Nathan "N.R."’s
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(group member since Dec 05, 2013)
Nathan "N.R."’s
comments
from the Miss MacIntosh, My Darling group.
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A beautiful page over at bibliomanic ::"Homage to Marguerite Young"
http://bibliomanic.com/marguerite-young/
Kristian wrote: "Nathan "N.R." wrote: "How is Miss Mac treating you?."Well, she requires a lot of patience and concentration, but I knew this going in. But rarely if ever have I found myself presented with such b..."
Nice!
Kristian wrote: "Could the decidedly unreal possibly ever be coded in a font large enough to see?...is my 3 a.m. attempt at an honest answer."
Sounds much more than honest to my ear.
How is Miss Mac treating you?
Kristian wrote: "On the 1967 signet paperback: It's a ridiculously compact edition, a small mass-market paperback with super thin pages and a spine which is only some 2 inches thick (oh boy, the swelling). Super p..."
This thing in a mass market edition?! Makes. No. Sense! Is the font even large enough to see?
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Miss MacIntosh on the Radio ::"Thought maybe this looked like possibly a more complete collection than what I recall having seen before ::
http://clocktower.org/series/margueri...
At anyrate, an updated link.
Fionnuala wrote: "Google also gives her masculine pronouns here and there"Consistently :: I made the following correction "who began her career as a poet" but then I said, Let it be! And I had my suspicions about that Dylan car ride too! ; )
I don't know that much about translating, but I do wonder if Miss Mac would even qualify as difficult-to-translate. Maybe it'd just be a matter of finding that correct long=sentence rhythm and getting the words to hop that stream from bank to bank.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "A blog post about our novel ::http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2017/..."
The googlation ::
The most beautiful book in the world, over and over again
Come on, let's talk once more about the most beautiful book in the world: Miss Macintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young, a fabulous novel of more than a thousand pages which the author wrote for eighteen years and which appeared in 1965, dazzling The rare readers who had the strength of soul to drown themselves there.
Died at the age of eighty-seven, Marguerite Young, who began her career as a poet quite soon, soon became a legend, not only in Greenwich Village. It was said of her that she had the haircut of W. H. Auden and wrote like James Joyce. Between a breakfast with Richard Wright, a car with Dylan Thomas, a light flirt with Carson McCullers, she found time to devote nearly two decades to writing a novel that never knew its place authentic and Deserved in the pantheon of American letters - and letters in short.
Though admired and supported by Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, John Gardner, Anne Tyler, William Goyen, his only novel, described in turn as a "gigantic epic", as a monumental fable, Young never had the satisfaction of See his masterpiece recognized as a Ulysses or a Moby-Dick.
Young, who claimed to frequent the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and Dickens, and Edgar Poe's tutorial, remains the author of the most beautiful and neglected book in literary history. Addressing the reasons for this injustice could be the subject of a thesis per se. Is it the length of the work? Go tell Proust that. Is it the fact that Young was a woman, and moreover a feminist? We're burning, surely. The fact is that, from reading this book, nothing makes it possible to understand why it is not among the ten most beautiful literary monsters of the century.
What is there in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling that can frighten the reader (apart from its dimensions)? No doubt this book is too ardent, too hypnotic, too dense, too fascinating, too sensual, too ambiguous, too loving of beauty - too powerfully Orphic. To immerse ourselves in it is to no longer be able to emerge (and fear to no longer want) to emerge from it, as in a dream-book which would produce its own atmosphere and leave you no hope but that of losing oneself, Drowned, dissolved. Yet, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is not a book on anything - far from it. It swarms, winds, carves, shapes and tells, it affirms, denies and goes beyond, it seems absolutely autonomous and supremely surreal, stirring a thousand textures, a thousand lights, a thousand shades of textures and lights, treating the tiniest Affects and the most virulent passions with the obstinacy of an entomologist / paleontologist / engraver / musician / biologist / adventurer who would have been proposed to describe the world and who would have preferred to sing the mysterious and invisible lining. And to double this lining of the magical knowledge of death and rebirth, which are the ever-declining themes of this literary vortex.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling - of which no French publisher has yet dared to envisage the publication in translation, alas - remains, for those who read it, the incandescent proof that the literary world had no desire even in 1965, To recognize that the most beautiful book in the world was the work of a woman, poet, socialist and feminist critic. What Nin and Woolf knew on their scale, Young had to live with his own. Eighteen years of labor, a manuscript of 2500 pages and, in spite of fervent support, an indifference confining to censorship. Who knows Marguerite Young today? Men would have to imagine a world where Joyce's name would be unknown, where Rabelais would not interest anyone, a world where Melville would be just an eccentric and David Foster Wallace a phraser.
However, every time I open Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and plunge into it, I know that I have in my hands the best kept secret of literature. His tomb of shadow and light. A diamond that feeds its innumerable reflections and engenders grandiose and intimate myths, such as a flower-world that orgasms its contagious pollen to the stupefied mouth of the individual become pure vibration. An organism as generous as blinding, as prodigious as it is concrete. The work of a life, of course, but above all the life of a work finally illuminated from the depths of an incredibly familiar abyss. That of the human soul? Better than that: that of Marguerite Young, true queen of the night.
A blog post about our novel ::http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2017/...
"Allez, parlons une fois de plus du plus beau livre du monde: Miss Macintosh, My Darling, de Marguerite Young, ce fabuleux roman de plus de mille pages que l'auteur mit dix-huit ans à écrire et qui parut en 1965, éblouissant les rares lecteurs qui eurent la force d'âme de s'y noyer."
Wish I had stuck to my French lessons.
George wrote: "I'm reading "Tributes and Essays", and I came across a section saying that Ms. Young had a Kennedy Assassination theory, is there any information, that anyone knows of, about her theory? Is it disc..."Not ringing a bell at the moment.
Ce Ce wrote: "she's beckoning for me to return. ": )
George wrote: "I know I am late to this conversation,"Yes! And welcome. Very much enjoying your status updates on this.
@Nick -- you still in this book? I know the group tends toward the quiet, but it's a real literary joy hearing from readers' reading of this immense and beautiful novel.
George wrote: "You make my wallet weep, Nathan."FIVE BUCKS!!! ::
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Searc...
But, yeah, put twenty of those FIVE BUCKS together and you've got a not-small stack of change.
One of the interviews contained in this volume ::
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conver...
George wrote: "Thanks for finding those Nathan. I am going to look at a second hand store today, and I suppose check my library. I am interested in her poetry now because her writing in Miss McIntosh is so lyric..."Not to be redundant, but once you've fallen head over heels for her, you might want :: Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays.
Moderate Fable for reasonable $$$ ::http://www.amazon.com/Moderate-Fable-...
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Searc...
Not sure of your location, but here's Prismatic Ground in libraries near Chicago ::
http://www.worldcat.org/title/prismat...
Prismatic for too much $$$ ::
http://www.amazon.com/Prismatic-groun...
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Searc...
oh hey I forgot I hadn't threaded the entire needle. Have at it!!
Archive Fever!Should you find yourself in the Yale area, perhaps you'd like to visit the Marguerite Young Archive :: http://drs.library.yale.edu/HLTransfo...
"The Marguerite Young Papers document the work of writer Marguerite Young. The papers consist of personal and professional correspondence, drafts of writings, audiovisual material, notebooks, research files, printed material, photographs, artwork, realia, and financial papers spanning the years 1925 to 1999. The bulk of the collection consists of Young's drafts of writings, correspondence, and audiovisual material. Writings include autograph manuscript and typescript drafts, printed versions, notes, and notebooks of her writings, including Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias; Miss Macintosh, My Darling; and Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. Correspondence includes letters from friends and colleagues regarding her professional and personal life. Audiovisual material consists of sound recordings and one unidentified film, including the 1974 to 1975 radio production of Miss Macintosh, My Darling read by various authors and actors for WBAI-FM Pacifica Radio. Other papers include photographs, clippings, financial papers, personal papers, personal effects, and realia."
If I understood correctly, there is contained in the archive somewhere the 400 page novella excised from MMMD.
Ce Ce wrote: "I have not bailed. "I'm still here too. I've taken to it as a long term reading, like I had done with The Wake, more so than I had initially intended.
Ce Ce wrote: "Let's move our discussion over to the Ch 6 thread. "Organizationally, if you need a more specialized thread to discuss issues like the above about the narrative technique, feel free to start up a new thread in the 'general' folder.
Fionnuala wrote: "The narrator begins by having a little conversation with the bus-driver, then she gives us his long response in direct speech, then she slips into indirect speech, continuing his monologue but slipping in the odd place-marker in case we've forgotten who is speaking, but at some point in all of this, we no longer know if Moses Hunnecker is still speaking aloud. It's all very skilfully done. "Me too too! I discovered sometime ago that I have a real hang-up with first-person narrators in novels. Perhaps it has to do with how artificial it is ; we don't experience the world in first person but through stories. Anyway, Young's novel here is written in first person ; I think ; and we should always remind ourselves that this is all something Vera is telling/writing. Even when we completely lose track of her. And she's telling us what only her mother could know (because I don't believe her mother ever bothered to narrate to her daughter all these goings-on in her opium dreams. I say this because I think it's absolutely genius! There is no hang-up about trying to answer this question "But how could Vera know what was inside so-and-so's head?" I can't entirely put my finger on all the points, but just reminding myself that this is all first-person narration (somehow!) makes me smile.
