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Index: Principal Articles

Who is Bruce Springsteen?

Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Peter Knobler: ‘Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry says, “There’s an authenticity about Bruce that’s just incontrovertible…I think it’s because he’s so true to who he is, and people know it.” But who is he? Is he the egalitarian liberal who sang the radical anti-private-property verse of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” at President Barack Obama’s first inaugural, or is he the guy who allowed his band to be low-balled when offered contracts for a highly anticipated and financially rewarding “reunion tour”?’

Also filed in Biography, Memoir and Autobiographical Prose, Music and Photography, Notes & Comment | Tagged | Comments (20)

The relentless fury of Ed Dorn 2.

Monday, 18 March 2013

Peter Riley: ‘Statements in “Thesis” may not be justifiable from a rationalist point of view, but they are wrapped in royal robes of rich figuration and rhetorical gestures. Now the poems broadcast the author’s opinions unconcealed, and all the more starkly in the modes of irony and sarcasm he adopts. They are largely bare too of all sense of place as landscape with or without human figures — all we have is mockery in a desert. His extremist or hyperbolic statements now stand exposed to anybody’s questioning, especially “Is this actually true?” The wit and the deftness of script discourage us from asking the question, but it cannot be kept at bay for ever.’

Also filed in Notes & Comment, Poetry Notes | Tagged | Comments (0)

Reframing ‘Guernica’.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Nigel Wheale: ‘Almost everyone involved in organising the five exhibitions of Guernica during these critical months, and many of those who visited them, must have been aware that Franco’s Nationalists were at that moment remorselessly destroying all hope of a Republican victory; on 2 November an armed Nationalist merchantman had even sunk a Republican steamer carrying food seven miles off the Norfolk coast near Cromer. While Guernica was on its progress through England, Republican lines were collapsing, the front destroyed; Catalonia was overrun during January, half a million fleeing north from Barcelona in the last days of the month.’

Also filed in Art & Architecture | Tagged | Comments (1)

Pattern recognition and the periodic table.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Alan Wall: ‘What mythology shows us is that we have always provided ourselves with patterns; as a species we have a genius for mapping ourselves on to the cosmos. And what religion and politics show us is that when observed reality contradicts scripture, tradition or ideology, we are usually as ready to re-arrange our observations as we are to question the credal patterns of our sanctioned taxonomies.’

Also filed in Africa Diary, Clues & Labyrinths | Tagged | Comments (0)

Entertaining Mr Pooter.

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Stephen Wade: ‘The world of entertainment c.1900 was multi-layered and performers worked at every level, from readings and recitals to grand opera and serious drama. The writers who provided the material were working in an increasingly complex world in which professionalism was being created and defined, partly through the growth of intellectual property legislation. The performers existed, for the most part, in a designated slot within the very wide spectrum in the performing arts, both amateur and professional. As for the audience and readership: they were an identity in flux, eager for things to do after their long working hours and economic pressures.’

Also filed in Biography, Memoir and Autobiographical Prose | Tagged | Comments (1)

Popping the larger question.

Saturday, 9 February 2013

Anthony O’Hear: ‘In Britain at least revisionism is currently going through on the nod, with barely any of the sort of discussion which has been happening in the USA, and I’m not clear how long resistance can be effective there either in the current political climate. In Britain anyway the homosexual lobby is so powerful in the worlds of politics and entertainment that the campaign is won almost without any effort on the part of that lobby, and they know it. Woe betide anyone who works in the media or local government and dares to appear as ‘homophobic’ (i.e. supporting a privileged position for conjugal marriage). ‘

Also filed in Notes & Comment, Politics & Culture | Tagged | Comments (0)

Extremities of perception in an age of lenses.

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

Alan Wall: Truly we live in an age of lenses. Photography has now been with us for nearly two hundred years, and cinema for well over a century. We do not have separate compartments in our minds into which we can insert photographic images, as opposed to those we first encountered with the lenses of our own eyes. So, many of us are unable to sift and separate what only ever entered our mind through photography or film. I never saw Elvis Presley in the flesh, and yet the image of him in my mind is more vividly present than the physiognomies of people I went to school with. I am unable to recall the features of my first girlfriend, and yet the Kennedy assassination sometimes plays and replays in my mind, not that I was in Dallas on that day, or any other. Muhammed Ali is in my mind; I can still see the sweat glistening on his torso, though I doubt I have ever come within two hundred miles of his actual person.

Also filed in Alan Wall Essays, Clues & Labyrinths | Tagged | Comments (0)

Notes taken from an Alpine landscape.

Friday, 28 December 2012

Tom Lowenstein: ‘This is an extract from a sequence of Notebooks and Fantasias in the voice of a late eighteenth-century poet who had just completed the composition of Kubla Khan. Although the identity of S.T. Coleridge obviously is implied, the work makes no attempt at biography or literary criticism. In the following passages, pseudo-Coleridge, either in person or in imagination, is walking in the Swiss mountains. The book contains many anachronisms.’

Also filed in Excerpts & Passages, Poetry & Fiction | Tagged | Comments (0)

Fairness and family values.

Tuesday, 25 December 2012

Stephen Asma: ‘Just as compassion (not fairness) more truthfully captures our philanthropic urges, so too justice (not fairness) more accurately captures our concern for the disadvantaged. Most of our complex grievances about social justice get reduced down to cries for greater “fairness” because we lack a more nuanced moral vocabulary.’

Also filed in Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (0)

Trollope and Self-Help.

Monday, 12 November 2012

Rebeca Richardson: ‘I read Trollope’s Autobiography as a self-help story featuring an ambitious protagonist who utilizes self-deprecation in a bid for readerly sympathy, and who depicts ambition not as a quality that threatens others, but rather, as the drive behind self-competition.’

Also filed in The Fortnightly Review of Books, The Trollope Prize | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Case of Edmund Rack.

Sunday, 28 October 2012

Tom Lowenstein: ‘Buried in [John Collinson’s] Preface, Rack’s presence counts for nothing. He’s the ghost in the corpus. Once he has done service, this Norfolk weaver’s son (who’d made his living as a dyer), is penned up in a sentence. The book’s proclaimed author is a Church Patrician. While Rack exits, once he’d briefly entered, like a footman, in a single movement.’

Also filed in Biography, Memoir and Autobiographical Prose, Excerpts & Passages, Poetry & Fiction | Tagged | Comments (0)

A quest of the imagination.

Saturday, 20 October 2012

J. B. Bury: When historical methods of aesthetic have been perfected, there may be some chance of sifting out the Greek ideas in comparative purity; and it may be possible for the imagination, in some measure, to grasp the Greek world. The processes of analysis are slow, and our race shall have seen many generations of historians pass, and shall have celebrated many a grammarian’s funeral, before the most skilful navigator can touch the shores of “Hellas” and behold the smoke curl upwards from the hall of Euphrosyne, even then only in the distance.

Also filed in History & Travel, Poetry & Fiction, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (0)

Genetically modified.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Peter Riley: ‘There was a sense of a rather shaky solidarity of the innovative, the only major flaw in which was an evident lack of interest on the part of these and other foreigners in the innovative British poetry with which we surrounded them. None of us ever got a reciprocal invitation. Ten to twenty years later it all feels rather different. If I now think there are problems with a lot of this poetry, am I betraying a trust or exhibiting my own faltering instability?’

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Notes & Comment, Poetry Notes | Tagged | Comments (1)

Afterism.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Anthony Howell: ‘My initial take, leafing through the large Norton publication which is the anthology, is that Americans go on too long. Endless, separated, hardly ever rhyming couplets, for instance, or very long lines indeed, and plenty of them. Some of the poems here get to be as expansive as a Morris Lewis! And these Norton anthologies never skimp on pages, so, inevitably, there is lots of stuff I like, some using narrative, others more abstract. I appreciate the breezy chatty poems of Albert Goldbarth, and a poem called ‘Impossible Blue’ by Ann Lauterbach, whom I associate with the London art scene and New York.’

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Notes & Comment | Tagged | Comments (0)

F.T. Prince and other mavericks.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Anthony Howell: “Prince was a Catholic, but his commitment as a writer was primarily to literature. Having been invited to chair the English department of Kingston University in Jamaica, he grew exasperated when students handed him manuscripts avowing their religious zeal. He said to me once, ‘Literature allows one to become emancipated from oneself.’”

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Poetry & Fiction, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)
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