Guy Davenport died this week. I think I lent his book "The Geography of the Imagination" to some of my friends. I know I have lent or given "7 Greeks." I go back to his essays when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling stupid or complacent. Yesterday morning I saw his publisher's announcement of his death in the New York Times and felt a shock. His name has held a totemic significance for me ever since I was a teenager and read an essay of his on the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. This was in an Aperture monograph of Meatyard's work that I must have read to pieces. Then I lent it to someone whose photography reminded me of Meatyard's but who had never heard of him. Next thing I knew the book was lost in the Oakland fire, along with whatever other great treasures. But there was an essay about Meatyard by his friend Davenport that moved me. It's the source of a thought I apply to many of the people I love -- Davenport, who was extremely educated, was remarking that Meatyard had never read the Odyssey or the Iliad or something. But, Davenport said, when Meatyard does get around to reading it, what a reading it will have. I may be getting the attributions messed up but that's the idea. Most of his nonfiction writing involved making connections among writers and books and ideas, about half of which I've read. And every time I go back to reading his essays, I've read a few more books he mentions. I'm excited to go back now having finally read Howard's End. He jumps around among topics and ideas in a way that gets me excited to pick something new up. It is as exciting to me as my freshman-year honors conference, when there was a similar interplay of ideas. It was just assumed you wouldn't make cheap pop-culture references that would end the discussion. I don't know if kids can even have this kind of discussion now. Some smartass would jump in with a sitcom refernce and shut down the higher brain function of the class. If I was a professor I would ban references to any kind of modern work produced for profit. "Madonna Studies" can blow me.



One thing I remember doing on search engines in, like, 1996 was searching for the terms "Guy Davenport" and "Ralph Eugene Meatyard." I'd come up with nothing. The two groups, early Web users and modernists, were absolutely separate. It was akin to Fran Lebowitz translating the letters of Alfred Lord Douglas into CB slang. (There was no CB term for "pearl gray.") Is it declassé to know the works of Fran Lebowitz almost by heart? Guy Davenport knew lots of Greek lyrics and stuff.