I’ve got no real beef with Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate. Sometimes he writes things that make me scratch my head (people shouldn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses? Really?), but generally he’s one among a number of smart folks who like books but aren’t academics or interested in how academics read and like to . . .
Read MoreDuring a brief exchange at the Mass Review table in Chicago, when asked what poetry I like, I offered a few names. My response was met with the usual “Ah, Language poetry is so dated and passé, and besides there’s no feeling in it and isn’t it so narrow” comment, to which there is . . .
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago, Adele won six Grammy awards. I haven’t ever paid much attention to the Grammys; the music I most like doesn’t really echo in that chamber of the culture. This news caught my attention, though, because it was yet another reminder of how much how many people really . . .
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“When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.” Thus Samuel Beckett, after a U.S. reporter asked why his small country had produced so many great writers. Beckett then developed the point by means of triangulation: “It’s the English Government and the Catholic Church – they have . . .
Read MoreAnyone who’s been spending time lately at the major book fairs knows this already – about the only thing that’s sure to pack the conference rooms these days is either a book that’s got a movie contract, with celebrities attached, or a panel about e-publishing. And yet there’s no end to the . . .
Read MoreFrom the first paragraph of David Rabe’s new essay we know we are into something exact, profound, with echoes of all the great epic accounts of the human situation. Perhaps that is an overblown response: As its subtitle tells us, the piece is about prize-fighting, boxing, “the sweet science.” The temptation to cliche about . . .
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I spent last Saturday afternoon looking at naked women. Hundreds of them: dancers, prostitutes, women getting into bathtubs, women getting out of bathtubs, women combing their hair. Most of them were hanging on the walls. A few were up on pedestals or behind glass. This was, you’ve guessed, the “Degas and the . . .
Read MoreIn his meditation on “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” the anthropologist Michael Taussig observes that, “[Benjamin’s] text seem[s] to be filled with pithy statements apt for gravestones and monuments, and there is no shortage of writers who, desirous of some spectral profundity, paste in a slice or two.” To the wind with such apt . . .
Read MoreIt wasn’t the beach reading I’d planned on or brought along (that was a bag of mystery novels and a book on the financial crisis), but when I found it at Herridge Books on an afternoon browse in Wellfleet, I had to add it to the list. Published in October, 1959, the . . .
Read MoreA friend of mine, a few years ago, told me that he’d taken to reading poetry in the morning. “It has replaced,” he said, “the habit of prayer.” In the current poetic landscape there’s precious little to make one feel prayerful, but for a meditative conduit to the actual, to imaginary gardens . . .
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