Not much courage, anyway. From the excellent long essay “Poetry Slam: Or, The decline of American verse”, by Mark Edmundson, in Harper’s for July 2013: “I found myself once talking with a fiction writer, a woman of considerable achievement and reputation, about the MFA program in which she taught. I put forward the idea that …
Tag: Literature
Quote: Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Henry VIII and his court, as seen through the eyes of courtier Thomas Cromwell, is one of the most harrowing fictional works I have ever read– brilliant and acute, never pleasant. Am I the only reader who sees a similarity between Henry’s court and that of the Red Czar? As with …
Art, Science, Insect Hunting, and Nabokov
John Wilson’s butterfly photos remind me of one of the great neglected stories of 20th century intellectual life; that Vladimir Nabokov was not just a writer and teacher but a great taxonomist, this despite being denigrated as a dilettante in his time. Joseph Conrad is legitimately revered for becoming a great English novelist in his …
Road Classics
Thesis: the three great American “Road” books are Lolita; On the Road; and one you may not know, Roger Tory Peterson’s Wild America. Nabokov and Peterson came out in 1955, like my favorite Chevy, my parent’s second car and the first they bought new that I can remember; as far as I know, Kerouac finished …