I haven’t posted on the Sphere for a while, even if I sometimes, more often lately, have looked in. I’ll be back when the mood strikes. In the meantime, this is to announce a couple of new publications, a booklet of my Dante essays plus a volume which I edited and introduced.
The Quest for Knowledge in Dante’s Convivio comes out of my project (almost completed) of making a new annotated translation of Dante’s unfinished philosophical work the
Convivio (“Banquet”). There are two essays in it, based on two talks I gave at Temenos Academy in London last year. It’s a beautifully produced book, btw, with cover calligraphy by the master letter cutter Tom Perkins. Some more details at the Amazon listing. If you’re interested, you can PM me to circumvent Amazon; all it’ll cost you for the book is the postage from Italy, about 10 bucks.
Daily Bread: Art and Work in the Reign of Quantity is a book of essays about art and poetry by the English poet-critic-publisher (and protégé of Kathleen Raine) Brian Keeble. The “work” in the title is there because Keeble says, after Blake and others, that art is what all work essentially wants to be—an idea I love. Keeble’s take on these things comes out of his immersion in the perennial philosophy, and I’ve found his writings unusually profound and refreshing and challenging. You might as well. There are fine essays on David Jones, the painter Samuel Palmer, the potter Michael Cardew, and more. Perkins’s letters are on the cover of this one, too.
That’s all, folks. See you around the Sphere sometime soon.
Two new books
Threaded Mode
