Reading Coates Reading Eliot

He’s such a generous reader, which is what makes his pieces so enjoyable, not least because he’s able to lock into the generosity of Eliot’s narrator.

(Someone elsewhere mentioned Coates in the context of you-know-who’s death, and I can’t think of a more different writer within the American mediasphere.)

I successfully avoided any post-high school encounter with Jane Austen until Coates slyly enticed me with his wonderful series of posts.

nick s is right: he is a generous reader, and recognizes other writers’ strengths. When Coates read Ulysses S. Grants memoirs, he remarked upon the historical circumstances of Grant’s decision to publish, the clarity of Grant’s prose, the accuracy with which Grant described historical events, and the Grant’s insights into military and political strategy.

I can hardly wait to discover what Coates will have me read next.

I have found that the only way to follow bloggers The Atlantic is to use each RSS feed and use the RSS reader’s functionality to either to tag individual posts or switch back and forth from newest first to oldest first. It is less than ideal but not nearly as bad as digging through the TNR archives only to find that the article in question, while searchable through Google, is only available in .pdf format. Then 404 errors and hilarity ensue.

I’ve long been of the opinion that Middlemarch is the greatest novel written in English, and it’s always wonderful to see a sensitive and attentive reader discover it for the first time. Eliot had such warm and intelligent sympathy for the human condition.

This line by Coates really stuck with me:

One of the great things about my trip through the Western canon is the way I’ve seen so much of what I considered to be “street knowledge” confirmed as simply “knowledge.” I came up different. My canon was Baldwin, Hurston, Armah, Morrison, James, Soyinka, Rodney, Diop, Baraka, Neal etc. I was told that these writers and scholars reflected my world, and I loved them–still love of them.

But so much of the best of them is just the best of humanity.

Interesting that Belle notes her first reading of Middlemarch occurred when she was ill, as aside from being an obviously amazing work in its own right, Middlemarch is rightfully considered one of the seminal modern English-language texts in literature & medicine scholarship (see, e.g., Caldwell 2004; Logan 1991) and is standard in most basic L&M textbooks and curricula.

Agreed on the general quality of TNC’s posts, and on Middlemarch.

This might help with your mini-education into rap.

TNC brings up points that even now I remember from a college reading of the novel. The comparison between men’s and women’s minds — even a man’s ignorance is sounder! Also, the “elegant canary bird” line: Casaubon wanted his wife to be an elegant canary bird that goggles mindlessly and approvingly at his deep thoughts. This last has been a constant joke in our household for at least two decades.