… A surfeit of reverence: Writers Into Saints by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
I didn't get the same impression from Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I reviewed, as Parks seems to have. And, having witnessed clinical depression, it must indeed have taken great courage for Woolf to continue working in spite of it. That said, apart from their work, artists are as often as not less than meets the eye.
… Conservative counter-culture: The Arroyo—Breaking the Left’s Monopoly on the Arts.
The Arroyo is really an amazing accomplishment. Brought into being on a micro budget, it’s a feature quality film. And to label it conservative would be limiting and unfair. It’s only conservative in the sense that it doesn’t lie about its subject. It tells the story of a rancher on the border who gets fed up with the heartless Mexican cartels using illegals to smuggle drugs across his land. Ignored by local law enforcement and deserted by our corrupt and hapless federal government, the hero takes a stand alone — and finds himself in a world of trouble
… Noticed again: A Chain on the Great Feelings.
You could think of [Stevie] Smith as an eighteenth-century poet with twentieth-century disenchantment. A brooding woman who pulls herself together by working in tight forms, Smith has a style that people call idiosyncratic, but I think it’s merely historical. Like her British male contemporaries W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Smith pulled in the verse techniques of an earlier century and used them to ironic advantage. These poets synthesized literary traditions instead of flinging them away wholesale—they were all eighteenth century poets of a sort.… Here we go again: The Unkillable (?) Dream of the Great American Novel.
… In brief: THE ONE-SENTENCE NOVEL.
… For better or for worse: Revisiting the Backlist: Marrying Libraries.
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