This morning's Lull Reprt …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Green hell: Flight by Elephant — The Barnes & Noble Review.

The British began their exit by ship, aircraft, automobile, and train, but the tardiness of their departure and the lack of infrastructure in parts of the country meant that large numbers of British and Indian troops, officials, workers, and their families had to make their way out on foot.

… Still going strong: The Master.

[Elizabeth] Spencer is back with a new collection, Starting Over. The title takes its cue from the book’s many characters trying to find new homes, recover from life’s fumbles. Some might muse that Spencer herself is starting over, once more back to the typewriter, but there is nothing of rebirth here. She is, as she ever was, one of America’s best short story writers, with her invention and craft undimmed.

… FYI — Correspondent’s Course: American Indian Authors You Must Read.

… Speaking out: An interview with... Harold Bloom on Literary Criticism.

I maintain canonical standards for the study and appreciation of literature. I practice philology and knowledge of the history of language. I do not give in to political considerations, however they mask themselves. All this business about gender, social class, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation is nonsense. I'm 81. I'm not prepared to temporise any more. I've been prophesying like Jeremiah since 1968, warning the profession that it was destroying itself. And it has. There are fewer and fewer people teaching English, or any other kind of literature, in American universities. Students don't wish to study garbage and that's all they're offered.

… James Joyce and the public domain situation.

… for some jurisdictions, [Joyce's] towering classics of modernist literature are available online for free – and for some, they’re not.

… A testament to learning: Bibliographing the ’sixties.

I am struggling against self-pity when I say that learning is no longer considered the sine qua non of the scholar, especially not in English departments. At one time, as J. V. Cunningham wrote in a 1964 Carleton Miscellany symposium on graduate education in English, bibliography was numbered among the specialized disciplines of literary study—that is, every literary scholar was assumed to be a capable hand at it, if not an adept. Now, however, what is prized in English departments is theoretical sophistication, interpretive cunning; being up to the minute, but not necessarily knowing “the impervious facts/ So well you can dispense with them” (to quote again from Cunningham), is what is sought in the bright young hires.

… Remembering John Hollander: "Sorry, H.T.L."