… Hierarchies: In Defense of the Canon | The American Conservative.
… In cad e you wondered: Why Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline deserve success as well as scandal.
I'm not sure if Journey ages better or not, though Cancer is far from from being Miller's best book (that would probably be The Colossus of Maroussi). The problem with Journey was identified years ago by J.B. Priestly, who noted that a mad account of sane world or a sane account of a mad world can work, but a mad account of a mad world can never be entirely satisfying.
… The course of true love: My Love Affair With Gerard Manley Hopkins.
If Father Hopkins were to know that in the 21st century a woman would write these words he could hardly be more surprised than at the fact he was known to posterity as a poet at all. For it wasn’t until 1918, long after his death, that his friend Robert Bridges published a collection of his poems. And fifty years later the ecstatic poem of the glory of God revealed in nature, God’s Grandeur, would prove a fulcrum in the life of a young English woman.… Homecoming: Ved Mehta's Vision of Writing.
“I think the coinage of writing has been debased over the last 50 years,” he says. “Now people don’t know how to write letters. I think hardly anyone writes formal prose these days. John Updike was the last writer I know who wrote formal prose. By formal prose I mean writing that is elegant, precise, clear. Now the writing has become quite a bit like schoolgirls writing to their mums — letters about what’s going on in their schools. It’s different.”… Timothy McDermott: An appreciation.
… Reading on the move: 5 Books to Take on Your Travels.As a philosopher, he could be withering about the attempt by some scientists to explain how the universe could have emerged from “nothing”, properly understood. He remained adamant that it is impossible, in the terms naturalism allows, to say how anything could exist at all.
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