“Child, I am God / Please do not bother me with practicalities:” Christopher Logue’s version of the Illiad kicks so much ass, who cares if the guy doesn’t actually know ancient Greek? Jeff Sypeck explains. What is the “Usage Panel” of the American Heritage Dictionary? Editrix considers. “Find me a better literary critic in the [...]
“I hear an army charging upon the land;” at MIT, a group of students have put Ezra Pound’s Des Imagistes project online, including James Joyce’s remarkable poem. “What pure motives, and purely carried out:” My Life in Books has been reading Willkie Collins’ The Moonstone. You should read it, too. Remember my itty bitty jab [...]
What should a writer notice; what can a critic contend? Sam Tanenhaus pits Updike against James Wood, which gets Wyatt Mason thinking: “as a form of argumentation, literary criticism is charged with making defensible cases for indefensible positions …” Okay, I like a good mean joke. All the same, it’s pretty dark to pick on [...]
Roger Ebert day-dreams of a life on the balcony, as things come to an end. “One of these days I shall tackle the rest of Baudelaire,” wrote Walter Benjamin to his friend Max Horkheimer, in a last letter from Paris. Samuel Beckett adamantly refused be taped. Against character, I decide not to watch this tape [...]
People are reading G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and coming up with complicated things to say about it. (Hey, there’s even an Orson Welles radio play) Others are getting hip to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery again, on its anniversary. (Sometimes reading it aloud) Meanwhile, read a few recollections of Emerson written by journalist [...]
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