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The schoolroom was its own place, our home another, the red fields of the Savannah valley another, the cow pasture another, uptown, the movies, other people’s houses: all were as distinct as continents in disparate geological epochs. The sociology of the South has something to do with this, I think. All occasions had their own style and prerogatives, and these were insisted upon with savage authority. At Grannyport’s (thus her accepted name after its invention by us children) one never mentioned the moving pictures that played so great a part in my life, for Grannyport denied that pictures could move. It was, she said, patently illogical (she was absolutely right, of course, but I didn’t know it at the time), and no dime could ever be begged of her for admission to the Strand (Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers) or the Criterion (Flash Gordon, Tarzan) for these places were humbug, and people who went to them under the pitiful delusion that pictures can move were certainly not to be financed by a grandmother who knew her own mind. Joyce] is an instrument through which the past can speak. Joyce's past, like Homer's, is not history. If the success of man as a political, companionable animal whose culture has thus far progressed to families living in cities, that achievement of humanity is dying, Joyce saw. Life at family level goes on pretty much as in the bronze age. Man's idea of God, though, is in trouble; his idea of the state is in trouble; and an awful restlessness begins to disturb the inert, paralyzed, darkened life of the people. Ulysses was written between 1914 and 1921, dates that end a world." The remainder of the twentieth century (most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome) might profitably be spent putting together the human achievements which tyranny has kept behind walls." Taken from lecture presented at Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University on 4 March 2003). Review
In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. Davenport provides links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. And pretty much everything in between. Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.Oswin, N. An other geography. Dialogues in Human Geography 10.1 (2020): 9-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619890433.
No one writes like Guy Davenport. He’s a genius, sure, but also a delightful, generous example of how exhilarating the life of the mind can be. These inventive and harmonious essays are a dazzling reminder that great writing is also great fun.” Book Genre: Art, Books About Books, Criticism, Essays, History, Language, Literary Criticism, Literature, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Writing Persephone's Ezra: a tour de force, anybody reading The Cantos ought to read it. Davenport's felicity for classical myths & literature finds a natural affinity in Pound's Cantos. Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay. It all added to the melancholy atmosphere of shadowy room, cloudy weather and addicted mind.But this is not the meaning of looking for Indian arrowheads. That will, I hope, elude me forever. Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake. I was with grown-ups, so it wasn’t play. There was no lecture, so it wasn’t school. All effort was willing, so it wasn’t work. No ideal compelled us, so it wasn’t idealism or worship or philosophy.
In her chapter of the Secondary Geography Handbook, Massey explains her understanding of a geographical imagination. Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York: Dover, 1 966), p. 275 . Nor could the movies be mentioned at Grandmother Fant’s, for attending them meant going into public, a low thing that the Fants have never done. The Fants were French Huguenots, from Bordeaux. They were a kind of Greek tragedy in the third of a great trilogy. Once they were rich with two ships that bore South Carolina cotton from Charleston to France. The United States Navy sank them both in the time of the War–there was a tale we heard over and over of Grandfather Sassard going down with the Edisto, standing impassively on her bridge, a New Testament clutched to his breast, his right arm saluting the colors of the Confederacy, which were soon to follow him beneath the waves of the Atlantic. His brother wore a friendship ring given him by Fitzhugh Lee, and this sacred ornament would be got out of a kind of jewel casket and shown to us. I don’t think I ever dared touch it. Broadly, this collection of forty essays becomes an attempt to map the creative imagination through time & space across various humanities: literature, art, & philosophy (and science too!*). This erudite work would help greatly as a reference book too.Davenport was a classicist by training and shared a lot of the same turf as the mythologist Joseph Campbell (both have a strong interest in Joyce and wrote heavily about myth's survival under the cover of what was passing for modernity), but honestly Davenport is the more interesting and varied writer, and funnier. I always seemed to find myself book browsing on rainy afternoons when I would wander up the book shelved hallway into my bedroom where, lying aslant my bed, I'd dip into the bottom shelf of my large bookcase there, in the semi-darkness, and lazily cruise in and out of various volumes.Volumes of essays. Now, today, all - poems, essay and book itself - have undergone their obscure little resurrection from their entombment on the bottom shelf. All of us carry such images, they may sometimes be in conflict or even be the cause of conflict, and digging these things up and talking about them is one good way in to beginning to examine what it means to think geographically’
Is Geography coming out of the closet? Why queer geography matters, The Bloomsbury Geographer, 2022 The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. Another Odyssey Salvatore Quasimodo translates the three lines that begin the third book of the Odyssey: II sole, lasciata la serena distesa dell' acqua, si levo verso ii cielo di rame a illuminare gli After the War my grandmother, born and raised in Charleston (she never said “the Yankees,” but “the stinking Yankees,” the one unladylike locution she ever allowed herself), married a Fant, who took her to Florida to homestead. There my uncles Paul and Silas were born with teeth, it was always pointed out, two tiny pink teeth each, for this was the signum of their fate. As they lay in their cradle a catamount sprang through the window and ate them. Sometimes it was an alligator that crawled into the house and ate them. As Granny Fant reached a matriarchal age, her stories began to develop structural variants. She used to ask me never to forget that we are descended from Sir Isaac Davis though I have never been able to discover who Sir Isaac Davis was. Through him we were related to Queen Anne. And the stinking Yankees stole her wedding ring and gave it to the Holmans’ cook, who wore it a day of glory and then returned it to Miss Essy. There is no way to prepare yourself for reading Guy Davenport. You stand in awe before his knowledge of the archaic and his knowledge of the modern. Even more, you stand in awe of the connections he can make between the archaic and the modern; he makes the remote familiar and the familiar fundamental."
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The Geography of the Imagination turned out to be my stimulating introduction to Guy Davenport, the multifaceted American man of letters. The forty essays here amply convey the range & depth of this fascinating mind. How strange [Pound’s] condemnation of usury sounded to a world that had forgotten the rage of Ruskin against the shrinking of all values into the shilling, the passionate voices of Fourier, Thoreau, and Marx that men were becoming the slaves of factories and machines."
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