READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Email from Max Richards, 5 th April 2011: This is the title of a short essay in Craig Raine, Haydn & the Valve Trumpet , Faber 1990. Read it, accept it, and call off your projected gathering on the topic! On the other hand, read it, demolish it and then do your thing... Just chanced on my copy of Raine in a box tother day, and only just now looked down the contents page. How goes it, anyway? To my surprise I spent time Sunday morning in the Castlemaine Anglican church, because my friend Lorender Freeman of Barkers Creek is a keen Anglican there, and an old longlost friend who now lives in C., was to be playing the cello with a small group for just that session. Bob Long, doctor and cellist. The session was for children first, and they sat on the floor up front and were engaged in conversation by the junior priest. The senior one is the great Rev Ken, whose surname will come to me in a moment. Ken has done much for J. S. Neilson in the past and introduces art and lit i...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n24/michael-wood/quashed-quotatoes ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Philip Harvey  Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:53:49 +1100 Subject: Fined Again Wacked To: Max Richards Dear Max and Alan, thank you for the review of the new Danis Rose FW. I have just read it over lunch. The reviewer, Michael Wood, has given some excellent descriptions of the process of reading the book and of the types who get into Joyce's type. I recognise myself and others in a number of his portraits. The review helps to update us on the general history of reception. I also like the tempting theory that Joyce was not really interested in the cyclic Vico view of history, even though it is unquestionably one of the identifiable bases of the creative performance.  Personally, I think Joyce believes in repetition and that every time something repeats itself in time, it's different. Did Stephen Dedalus ever wake from the nightmare of history? When I read FW i...

Cuttings, held together by a slightly rusted paper clip, fall from his copy of Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams. (Penguin Books, 1967). They include a typed version of ' The Rainwalkers ' , and photocopies of ' February Evening in New York ' and ' The Cold Spring ' , the second with a note in Max’s hand " comp[are] with Dickinson ‘The Bustle’." Was he taking a class or writing a review? Then this one page hand-written set of notes about poetic construction. Are they Max Richards’ own responses or his summary of things by Levertov collated from her writings for reference? Or a bit of both? Whatever the case, the page has the feel of a trouvée poem:   24-7-81 Denise Levertov on non-traditional metrics free verse: impulse to flow, avoidance of the interruption of pattern But ‘wellwrought’…? ‘organic form’ 19 th c. a term taken over by shampoo manufacturers! ...

From a cache of cuttings about Harold Bloom, mainly on his book ‘The Western Canon’ (1994) fell a handwritten letter, unsigned and unsent. For some reason Max Richards (1937-2016) starts the letter, then leaves it alone. Maybe it’s a draft for something else. The letter eloquently reveals the sorts of shifts happening in Melbourne literary studies, Melbourne by then just typical of more widespread changes in attitude and practice.                                                                      1/7/95                            ...

Here is an email, unchanged, from Max Richards (1937-2016) received in March 2014. His preliminaries include [perhaps only Hugh Underhill, who crops up in the dream needs to read this] which is odd seeing how he sends it to me as well after a conversation about Seamus Heaney. Or is it a memo to himself? I am starting to find that Max’s emailing habits had an element of disclosure of things his correspondents had not necessarily thought would be forwarded on, reported back, &c. Now, all of that is fairly immaterial, though tread carefully. Hugh Underhill was a colleague at La Trobe University, author of ‘The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry’ (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Do we sleep or wake? I think the dream has a paradisal, peaceful feel. as mentioned today in chat with Philip -  best wishes from Max  [my only face to face time with SH was in the signing queue years ago at the melb writers' festival, when I had a pile of his books in my sa...

  As said in the Denise Levertov essay on this site, really the Opening to this collection of records and responses to the death of Max Richards (1937-2016),   I have been spending time thinking about Max’s long interest in religion, of faith lost or found. He taught on this subject as an English Professor at La Trobe University, but it's challenges were always personal and he had both a serious and a bemused consideration of what it might all mean. As for example in this brief exchange of emails, prompted by his awareness of my keen interest in the writings of Lesley Chamberlain, especially her work on Russian spirituality and philosophy. The Les in “the big les discussion” is not a reference to Chamberlain but Les Murray. That month I conducted a reading group at the Carmelite Library on spirituality in his poetry . 4/15/13, Max Richards wrote: Van Gogh and The Joy of Living Posted on January 24, 2013 by lesleychamberlain at http://lesleychamberlain....

Silas James as Bar-Fly in Barney Kiernan’s, Bloomsday in Melbourne 2011 Mid-June is the time of worldwide Joycean events, especially in Melbourne. In 2011 Bloomsday in Melbourne produced a theatrical piece about nationalism, Irish and other, centred on the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. My subsequent report (re-published this day on this blog) is what Max Richards (1937-2016) refers to in the oepning of his email of the 19 th of June 2011, three days after Bloomsday. Max had celebrated the Day at Geelong Art Gallery, where various events to do with James Joyce had been enacted, including a show of artworks by Barry Gillard. I shall read your Bloomsday report tonight, most likely, keenly. Here is a mixture of fragments of the Geelong experience... […] I was asked weeks ago to provide the Gallery with a ‘bio note’ so they’d introduce me accurately. This is what I wrote – I was sorry not to hear it read out. What the others provided I dunno... Max Richards as a todd...

Last Thursday's posting, an account of Max Richards’ (1937-2016) and John Barnes’ visit to the poet Dimitris Tsaloumas, has a footnote. In a separate file this morning I found ‘Two Seniors’, a poem about this period of visits. It makes sense of the line in Max’s anecdotes in ‘share 1’ about ‘Two Seniors’. "Tercet-constructing Max" is how poet friend Bill Wootton describes him in 'Maxless', a eulogy posted on the 4th of October on Facebook. Here are the tercets at work, also what Bill calls his "measured lopes / of goodwill or gentle enquiry".    Two Seniors       (Judith Rodriguez, b.1936,                               Dimitris Tsaloumas, b.1921) Vigorous poems she wrote – ditto her body language. She roused her students – all can be creative! New then to her countr...

In an email of 23 rd February 2015 Max Richards (1937-2016) writes: “ another blog piece or E st article, Philip, one day if not now, best from Max”. Attached was an enlarged image of Mark Twain’s unsolicited judgement of John Dryden’s work on Plutarch’s Lives. This title page had been circulated by the Oxford Marginalia Group. As a minor service, I thought a few reflections on this page were now due. Possibly the least read of the canonical Great English Poets today is John Dryden. He was someone we were relieved to move on from in University days, not because the poetry was “rotten” but because Dryden’s references and milieu had become so obscure. We were taught that he is integral to “the line of wit”, a critical construct employed to argue that there is such a line running right through English writing. Anyone belonging to “the line of wit” was in a charmed circle of acceptance, their credibility undimmed. We could see right off, his verse was nimble and nifty: ...

When Max Richards (1937-2016) moved from Ruffey Lake Park in 2012 he gave into my care a large part of his extensive library. Religion and Spirituality went to the Carmelite Library in Middle Park, while Literature found its way to our place, onto Ikea shelves supplied by Max himself. We managed. The riches of his library included the cuttings of articles, reviews, letters, lecture notes &c. appropriate to that book, dating from the fifties onwards. Sometimes his books double in size from all the additions, each one dated by Max. Max was a genuine collector of every kind of knowledge and equally an astounding sharer of newly discovered knowledge. This translated into the current age, where email in particular served to spread the knowledge to anyone he thought might find an interest. Links to articles, reports of visits, poem of the day, he was irrepressible. His last email to me was at the Library on the day before he died, an article he thought would attract my interest on Kh...

 News reached us this weekend of the death of our dear friend Max Richards. He died as a result of head injuries sustained after being hit by a car on Wednesday morning, while walking his dog Pink in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. To attend to the shock of this terrible news I have been re-reading many of his recent emails and posts, in order to hear his voice and sit with his steadying patterns of thought. In particular I have spent time thinking about Max’s long interest in religion, of faith lost or found. He gave a paper at the Carmelite Library in the last couple of years on this subject, as expressed in Victorian poetry. The last book recommendation he gave on Facebook was ‘Absence of Mind : the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self’, a set of lectures given at Yale   by Marilynne Robinson, that takes to task the way secularists wish to displace religion with science. Her book is withering in its dismissal of the attitude that we can ...