Geography of Imagination – Guy Davenport

  • Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.

    Library thing Guy Davenport

    Davenport was a model of intellectual independence, adopting nobody’s theories and toeing nobody’s line (when he wrote that Levi-Strauss was too original of mind “to be the exponent of a master or a school,” he might have been referring to himself. Long a contributor to National Review, he mocked academic groupthink.

  • His cartoons and Geography of Imagination

  • Paris Review art of fiction – Guy Davenport

    There were some good students, and wonderful moments. I think of a class I taught in Philadelphia one evening, at a reformatory. The students were problem children, some criminal, some radically disoriented. On a large block of newsprint I showed them how Chinese characters work, and how a poem written in pictographs is different from a poem written in an alphabet. I moved on to haiku (news to them). At the end of the hour a uniformed guard said my time was up. The whole class, one by one, hugged and kissed me. On the other hand, at Yale, after a lecture, a student stood up and said my every word was wrongheaded and behind the times.

  • His letter to Marjoie Perloff
    (click to enlarge)

  • Colin Turnbull

    (November 23, 1924 – July 28, 1994) was a British-American anthropologist who came to public attention with the popular books The Forest People (on the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire) and The Mountain People (on the Ik people of Uganda), and one of the first anthropologists to work in the field of ethnomusicology.