590 Blotted Lines (with Adhaar Noor Desai) | My Last Book with Lara Vetter

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do geniuses compose their poetry and prose? Do they carefully and laboriously revise until they achieve perfection? Or does perfection just flow out of them - as it reportedly did for Shakespeare? In this episode, Adhaar Noor Desai (Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition) tells Jacke about the discoveries he made when analyzing the manuscripts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. PLUS Lara Vetter (H.D. (Hilda Dolittle): A Critical Life) discusses her choice for the last book she will ever read. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello, Shakespeare never blotted out a line, said two of his friends as they introduced the first folio to the public and so we think a yes genius was flowing from the heavens right to the man's mind and from there to his fingers and to the pen and the ink onto the page.
0:27.0	Such is the nature of genius.
0:30.0	It's Paul McCartney waking up with the song yesterday in his head fully formed.
0:34.8	It's why Mozart could, it's how Mozart could be so prolific and Keith's and so many others.
0:41.2	They were thinking art. They were thinking perfect art. It's how
0:47.1	great art must come to be. But is that really so? First of all, was it even true?
0:54.1	Did Shakespeare truly put words on the page
0:56.4	in some indelible way as if divinely inspired?
1:00.2	If not, what has that meant to the rest of us who are trying to understand greatness?
1:05.6	And what about greatness has to be so self-assured right from the start?
1:09.7	What about the greatness of revision?
1:12.2	Or the indications of hesitancy second thoughts better ideas the
1:16.6	process of perfecting can there be genius residing in those areas as well.
1:24.0	Our guest today has spent some time studying old manuscripts and thinking a lot about these
1:28.8	ideas.
1:30.3	He joins us today to tell us about that process.
1:33.2	At our Noor Desai and the Poetics of Discomposition
1:37.4	today on the history of literature.
1:40.8	Oh.
1:41.8	Oh. literature. Okay, here we go.
1:46.7	Hello everyone.
	...

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