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Index: Commentary on Art and Literature

A Visit to ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

Oscar Mandel: ‘But for Shakespeare, and most probably for his audience, a daughter’s reverent obedience needed no explanation; it was her virtue that mattered. Subtly searched out and believable motivations are our imperative.’

Considering ‘The Young American Writers’ anthology, fifty-five years later.

Richard Kostelanetz: ‘Both Carroll and myself resisted attributing to our writers a common esthetic stance and, in this respect, we differed from, say, Ezra Pound’s Des Imagists (1914). Or even a common background, such as a geographical residence or university writing programs.’

Toughs.

Anthony Howell: ‘The literary establishment, that is the commercially published establishment, here in the UK has always frowned on abstract writing and kept the gates closed against us that have engaged in such. But they can’t keep out the slammers.’

The Censor of Art.

Samuel Barlow: ‘The chief and essential offense committed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, was the violation of the constitutional right of any man to be tried by a jury of his peers. Here at least it is pleasant to record that such a Jury of Peers has risen and insisted on rendering a true verdict, even if it partake some-what  of the nature of a post-mortem.’

Modern Artiques.

Robert Almon: ‘T.S.Eliot, who before he was twenty one, had written as fine poetry as this generation has produced, is a victim of the culture via ideas regime, more insistently the autocrat of the English mind than it is of the American.’

Small Magazines.

Ezra Pound: ‘The value of fugitive periodicals “of small circulation” is ulti­ mately measured by the work they have brought to press. The names of certain authors over a space of years, or over, let us say, the past score years, have been associated with impractical publication.’

Everything that is the case.

Peter Robinson: ‘For something to ‘be the case’ in philosophy is of course not the same as ‘the case’ that Oscar Wilde puns on, namely the large valise such as was supposed to contain the two volumes of Miss Prism’s unusually sentimental novel in The Importance of Being Earnest, or, for that matter, the case of a woman suffering from advanced Parkinson’s Disease being taken away from her husband during the opening phases of a global pandemic.’

Violet.

John Wilkinson: ‘With Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” the violet hour recurs as the eventide bringing into sharp and estranged focus, activities and settings which otherwise are banal..’

Pop Songs.

Alan Wall: ‘ You could half-whisper into a mike, and you were instantly in a bedroom, disrobing. Leonard Cohen was very close to the mike. There was a reason for this: in any orthodox sense, he couldn’t sing. He was endearingly aware of the fact.’

Georges Braque: A poetry of things.

Anthony Howell, on Morandi: ‘Ambivalence and ambiguity seem the very subject matter. How can all those objects actually balance on the top of that frail table, a top which seems tilted in our favour?’

Keats, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Nigel Wheale: ‘In both Keats and Freud, feminine narcissism finds its perfect partner in the male gaze. As Madeline sleeps, Porphyro ‘gazed upon her empty dress’ (245). From the point of view of Laura Mulvey, feminist psychoanalytic writer, Porphyro’s male gaze objectifies Madeline through scopophilia, the voyeur’s (male) pleasure of looking on someone unaware.’

José-Flore Tappy and poems from a country within a country.

José-Flore Tappy: ‘The Mediterranean, the arid lands, the most deserted landscapes, or the poorest landscapes. This is where my imagination goes and where I recover my roots. I have spent many moments of my life on one of the Balearic islands, and I came of age in the midst of an environment that was at once solar and maritime’

Etymologizing.

Alan Wall: ‘Etymology is mostly strict and scholarly these days. Even to the point where it contradicts our presuppositions. Faced with the word ravenous, we might reasonably suppose that a raven lives there. After all, this is a big, commanding, eye-plucking bird. Pruk-pruk. It used to make a feast of our dead, lying around after battle – maybe it will again one day. But here the etymology disappoints.’

A Spell to Lure Apollo.

Alex Wong: ‘The story has its setting in a small and moribund German grand-duchy, about to be absorbed into neighbouring territories, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Duke Carl is a bookish aesthete, seduced by the brighter, more humanistic culture of certain less gloomy and more cosmopolitan realms abroad.’

In defence of les femmes françaises.

Christopher Landrum: ‘Is it so shameful to seek beauty? To seek it in books? In the human body? Or how the beauty of the body or of a book can reveal, whether intentionally or otherwise, some speck of the inner beauty of the mind and the greater ineffable beauty of the soul?’