Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing Book

- Franz! Max said before he considered what he was saying, why are there tears in your eyes?
- I don't know, Kafka said. I don't know.

I want to insist (pedantically) on a distinction between erudition and pedantic information-mongering. The first of these can't be googled or faked. There may be intermediate cases, but Mr. Davenport is most definitely on the side of erudition. His learning is vast and it seeps into the deepest parts of his soul. And for that reason, this collection is not always easy to approach. It may claim to be fiction and criticism, but it's really more like poetry. Davenport must be one of the greatest overlooked American writers of last century. These pieces contain depths I can hardly begin to fathom.

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Where it was, there must I begin to be...

'The unexamined life is eminently worth living, were anyone so fortunate.'

Health, as we know, is organic innocence. When healthy my body is all but invisible to me, the indifferent medium by which I have a world.

Can there be such a thing as a second, post-critical conquest of innocence? Even to speak of an investigation of innocence may be a contradiction in terms, since the critical apparatus necessary to investigate already presumes a split within being. Nonetheless I think this is what Davenport is up to here. The quasi-pornographic content of these stories is in keeping with this. Porn is often far more innocent than it's given credit for being. The furious moralists who castigate it for objectifying or demeaning the body are themselves more often than not the disease for which they purport to be the cure.

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For good measure, on the subject of innocence, here's that inexhaustible quote from George Canguilhem

No one innocently knows that he is innocent since being aware of adequation to the rule means being aware of the reasons for the rule which amounts to the need for the rule. It is appropriate to contrast to the overly exploited Socratic maxim no knowing man is evil, the opposite maxim that no one is good who is aware of being so. Similarly no one is healthy who is aware of being so... But it is in the rage of guilt as in the clamor of suffering that innocence and health arise as the terms of a regression as impossible as it is sought after.