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Books, covered and uncovered
I’m a little wary of defending The Great Gatsby. Not because I’m wary of the book, which I’ve loved with a passion since age sixteen, but because I can’t speak nearly as well on the book’s behalf as the book does. Gatsby doesn’t really need another reverent critic; it'll continue to be taught in ...
A man spends ten years trying to sail home to his wife, who has stayed faithful even if he hasn’t… A naked foot slides, with mysterious ease, into the prince’s slipper… A thirteen-year-old stands on a balcony, proclaiming that her love is as infinite as the sea… A girl tells the ...
Well, if the New York Times Magazine can write a headline like that about fiction in January, why can't I borrow it for poetry in February? Anyway, it's true: Joshua Mehigan's "The Orange Bottle," published recently in Poetry magazine, is such a tour de force I doubt we'll see it surpassed in 2013 ...
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell….what I've come to learn is that [the Bible is] the manufacturer's handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our ...
Part 1 and Part 2 of this essay appeared earlier this week. Thomas Hardy I never cared for Life: Life cared for me, And hence I owed it some fidelity... W. B. Yeats Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! Robert Frost I would have written of me on my ...
Part 1 of this essay appeared yesterday. Part 3 (of 3) will appear tomorrow. Where Thomas Hardy seems to me primarily a pessimist, W. B. Yeats is an ironist. A comparison between “Channel Firing” and any of Yeats’s best political poems—“Easter, 1916,” for example—will show the difference clearly ...
In a mid-career essay about his elder contemporary Robert Frost, the poet W. H. Auden observes that "[Thomas] Hardy, [W. B.] Yeats and Frost have all written epitaphs for themselves." He quotes all three epitaphs, which in their final versions read as follows: Hardy I never cared for Life ...
The great American poet Wallace Stevens, author of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and many other famous works, was also a longtime insurance executive. While researching him for my previous post, I decided to look up what his old employer, The Hartford (formerly the Hartford Accident and Indemnity ...
Poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler has published a refreshing article in Harvard magazine, in which she encourages the school to welcome mediocre students who also happen to be great writers. It's about time someone of her stature exploded the ideal of the "well-rounded" student ...
I saw Lincoln this week, and on balance I liked it very much. At the beginning and end (and occasionally in between) it's a sentimental pageant, with swelling chords and overbearing long takes, and for that we have Steven Spielberg to thank. The rest of the time, it's the most literate major motion ...
According to The Independent , a recent Yale-Moscow State University study has found "a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing." The conclusion was based on an evaluation of writing exercises assigned to 511 children and one or both of their ...
The poems had become unstoppable. She had kind of hit that mother lode, you know, like Brent oil or something. She'd gone through and found the reservoir. She was writing poems of an order that seemed to me quite extraordinary for this century....She was writing two or three a day, as though she ...
Not content with publishing a fake newspaper, producing a fake news channel, and delivering the best satire on the Web to millions of genuine fans, the staff of The Onion has compiled a fake encyclopedia. Just in time for the death of print, The Onion Book of Known Knowledge: A Definitive ...
Recently two brothers named Chaplin created the smallest book in the world. Their tiny tome, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, is etched on a microchip narrower than the width of a human hair. Malcolm Douglas Chaplin did the writing, Robert Chaplin did the etching, and the good people at Guinness ...
This past Friday I headed down to the Baltimore Book Festival, an annual three-day street fair full of readings, panels, small press exhibitions, and overstuffed bookshelves on city lawns. It was a pleasure to ramble around eating cinnamon pecans, playing hooky on whatever it was I was supposed to ...