Rulers and a book about the Larry Bird - Magic Johnson rivalry/friendship. Both are sure to be better reading than the latest tome on the future of A.I. or a breathless screed on the mounting _______ crisis.
Readers have the best Christmases!
Season's Greetings
to All. I have often wondered who reads Anecdotal Evidence. As a longtime regular here, I know a bit from the comments. I'm guessing that, besides being serious readers, AE followers have a wide range of interests and jobs. Ages probably tend to skew toward the older crowd, say over 40, but doubtless there are a number of younger readers. Commenters here are spikey with prejudices about what they will read, and won't. The reading landscape is likely as vast as the American prairies.
If I had bound volumes of Anecdotal Evidence, I'd keep them on my bedstand and read them every thing.
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