Adam Hare > Recent Status Updates

“I am ridiculous. But I am in Prague.” pg. 320

“I think I’m beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel.”

“I keep banging my head against the wall of history.” pg. 178

Oddly, Hansen claims that appreciation of landscapes was foreign to Northern heroic storytelling. I’d have to read his citation here, but in Njal’s Saga, perhaps the pinnacle of Icelandic sagas and roughly contemporaneous in composition with Saxo’s life of Hamlet, the deuteragonist Gunnar chooses to stay in Iceland after being struck by the beauty of his home. This leads directly to his death.

Davis keeps saying things like “the way Sargent painted this man or woman clearly shows that he was in love with them” and then in the next paragraph says how important each of those flattering paintings were to furthering his career. Both can be true—it’s just that Davis asserts rumors without evidence. Claiming that he’s the model for Oscar Wilde’s Basil Hallward requires some citations!

I’m glad topics like this are getting covered, but I would’ve preferred a more scholarly work. Do we need to speculate on if Sargent had a crush on every woman he painted?

Davis accepts uncritically a concept of hereditary “insanity,” which she does not elaborate on, and underplays the fact that Madame X’s family owned 150 slaves. She confuses “whale sperm” with “sperm whale” in re: ambergris.

In this chapter, the author remarked upon which of the bathrooms referenced here and in Ulysses he’s personally used.

I think having multiple viewpoints on this is important - no book aspiring to be even twice the length of the Wake itself could capture a majority of its references - but I think a more modern one than Tindall’s would be more valuable.