The literary critic has died Frank Kermode ~ a perpetually affirmative reader and writer of texts.
it is a sad moment in time
as it will be when Harold Bloom passes
The guardian writer
has
written a tribute
to him
of which
this excerpt ~
'the literature he himself liked best to play against, and master, was
complex. He had little time, for example, for Thomas Hardy. Why? Because
he felt Hardy gave up his meanings too easily.
The modern poet Kermode
most respected was Wallace Stevens – never a writer who yields to the
reader without a struggle. Once at Edinburgh in the 1960s (I was there),
he mischievously asked the audience if they wanted his easy or his
difficult lecture on Stevens.
We stuffily opted for "difficult" and
tried, desperately, to keep the bamboozledom off our faces over the next
hour. Kermode was hard to keep up with in those days. '
and
'In the long years of his retirement at Cambridge he capitalised on his
uniquely well-stocked mind to establish himself as a stylish literary
essayist. He had, with Karl Miller, helped to found the London Review of Books in 1979. It became the principal outlet for what, in one of his gathered collections, he called Pieces of my Mind. These essays ranged from meditations on the penis of Jesus to Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes
and speculations as to whether the resurrection actually happened or
was Christianity's finest fiction. A good, though by no means complete,
selection is found in his last collection, Bury Place Papers, published at the end of last year.'
and
at the london review of books blog
Frank Kermode and the origins of the LRB
19 August 2010
____________________________________ and
'Frank Kermode died yesterday. He was the most erudite man I’ve ever
known, and the best company. He had a lovely sense of humour and a
smile that — literally — seemed to twinkle. He first came into my life
as a distant presence — as General Editor of the Fontana Modern Masters
series, ideal material for an autodidact like me. It was only in the
1990s that I got to know him in person, for it turned out that we had a
good friend in common. '
from Memex 1.1
_________---and
