Windmills in the Head

Windmills in the Head ANTHONY KERRIGAN

DWARD DAHLBERG is idiosyncratic. | He is, that is to say, a private per- son, one not susceptible to “educa- tion” by mass-teachers, and when he says td10w, “I make my own,” that is literally what he does in making judg- ments. He is also a fool, a divine fool, of the breed of Unamuno (“with wind- mills in the head’) and St. Theresa (‘the Jewess of Avila”). He learned nothing from any textbook, his texts being his “life-experience” (or vi- vencia, as Ortega would say) with certain men of the past, masters, wise men—most of whom were literary and social miscreants, from Socrates to Baudelaire to Ford Madox Ford, in the eyes of the beadles and deans of literature and the arts. He con- versed in Paris with the corrupt Doc- tor Matthew O’Connor of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and he (almost) rescued from oblivion the hump- backed American nonconformist Ran- dolph Bourne.

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About the Author

Anthony Kerrigan

Windmills in the Head ANTHONY KERRIGAN

DWARD DAHLBERG is idiosyncratic. | He is, that is to say, a private per- son, one not susceptible to “educa- tion” by mass-teachers, and when he says td10w, “I make my own,” that is literally what he does in making judg- ments. He is also a fool, a divine fool, of the breed of Unamuno (“with wind- mills in the head’) and St. Theresa (‘the Jewess of Avila”). He learned nothing from any textbook, his texts being his “life-experience” (or vi- vencia, as Ortega would say) with certain men of the past, masters, wise men—most of whom were literary and social miscreants, from Socrates to Baudelaire to Ford Madox Ford, in the eyes of the beadles and deans of literature and the arts. He con- versed in Paris with the corrupt Doc- tor Matthew O’Connor of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and he (almost) rescued from oblivion the hump- backed American nonconformist Ran- dolph Bourne.