The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind (Part I of II)
This fire, these flames, is and are the imagination ablaze across the range and country and prairies and hollows and wildlands that encompass the globe of my mind. Here this mad rush of heat and energy waves both smoke and light on acquired knowledge and endured experience.
This enveloping imagination of mine reaches for whatever it can grab, then, connects it with the larger patch of bursting energy burning across the semiconscious land.
The flames grab Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and her remarks on certain works by Kafka and van Gogh––how the final act of creation occurs when the reader-listener-viewer begins to think:
It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka’s early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them. (The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 184)
And flames of the enveloping imagination found and flung and fed on Arendt’s comments, then, connected them to passages from that tale from 1912––“Das Urteil” (“The Judgement”) by Franz Kafka (1883–1924)––and that tale’s absences of the character of “mother” and of the place of “Russia”––and how those absences reemphasize and highlight the ideas of “mother” and “Russia” rather than negate them:
Two years ago his mother had died, since when he and his father had shared the household together, and is friend had of course been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be realized in a distant country….
Georg stared at the bogey conjured up by his father. His friend in St. Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew too well, touched his imagination as never before. Lost in the vastness of Russia he saw him. At the door of an empty, plundered warehouse he saw him. Among the wreckage of his showcases, the slashed remnants of his wares, the falling gas brackets, he was just standing up. Why did he have to go so far away! ….
“You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a leg-puller and you haven’t even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there! I can’t believe it,” [said Georg’s father]. (“Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”), trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 78, 85, 83)
The flames now run wild—consuming and connecting everything before them. Before Arendt, Kafka, and van Gogh, there was Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), who suggests in a line from his play Emilia Galotti (1772), that “one praises the artist most when, in looking at his work, one forgets to praise him.”
(Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Anna Johanna Gode von Aesch, (New York: Continuum, 1991), I, iv, p. 80).
Somewhat following Arendt, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) encouraged readers to ponder the negation and opposition of an idea, if one is to understand the motivations behind that idea. This process of imagining the negative—as in the case of Van Gogh’s shoes––is, at least according to Kaufmann, sometimes but haphazardly called Hegelian dialectic.
(Discovering the MindVol. I: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 266).
The fire now burns deep: it compares C. S. Peirce (1839–1914)––a reader, but perhaps, not a follower of Hegel––and how, as Peirce and fellow philosopher-logicians might say that the sociology of humans being is based on semiotics––though non-philosopher-logicians might instead say that a human’s place in his or her community is itself a symbolic relation—a relation where the human is a symbol to the community. As Peirce puts it:
There is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the word homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought….
Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man. (“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1868))
Flame and soot and smoke and ember—elements indeed of any and all’s imagination––now burn close. Closer to our own time, Umberto Eco (1932–2016) summarizes what Peirce is getting at:
It may seem paradoxical to talk of the icon, which Peirce held was the first moment of an absolute evidence, as pure disposition-to, of pure absence in some way, an image of a thing that is not there yet. It would seem that this primary icon is like a hole, given that we have everyday experience of it but nonetheless have difficulty defining it, and given that 152 can be recognized only as an absence within something that is present. And yetit is precisely from that nonbeing that one can infer the shape of the “plug” that could stop it up. (“Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content,” Kant e l’ornitorinco (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition), trans. Alastair McEwen, (New York: Harcourt, 1997), pp. 110–11. On the point of the plug, Eco cites: Roberto Casati and Achilie C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994))
Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has also pointed out that space and object probably cannot be logically isolated. My imagination says I should say “probably” because Wittgenstein left some possibility open by suggesting we humans may not have yet exercised our imaginations to the fullest extent—we have not yet burned through everything:
An atmosphere that is inseparable from its object—is no atmosphere.
Closely associated things, things which have been associated, seem to fit one another. But in what way do they seem to fit? How does it come out that they seem to fit? Like this, for example: we cannot imagine the man who had this name, this face, this handwriting, not to have produced these works, but perhaps quite different ones instead (those of another great man).
We cannot imagine it? Do we try?––
(Philosophie der Psychologie – Ein Fragment (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment) [formerly Philosophical Investigations Part II] in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), (II, vi, 50), p. 192)
Or, as Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once put it, imagination “seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived.”
(Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 39).
Do readers-listeners-viewers really sink themselves into Kafka’s quasi-stories and the painted shoes depicted by van Gogh? I really don’t know. But it sort of makes sense to me—me, neither firefighter nor firestarter—me, only a beholder of the enveloping imagination burning across my mind’s land.
We need more imagination to address our traffic congestion, our housing shortages, our mass-shooter threats, as well as our energy supplies and climate alterations. We need incubators and accelerators of imaginative thought (not just for the arts) but to aid in determining solutions to our greatest social pains. For where there’s pain, there is a problem. But there, there is also life; because only what is dead feels no pain.
I don’t pretend to be clever enough to know exactly what that fully entails—but I believe it begins with taking imagination very seriously—seriously enough to study it and analyze it (at least for starters).
And if, at the start, we’re too ill-equipped to undertake such an analysis, let us, if nothing else, attempt to analyze the findings of those who have already analyzed the human imagination.
Let’s cut to the chase by beginning with Hamlet (II, i), where he is confronted by his old buddies from university Guildenstern and Rosencrantz:
HAMLET What you have, my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN Prison, my lord!
HAMLET Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ Then is the world one.
HAMLET A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind.
Hamlet here seems a bit childish. And one of the major questions, throughout the earlier parts of the play, concerns the audience, along with the rest of the play’s characters, all trying to decide: how authentic is Hamlet’s childish behavior?
While the word imagination isn’t used in this passage, Hamlet’s holding here that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” marks a possible origin to imaginative thought.
I interpret one of the meanings to the line “thinking makes it so” to mean: the act of thinking allows one to discern a difference between two or more things, in this case, the difference between good and bad (whatever that difference may be).
But even if this is but a single legitimate meaning to the line “thinking makes it so”—one might still label it a childish judgment on Hamlet’s behalf.
Rosencrantz tells Hamlet that it is the latter’s “ambition” that “makes” Denmark seem like a prison.
So, from this scene, a reader might extrapolate (or perhaps daydream) the hypothesis that imagination begins either from thinking or from ambition.
Certainly thinking in-and-of-itself is generally not considered to be childish. (But an over-abundance of ambition might be so considered.)
For the Enlightenment-age sociologist Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), imagination is part of the complex relationship between reason and memory:
Just as old age is powerful in reason, so is adolescence in imagination. Since imagination has always been esteemed a most favorable omen of future development, it should in no way be dulled. Furthermore, the teacher should give the greatest care to the cultivation of the pupil’s memory, which, though not exactly the same as imagination, is almost identical with it. In adolescence, memory outstrips in vigor all other faculties, and should be intensely trained. Youth’s natural inclination to the arts in which imagination or memory (or a combination of both) is prevalent (such as painting, poetry, oratory, jurisprudence) should by no means be blunted…. The Ancients required their youths to learn the science of geometry which cannot be grasped without a vivid capacity to form images.
This is why, writes Vico elsewhere:
As the children of the new-born human race, the first people believed that the sky was no higher than their mountain heights, just as children today think it no higher than the rooftops….
People living in the world’s childhood [that is, the earliest days of humanity] were by nature sublime poets….
By nature, children retain the ideas and names of the people and things they have known first, and later apply them to others they meet who bear a resemblance or relation to the first.
Therefore:
The sublimest task of poetry is to attribute sense and emotion to insensate objects. It is characteristic of children to pick up inanimate objects and to talk to them in their play as if they were living persons.
(Vico, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time) (1709), trans. Elio Gianturco, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), pp. 13–14; Vico, La Scienza Nuova (The Third New Science) (1725), trans. David Marsh, (New York: Penguin, 1999), “Idea of the Work” [¶ 4] 3; I, § 2, xxxvii, [¶ 186], p. 89; I, § 2, lxviii, [¶ 206], p. 92. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophie der Psychologie – Ein Fragment (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment) [formerly Philosophical Investigations Part II] in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), (II, xi, 148), p. 208.)
So I interpret Vico to say: there is this thing called imagination, and its ingredients (or perhaps catalysts) are memory and reason.
But why talk about thinking and memory and reason when the discussion should be about imagination? The terms and concepts keep multiplying, but it seems better to keep it simple and as few as possible.
Yes, the terms and concepts keep multiplying, but that is because, as journalist and social-theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) has explained, when it comes to discussing the particular act of thinking we call imagination, simply because it is a word, it is (and shall always remain) a metaphor for something else:
The chief difficulty here seems to be that for thinking itself—whose language is entirely metaphorical and whose conceptual framework depends entirely on the gift of the metaphor, which bridges the gulf between the visible and the invisible, the world of appearances and the thinking ego—there exists no metaphor that could plausibly illuminate this special activity of the mind, in which something invisible within us deals with the invisibles of the world. All metaphors drawn from the sense will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not Energeia, an end in itself but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.
(The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 123)
In other words, we readers cannot “start from zero” (ex nihilo), for—just as there is no emoji for the word emoji––there is no metaphor for metaphor.
Imagination isn’t just a mental activity—it can also mean a mental place where such activity can occur. In the tale “Night on the Galactic Railroad” (1927), Japanese novelist-poet Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) the child character of Giovanni does this effortlessly:
I’m a great big locomotive! Watch as I speed down this incline! And look, my shadow has slipped out in front of me, swaying like a compass needle, he played around in his imagination.
(Night on the Galactic Railroad & Other Stories from Ihatov, trans. Julianne Neville, (Long Island City, New York: One Peace Books, 2014) “§ The Centaurus Festival,” 54)
But one shouldn’t accept Vico’s statements on children and imagination at face value. Some people, like Canadian comedian (and social philosopher) Norm MacDonald (1959–2021) as a child, imagination takes a tremendous amount of effort psychological effort:
So I decided right then and there to see the picture as it really was. I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.
(Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, (New York: Random House, 2017), pp. 20–21)
This passage serves as a kind of over-arching metaphor for Norm’s book—readers don’t really know completely what is fiction or fact or some combination of the two, blended by memory.
Adults too, make use of imagination as a place where they can imagine they know things that they actually don’t know. As the glad genius Umberto Eco (1932–2016) once explained:
Even though I too am incapable of telling an elm from a beech, I can easily recognize mangroves (which I was able to identify one day thanks to having read about them in many travel books) and banyan trees, about which I had received plentiful instructions in Emilio Salgari’s adventure books. But I was convinced I knew nothing about the paletuviere (mentioned equally frequently in Salgari’s books), until on reading an encyclopedia one day I discovered that, in Italian, paletuviere is simply another word for mangrovia. Now I could reread Salgari, imagining mangroves every time he mentioned paletuviere. But what did I do for years and years, from childhood on, reading about these paletuviere without knowing what they were? From the context I had deduced that they were plants, something like trees or bushes, but this was the only property I could manage to associate with the name. Nevertheless, I was able to read on by pretending to know what they were. I used my imagination to integrate what little I had been able to glimpse within the half-open box, but in fact I was taking something on trust.
(Kant e l’ornitorinco (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition), trans. Alastair McEwen, (New York: Harcourt, 1997), p. 292)
Finally, compare the imagination of patient Leonard L. in the Awakenings (1973) report by Dr. Oliver Sacks (1933–2015), where the imagination is an aid to survival and quality of life:
Leonard L. had in fact, been hallucinating for years—long before he ever received L-DOPA (although he was unable or unwilling to admit this to me until 1969). Being particularly fond of ‘Western’ scenes and films, Leonard L. had, indeed, ordered the old painting of the shanty-town as long ago as 1955 for the sole and express purpose of hallucinating with it—and it was his custom to ‘animate’ it for a hallucinatory matinée after lunch every day….
Most of the patients’ hallucinations lack the ambivalent, often paranoiac, and in general uncontrollable nature of schizophrenic hallucinations; but that they are, in contrast, very like scenes of normal life, very much like that healthy reality from which these pathetic patients have been cut off for years (by illness, institutionalization, isolation, etc.). The function (and form) of schizophrenic hallucinations, in general, has to do with the denial of reality; whereas the function (and form) of the benign hallucinations seen in Mount Carmel has to do with creating reality, imagining a full and happy and healthy life of a sort which has been cruelly denied to them through Fate. Thus I regard it as a sign of these patients’ health, of their enduring wish to live, and live fully—if only in the realms of imagination and hallucination, which are the only realms where they still enjoy freedom—that they hallucinate all the richness and drama and fullness of life. They hallucinate to survive—as do subjects exposed to extreme sensory, motor, or social isolation; and for this reason, whenever I learn from such a patient that he constructs a rich and benign hallucinatory ‘life,’ I encourage him to the full, as I encourage all creative endeavours which reach out to life.
(Awakenings, (New York: Random House, 1973; Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 214–15)
Gracy Olmstead wrote the other day about rebuilding post-industrial towns and concluded:
There are other ways we can consider saving America’s towns. One I have been mulling over lately is the role wealthy individuals can play by boosting local commerce via their patronage (providing microloans, sponsoring vocational programs, providing grants and endowments, et cetera).
Recently, I’ve been reading New Harmony, Indiana: Like a River, Not a Lake (2015), a memoir by the late philanthropist Jane Blaffer Owen (1915–2010), someone whom I think somewhat fits the criteria Olmstead has been mulling over.
Like the famous architect, in terms of landscape planning, urban design, and cultural influence, Mrs. Blaffer Owen might very well be considered the Frederick Law Olmsted of New Harmony. Originally from Houston and the daughter of two oil heirs—her maternal family included founders of Texaco, her paternal, Exxon––Jane Blaffer studied under Paul Tillich and later married one of the great-great grandsons of utopist Robert Owen (1771–1858). They then moved to Owen’s home in New Harmony which she helped revitalize and preserve by starting things like the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation, whose mission continues “to preserve, promote and support, financially, and otherwise, the various historic and educational attributes of New Harmony.â€
Mrs. Blaffer Owen also oversaw building a Roofless Church for her adopted Indiana community as well as commissioning various sculptures around town which can be seen in the photographs and illustrations on nearly every other page of New Harmony––one of the most beautifully crafted modern books I’ve ever handled––right up there with Jung’s Red Book and Umberto Eco’s Book of Legendary Lands (2013).
So, for its aesthetics, Indiana University Press should be commended. Yet the text, at times, lacks organization. If readers prior to opening this book have never heard of New Harmony, Indiana or its founder––the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen––they might feel as I did: like they’ve eavesdropped upon the middle of an ongoing conversation without ever having been invited.
But I read New Harmony because it was a gift from my grandmother after its editor Nancy Mangum McCaslin came to a reading and signing in Lampasas, Texas, the hometown of Mrs. Blaffer Owen’s mother. And I too spent the first seventeen years of life in this small central Texas town of nearly 7,000. (The second seventeen years have been spent sixty miles south in wyrd Austin.) I too still have family back home and maintain minimum ties and tabs there—just as Rod Dreher now roves between Starhill and Baton Rouge.
Lampasas is a land of springs lying on the edge of a desert. Once dubbed “the Saratoga of the South,†it has withstood Comanche attacks, biblical floods, and even a visit from gunfighter John Wesley Hardin. And in 2016 the town seems to still be striving––yet still surviving––with or without buckets of philanthropic oil money. Since I left in 1999, the population remains about the same. Its public school population, however, has gone down. The sports teams used to compete with the bigger city schools from Waco, Killeen, and Austin, but now the schools they play against are mostly smaller, rural, and geographically closer.
Although it took me seven years to earn a bachelor’s degree, perhaps, because I remained in Austin after attending university, I too am modestly guilty for some of the “brain drain†from Lampasas. And I often wonder if the town compensated for these changes by making itself a more accommodating place for people to retire to, or tour through, rather than grow up in.
But the citizens of Lampasas are bettering the cultural health of their community, with neither my aid nor that of an oil baroness like Mrs. Blaffer Owen. For example, the Perception Creative Art School was founded in March of 2009. In 2005 an unused lot of land owned by the city was transformed into the Hanna Springs Sculpture Garden. Since 2008, Vision Lampasas has commissioned nine murals on what were once blank walls scattered around town.
One mural, “Small Town…. Big Sound,†displays a panorama of local musicians spanning generations and genres, including songwriters, gospel groups (both black and white), rock bands, country artists and their Tejano counterparts. I’ve known some of these musicians or their relatives, some now dead, others still alive. The conservative in me loves this mural for its community-memory-building capabilities; and the liberal in me loves the true diversity of musical talent acknowledged and celebrated in a single work of art.
Yet confirming patriotic imagery is not the same as affirming actual patriotism, and while Oscar Wilde got it right when he said, “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,†I still try to remember that the perfect must not be made the enemy of the good.
It’s almost time to head to Bologna! Here’s what I read since January to prepare. (FYI, I read Divina Commedia last year.)
Alighieri, Dante. De vulgari eloquentia. 1321. Translated by Steven Botterill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 1996.
Allsop, Peter. “Secular Influences in the Bolognese Sonata da Chiesa.†Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. Vol. 104. (1977–1978.) pp. 89–100.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Vita di Dante Alighieri. (Life of Dante.) 1355.
Bologna. Cultural Crossroads from the Medieval to the Baroque: Recent Anglo-American Scholarship. Eds. GianMario Anselmi, Angela De Beedictis, Nicholas Terpstra. Bologna, Italy: Bononia UP. 2011.
Braccidini, Poggio. The Facetiae of Poggio: and other Medieval Story–Tellers.
Buonarroti, Michael Angelo. The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti. Translated by John Addington Symonds. Second Edition. NY: Scribner’s Son. 1904.
The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel. Eds. Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 2003.
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 2001.
Cavazza, Marta. “Bologna and the Royal Society in the Seventeenth Century.†Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Vol. 35. No. 2. (December 1980.) 105–23.
Clarke, Georgia. “Magnificence and the city: Giovanni II Bentivoglio and architecture in fifteenth-century Bologna.†Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. No. 4. (December 1999.) 397–411.
Culture, Censorship, and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy. Eds. Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon. Leeds, UK: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. 2005.
Dean, Trevor. “Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages.†Social History. Vol. 29. No. 2. (May 2004.) 217–31.
Deleldda, Grazia. Chiaroscuro: and other stories. 1912.
Dumont, Dora M. “Rural Society and Crowd Action in Bologna, c. 1796–1831.†The Historical Journal. Vol. 48. No. 4. (December 2005.) 977–97.
Eco, Umberto. Kant e l’ornitorinco. (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition.) Translated by Alastair McEwen. NY: Harcourt. 1997.
Eco, Umberto. Il nome della rosa. 1980. (The Name of the Rose.) Translated by Martin Secker. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1983.
Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Charles V in Bologna: the self-fashioning of a man and a city.†Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. No. 4. (December 1999.) 430–39.
Gendler, Paul F. “The University of Bologna, the city, and the papacy.†Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13, No. 4. (December 1999) 475–85.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italienische Reise. 1816–17. From Goethe’s Travels in Italy: Together with his Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy. Translated by A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet. London, UK: G. Bell and Sons. 1892.
Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere. 1929–1935. (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.) Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. NY: International Publishers. 1971.
Guinizzelli, Guido. Al Cor Gentil (In the Gentile Heart) 1250.
Herzig, Tamar. “The Demons and the Friars: Illicit Magic and Mendicant Rivalry in Renaissance Bologna.†Renaissance Quarterly. Vol. 64. No. 4. (Winter 2011.) 1025–58.
Hughes, Steven. “Fear and Loathing in Bologna and Rome the Papal Police in Perspective.†Journal of Social History. Vol. 21. No. 1. (Autumn 1987.) 97–116.
Killinger, Charles. Culture and Customs of Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 2005.
Kolneder, Walter. Antonio Vivaldi: His Life and Work. 1965. Translated by Bill Hopkins. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 1970.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “Petrarch’s ‘Averrosists’: a Note on the History of Aristotelianiam in Venice, Padua, and Bologna.†Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance. T. 14. No. 1. (1952.) 59–65.
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il Gattopardo. (The Leopard.) Milan. 1958. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. NY: Pantheon. 1960.
Libby, Dennis. “Interrelationships in Corelli.†Journal of the American Musicological Society. Vol. 26. No. 2. (Summer 1973.) 263–87.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. Il Principe. (The Prince) 1532.
Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi (Betrothed) 1840.
The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP. 2007.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1873. London, UK: Macmillan and Co. 1910.
Petrarcha, Francesco. Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors. Translated by Mario Emilio Consenza. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1910.
Pincherle, Marc. Corelli et son temps. (Corelli: His Life, His Work.) 1954. Translated by Hubert E. M. Russell. NY: W. W. Norton & Co. 1956.
Rogachevskii, Andrei B. and Milena Michalski. “Social Demcratic Party Schools on Capri and in Bologna in the Correspondence between A. A. Bogdanov and A. V. Amfiteatrov.†The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 72. No. 4. (Oct. 1994.) pp. 664–79.
Ruskin, John. Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies Christian Art for English Travellers. Kent, UK: George Allen Sunnyside. 1875.
Talbot, Michael. “Vivaldi and Rome: Observations and Hypotheses.†Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Vol. 113. No. 1. (1988.) 28–46.
Terpstra, Nicholas. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna. Cambridge UP. 1995.
Terpstra, Nicholas. “Civic self-fashioning in Renaissance Bologna: historical and scholarly context.†Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. No. 4. (December 1999.) 389–96.
Timberlake, Craig. “Evviva Vivaldi: Still Vital after Three Hundred Years.†Music Educators Journal. Vol. 64. No. 7. (March 1978.) 68–71.
Tuttle, Richard J. “Against Fortifications: the Defense of Renaissance Bologna.†Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Vol. 41. No. 3. (October 1982.) 189–201.
Verga, Giovanni. Il Malavoglia  (The House by the Medlar Tree) 1881.
Vico, Giambattista. New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Third Edition. Translated by David Marsh. NY: Penguin. 1999.
Vico, Giambattista. Vico: the First New Science. 1725. Translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 2002.
Wicksteed, P. H. and G. E. Gardner. Dante and Giovanni Del Virgilio. London: Archibald Constable & Co. 1902.
Zamagni, Vera. Dalla periferia al centro. 1988. (The Economic History of Italy, 1860–1990.) Oxford, UK: Clarendon. 1993.
At American Fiction Notes, Mark Athitakis lists five reasons for not posting lists of “best books of the year” or any other such lists on his book blog. Bookbread fully supports Athitakis’s proactive approach towards list containment in the book blogosphere even if he has to create lists to do it.
Athitakis also includes some ideas of list making as a potential kind of art form and even spirituality:
Lists contribute to a culture of filthy linkbait whoring that just plays into Arianna Huffington’s greedy goddamn hands. Every person who gets access to a Web site’s stats knows that lists bring in traffic. This is naturally seductive, but ultimately contributes to an online hivemind of short attention spans, which is death on sustained commentary.
All of which is to say that I was a tad cranky.
I might’ve calmed down a little had I read Albert Mobilio’s consideration of Umberto Eco’s book The Infinity of Lists before the holidays. Lists can, he argues, have a kind of art to them, if approached in the right way.
A list is an intimation of totality, a simulacrum of knowing much, of knowing the right much. We select our ten best big-band recordings, all-time basketball starting fives, mysteries to read this summer; add up the people we’ve slept with or people we wish we had; index our movie-memorabilia collection; count our blessings; list reasons for not getting out of bed. We jot these accounts on envelopes, store them on hard drives, murmur them under our breath as we ride home from work—it’s no accident that many prayers are really nothing more than lists.
Bookbread can’t vouch for lists existing as types of art forms — though the listing of statements in Wittgenstein is rather elegant — but when it comes to mental nutrition, there is no doubt that certain lists (in the form of that dreaded c-word “canon”) carry a practicality that cannot be denied. As Harold Bloom observes in The Western Canon (1995), “An Elegy for the Canon”:
Who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read.
The question them becomes: what is the difference between the reader’s choice and mere list making?
