the duller the better, 1 : not at all according to its intent
I understand that most prisons are now supplied with libraries and that prisoners are expected to read the Everyman’s Library and other books of educational tendencies. I hope I am not being too reactionary when I say that my one desire is to be given one very dull book to read, the duller the better. A book, moreover, on a subject completely foreign to me; perhaps the second volume, if the first would familiarize me too well with the terms and purpose of the work. Then I shall be able to experience with a free conscience the pleasure, perverse as it may be, of interpreting it not at all according to its intent. Because I share with Valery’s M. Teste the “knowledge that our thoughts are reflected back to us, too much so, through expressions made by others”; and I have resigned myself to deriving what information and joy I can from this — lamentable but irremediable — state of affairs. From my one detached rocklike book I shall be able to draw vast generalization, abstractions of the grandest, most illuminating sort, like allegories or poems, and by posing fragments of it against the surroundings and conversations of my prison, I shall be able to form my own examples of surrealist art — something I would never know how to do outside, where the sources are so bewildering. Perhaps it will be a book on a cure of a disease, or an industrial technique — but no, even to try to imagine the subject would be to spoil the sensation of wavelike freshness I hope to receive when it is first placed in my hands.
ex Elizabeth Bishop, “In Prison,” The Partisan Review 4:4 (March 1938) : 3-10
viewable at Boston U archive : link
The image, however, detail of a back page containing the circulation slip, is from the Phillips Academy copy/scan of William Phillips and Philip Rahv, eds., The Partisan Reader : Ten Years of Partisan Review 1934-1944 : An Anthology (1946), which contains that story, as well as the object of my initial search for
H. J. Kaplan, “The Mohammedans, The Partisan Review 10:3 (May-June 1943) : 210-219, 281-292
at dokumen.pub : link
Kaplan’s novel The Plenipotentiaries (1950) is strewn with “putterings” as will become apparent in this space in due course.
archive.org : link
The image struck me, and I searched through the volume for some language that might in some way rime. The Bishop passage, new (like all of her writing) to me, captures something of the way I mis-read much (perhaps not all) of what I read.
see Annie J, her (since discontinued?) Reading Partisan Review: 1930s–1970s : Elizabeth Bishop, “In Prison” (April 7, 2017) :
link