Sunday, 18 September 2011
Lucy Sheehan: Even as Trollope’s maps produce a comforting image of self-contained local communities, they also expertly trace lines of power, grafting social networks onto spatial locations to provide a cartography of social and political influence.
Sunday, 11 September 2011
“I asked him to name two actors that from his viewpoint represented the two towers,” said Toth. “One of the names he gave me was Gary Cooper. I was dancing around the Internet and somehow came upon Cary Grant. It all just fit together and answered itself and gave a little bit of a human persona to it.”
Tuesday, 6 September 2011
Julian Barnes, Carol Birch, Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan, Stephen Kelman and A.D. Miller are today, Tuesday 6 September, announced as the six shortlisted authors for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Marshall Poe: If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.
By DAVID BLACKBURN [The Spectator] – This is the age of the social network. ‘Re-tweet’ has been officially recognised by both dictionaries as a noun and a verb. It has been joined by an additional definition of ‘cougar’, a noun to describe an older women seeking sex with a much younger man, and ‘Textspeak’, a [...]
Rimbaud suddenly saw that the true subject of a new poetry couldn’t be the usual things—landscapes, flowers, pretty girls, sunsets—but, rather, the way those things are refracted through one’s own unique mind.
Gerald Gaus: Our increasingly pluralistic societies are characterized by a variety of what the American philosopher John Rawls called ‘comprehensive doctrines’. We disagree about the aims of life, the place of humans in the universe, and whether we have a relation to a God, and what that relation might be.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Geoffrey Norman: Pointless and depressing to run through the scandals and the tawdry revelations about the game, every one of which has its own book. Too much is known about steroids, gambling, loveless sex and the rest. Too little about the games. There are no Red Smiths who can make you care about the sport. We are invited, instead, to ponder the wreckage of, say, José Canseco.
I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea. I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—“Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!”
[The New York Times'] Tillinghast’s comments merely celebrated the “middle class, middle brow lifestyle” represented in so much of contemporary poetry as opposed to a “continuation of those literary and humanist traditions that have something more at stake,” in short, writing and thinking like Williams’s. Speaking out against what he perceived as a dominance of this “official verse culture,” Bernstein drew a line in the sand that put him in strong opposition to many of the most revered publishers and advocates of poetry.
I asked two book editors I know, who have been editing (and reading) fiction professionally for decades, if there is less descriptive language in fiction today. Both said, generally, yes, and both mentioned movies as a reason.
Elliott Coleman: ‘I think it may be shown that Proust is more Christian than anything else. And further, it seems to me that in his unflagging and almost undeviating search for meaning, reality, and rightness of interpretation, his work becomes highly moral, judged by any system of affirmative morality: peculiarly so in the Western sense of the truth’s making us free, illumined, whole, and productive. For Proust the process was this: remembrance, contemporaneous realization, then art.’
Martin Sorrell: The translations made by an American octogenarian of a mercurial French adolescent bring us as close as we are likely to get in English to the wellspring of his genius. The distance in age and place between poet and translator is a happy irony. Ashbery’s Illuminations are set to become classic.
F. L. Lucas wrote the best book on prose composition for the not-so-simple reason that, in the modern era, he was the smartest, most cultivated man to turn his energies to the task.
At the time of the Charles Street closing, Leinwall told a reporter, “The world will go on, I assure you. This will not affect the course of human nature or of human life.”
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
