Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Alan Wall: The collection exists in order to hold ruin at bay, so there is an acute poignancy to the ruin of any collection. Particle meets anti-particle; annihilation ensues. Alfred Russel Wallace spent years putting together his collection of animals and plants from the Amazon. The brig on to which they were loaded for return to England caught fire, and almost everything was destroyed.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
John Ferriar: Proudly he shews, with many a smile elate,
The scrambling subjects of the private plate;
While Time their actions and their names bereaves,
They grin forever in the guarded leaves.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
“Bruges-La-Morte,” a tale of obsessive love, is a Symbolist novel, perhaps the Symbolist novel. The movement (officially promulgated by Jean Moréas in his “Manifeste du symbolisme” of 1886) is best understood as a vague composite of moods and formal preoccupations that pervaded the music and art of that era, no less than its poetry and prose.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
I stayed in touch with Logue for a while after our meeting. I received a couple of beautiful hand-written cards and spoke on the phone a few times, but I got the impression he was already bored of me. Then one afternoon a postman knocked at my door with a large brown tube. I opened it and inside was one of Logue’s poster poems from the 1960s, with a note of thanks inside.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
I’ve been gathering books for as long as I can remember. But I became a self-conscious book collector only in graduate school, when I lived amid dozens of secondhand shops in Cambridge, Boston, and the wider orbit of New England. Some of those shops survive, but many were closing toward the end of the 90s, with the rise of the Internet. Like many book lovers, I lamented that change.
Percy Fitzgerald: There is one view of Dickens which has scarcely been sufficiently dealt with, namely, his relations with his literary brethren and friends, as editor and otherwise. These exhibit him in a most engaging light, and will perhaps be a surprise even to those abundantly familiar with his amiable and gracious ways.
The report entitled “The books are even getting choked in Tehran” is penned by Akram Dashtban who is a graduate of Social sciences.
Last year she was a runner up in the Report section of the Festival of “Superior media & books” for “What is Future doing down the cup?”
Saturday, 29 October 2011
Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.
Thursday, 13 October 2011
It doesn’t seem to matter what’s in the ebook as much as that it’s an ebook. I hear about so-and-so and how they charge 99 cents for their ebooks and make money hand over fist. And that’s the topic for an hour in some con bar, and it might not even get mentioned what the book in question is about.
Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
This is the dark side of those progressive Victorians we all know about, with their trains and telegraphs, their technological advances and their scientific discoveries, their liberal politics and their enlightened scepticism.
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
The long-forgotten volumes that emerged from that excavation were quickly funneled through the occasionally deviant filter of none other than Richard Prince, the artist who for decades has been compiling and reworking the artifacts and autographs of what he calls “anything Beat, hippie or punk,” along with everything else that has struck his eclectic fancy over the years. It’s a peculiar way to make a living, and one that more than a few of us wish we’d thought of.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
A brief guide to Oxford’s ‘Very Short Introductions’.
Michelene Wandor: The first ‘Very Short Introduction’ appeared in the mid-1990s, and now there are nearly 300 books, which have sold over three million copies, and been translated into over twenty-five languages. The virtue is unadorned: A ‘Very Short Introduction’ contains all you need to know in order to decide if you need to know more. The recipe is a tough call: a ‘Very Short Introduction’ must necessarily historicise, provide an epistemological guide to the subject, analyse its conceptual and ideological issues, and wrap it all up – for now.