Back in the late nineties I took a class on Modernist Poetry from Len Scigaj ("ski plus jive minus the V"). It was, I believe, the only class I didn't fail during the Failing Time. It's where I got my love of modernist poetry (Auden excepted, and I've even found myself warming up a little to him), and my fascination with H.D. and with Eliot's The Waste Land.
At one point we watched a video of people discussing The Waste Land. One of the people on the video was Hugh Kenner. He had a long face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a mop of grey hair, and he spoke with an odd impediment[1], and he was so very excited and happy to be talking about Eliot. I have no recollection of anything he said, it's just the general sense of his exuberance that's stuck with me.
Scigaj and Kenner are both long gone, but thanks to a Twitter conversation between PNH and Jim Henley, I've learned that Kenner was not only a Modernist critic, he also wrote a book on Chuck 'Looney Tunes' Jones and one on Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes ("which I think I understand better than Fuller did"), and a column for Byte Magazine in the eighties. He frequently turned up on one of the early online chat boards.
Language Hat's obituary, and an interview with Kenner from 2001.
Fascinating guy. Tiny world.
[1] I found out recently that he'd been mostly deaf since the age of five, from a childhood case of flu.
At one point we watched a video of people discussing The Waste Land. One of the people on the video was Hugh Kenner. He had a long face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a mop of grey hair, and he spoke with an odd impediment[1], and he was so very excited and happy to be talking about Eliot. I have no recollection of anything he said, it's just the general sense of his exuberance that's stuck with me.
Scigaj and Kenner are both long gone, but thanks to a Twitter conversation between PNH and Jim Henley, I've learned that Kenner was not only a Modernist critic, he also wrote a book on Chuck 'Looney Tunes' Jones and one on Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes ("which I think I understand better than Fuller did"), and a column for Byte Magazine in the eighties. He frequently turned up on one of the early online chat boards.
Language Hat's obituary, and an interview with Kenner from 2001.
Fascinating guy. Tiny world.
[1] I found out recently that he'd been mostly deaf since the age of five, from a childhood case of flu.