I had greater ambitions for this novel, and I was also excavating some personal stuff that I wasn’t in a hurry to delve into. I wanted something deeper and (dare I say it) more lasting. For my first book, I was in a hurry, and I’d felt like I’d allowed “good enough” to be good enough. I was determined not to settle this time.
Intimate engagement with an imaginative text is about far more than just gender, though gender definitely matters. But in fact, since I wasn’t looking at any other translations while I worked on the Greek and my own version, I didn’t really know whether (or if so, how exactly) the text I was creating was different from those created by men. It was only at the end, once I was done with my version and had to explain to the general public what was distinctive about it, that I went and looked closely at various scenes in other translations—and realized that there are some very significant differences that do have to do with gender. For instance, as I’ve discussed before, I don’t import misogynistic language (like “sluts” and “whores”) where the original doesn’t have it, but—as I was shocked to discover—many translations by men indeed do this, even those which are touted for being “faithful.” I also, for example, don’t make the goddess Calypso seem ridiculous—but I discovered that most male translators work very hard to present her as a hysterical, absurd “nymph” whose frustrated sexual desire is essentially laughable. The Greek doesn’t do this, and nor do I. I didn’t know it was even a thing to avoid, until I looked at the other translations.
Nearly 230 pages long, it follows Walker, a veteran of D-Day who grew up in Nova Scotia, from 1946 to 1953. Instead of returning to Canada, his journey takes him from New York (where he works in the docks), to Los Angeles and San Francisco. He becomes a journalist with two especial interests, being on the “City Desk” – urban regeneration and homelessness. It is clear from the outset that Walker is a damaged individual, and part of the momentum of the poem is a quest for redemption, of being able to put himself back together after witnessing and committing atrocities.
… Pinker’s God has no mystery. He’s a do-gooder or a do-nothing. (Secularists don’t assert an evil God—that would be even more superstitious than a good God.) But Christians know that God is, in full, unknowable, and a day of intense suffering is at the center of their worship.
Golden Exits deserves some credit for being the most archive-centric film in a long time, possibly ever. There have been bookstore salesgirls, art gallery assistants, publishing assistants, and, of course, librarians, but archive assistants are much rarer. Here, the adventure comes from the aura of mystery around Naomi. She describes herself as “transient,” and her motives with men and interest in the archive field are opaque. Naomi swoops into Nick’s life, and suddenly makes archive work look like a perfect piece of precious Brooklyn hipsterdom. The specific material is far less important than the atmosphere of the archive itself, as the archive is a convenient space for establishing sexual tension. It’s small and intimate, and right near Nick’s chicly bohemian apartment. “You like routine,” Naomi observes of Nick at one point. It’s obvious she’s there to shake it up.
I would opt for mystery. As for the solution to the paradox, if by that one means an understanding of it by means of finite that may well be an impossibility.
… Cather was right—My Ántonia is a queer book, flickering with darkness and light, a true representation of its time, both in terms of wisdom and in terms of ignorance.
One of the takeaways from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan is that to understand the past it is necessary to reconstruct what the people at the time did not know.
“Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’” tries, perhaps too hard, to embrace that multiplicity. Its origins are interesting. Three years ago, to commemorate Eliot’s stay, thirty-five local volunteers formed the Waste Land Research Group. Together, they read the poem, planned the exhibition, chose the artworks and the organization of the show. Defying Eliot’s “I can connect/ Nothing with nothing,” they were determined, instead, to build connections. This does not altogether work.
The 52-year-old, who lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Claire Messud, and their two teenage children, describes himself as naturally “buoyant”, a disposition in evidence at a cafe in New York. Wood is in the city to teach a masterclass at Columbia University, a duty he combines with being a book critic at the New Yorker and professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. It is a life of satisfying intellectual endeavour and no small public acclaim, but even as a boy, says Wood – the son of two teachers who struggled, in an act of what he has called “financial insanity”, to send Wood to Eton – he displayed an essential cheerfulness that others in his family decisively lacked; it’s a concern of Upstate, his second novel and seventh book, to consider where the roots of these variants lie.
And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.
STEVE KROFT: Well, I take the fact that you're still giving interviews that you're aging better than you thought you would.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I think that's perfectly true. Each book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
The prevailing criticism of Brookner is that her work is repetitive. There are concerns she returns to: the single woman who wishes not to be, the dutiful daughter overwhelmed by filial obligation, the family that is not unhappy but not quite happy. I find such intelligence and vitality in her books that it does not bother me that they amount to variations on a theme. Repetition is part of the particular pleasure; the books’ familiarity, as well as the cunning with which the author pushes herself to reinvent the form she’s chosen as her own.
Of A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. By Gregory Orr. From The WaPo:
Poems are “turbulently alive with the disorder that plagues or exalts us,” and when we order our words, we create an expressive but stable structure.
Orr, who has published a dozen books of poems and has taught for more than 40 years at the University of Virginia, guides readers through classic poems and writing exercises he has used with his own students. The implication is clear:Anyone can learn to understand poetry because the impulse to engage with it has been passed down through generations.
But Orr addresses the experienced writer, too. As the book progresses, he explains the necessity of writing to the “threshold” where disorder and order meet, intensifying the sense of being alive and placing lyric poetry under the pressure of telling a story. He also shows how writers can use various poetic tools and determine where their poems begin and end as part of the revision process.
By now, he's used to the hitch schedule (10 days on, four off), knows all the trap site safety protocols (truck always pointed toward the way out, the doors always wide open in case you need a quick getaway), and can stand the smell of bear bait (mostly roadkill). He's used to horseback rides into Yellowstone's backcountry, long drives up rough forest roads and bear encounters don't scare him as much as the average person — he called it a "controlled fear."
By the way the dictionary has both bear and bears as the plural, and the linked article has both interchangeably.
La Rochefoucauld is a clever, careful writer. But before one can understand him rationally, I think, one must feel him viscerally; or rather, strive to experience and judge the veracity of his observations as they reflect against one's own soul.
Are there any objective, or at least non-subjective, criteria for beauty?
Yes, I think there are. The French, after all, have Versailles, and they have so many marvelous buildings which are perfectly proportioned in every sort of style. They have the classical tradition of remarkable taste, but unfortunately, as soon as the petite bourgeoisie takes over, then it becomes grotesque. French taste has gone down the drain. Even their painting is now very poor. Only think what they used to be in the eighteenth century. The whole question of taste is very difficult because taste is so personal, so private a thing, but I think that a person who has a certain classical education is entitled to some say in matters of taste. Classical education is the background. I’m afraid there is also natural bad taste, and bad taste is more general than good taste. When I see the garish, the obvious, the bright, the sexy, all of that appals, alas.
To come back, then, to what appeared to be a passing, but was not, point about the afterlife: Christianity, and most other religions, are all in the clouds, in the great hereafter – Judaism tends to concentrate on the here and now, and indeed its rules. But in minutiae, there is humanity: it is in reaching after the grandiose things in life that civilization gets skewed. To be microscopic, comically, is to create engagement: these people, the joke says, are like you, because like you, they sweat the small stuff.
I guess Don Adams makes it, because his father was Jewish, But he was raised in his mother's Catholic faith and had a Catholic funeral.
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
In her Oct. 16 message, Bacon said that working from far away, as Gwynn had done, was “not ideal” and that West Chester would now search for someone “local-ish.”
But it was never intended to be merely “local-ish.” It was, from the start, “international-ish.”
The Guardian recently had a pretty lousy one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest book. The Times does seem to have succumbed to the predictability of much contemporary American journalism. The Pos still surprises occasionally.
Adams continued to issue bold predictions throughout the election cycle, a spooky number of which actually came true, including the most important one: Trump’s victory. Adams was arguably the most accurate pundit in the last election. Cashing in on his new fame, he has written Win Bigly, analyzing the election and detailing his theories of persuasion.
Almost every time I read an article, post, etc. on politics, I anticipatorily steel myself for the note, somewhere in the article, or if there are comments, there, about how people like me are problems to be solved. Even in our peaceful world at Books Inq., a link to Camille Paglia's latest leads to her ignorant proclamation on the nature of trans people, or a link to poetry and the Super Bowl Coke commercial that included trans people and somehow isn't a good thing because somehow it is political. It's not political, it's life. My life more to the point. Blessed yet cursed with a brain anatomy that tells me, as surely as your brain tells you what you are, that tells me that my brain and soul is female even though I was born with a male body. Being trans is not madness, nor sexual deviancy, nor moral degeneracy of me or society, nor a mortal sin, nor a red flag to waive in the eyes of the body politic, no matter how ignorant. It's simply the way my brain was made, "Before you were in the womb I Knew you." God says. And here is a link to neuroanatomical studies on trans brains if you want to look at the science of it. So if you think that people like me should be returned to the world "that used to be" where everything was good, especially if you are a white male (but really never was, even for them, and certainly not for anyone who wasn't a white male) or if we are the bleeding edge of what is wrong with today's world, remember the science and this is how we are made, and we are people who are real and hurt, and the fact that your life really won't get better at all by calling me and people like me sub human.
“I have a certain contempt for people who write autobiographical characters that are really likable, always do the right thing, and are just so virtuous. I think, how dumb,” he said. “I’m pretty comfortable taking a personal avatar and making him or her do awful things. I get to do them in my fiction, and maybe that’s why I don’t do them in my life.”
I position myself as an agnostic. I don’t see evidence for any kind of supernatural being or intervention, but also understand that we are partially blind to what’s out there and hence should show some humility. I see atheism as being inconsistent with the scientific method, as it is, essentially, belief in nonbelief. It does not offer any proof of nonexistence as that would be literally impossible through science. Atheism elevates belief to a rational argument that is very ill-founded epistemologically. You may not believe in God, but to affirm its nonexistence with certainty is not scientifically consistent. If you are nonbeliever, the only position consistent with science is agnosticism.
Anecdotal Evidence has many of the strengths of Cope’s older work; it is concise, accessible, and sincere. Its poems are very good, just different from the treasured pieces of the ’80s and ’90s. An example is “Naga-Uta” (a Japanese form of alternating five and seven syllable lines — a sort of extended haiku), which begins with some quietly Anglo-Saxon alliteration and then settles into the sparer Japanese imagery associated with the form. Another example is the musically lilting “Lantern Carol,” the best of several poems in which this nonbelieving poet longs for the solace of religion.
As I told Dave in an email, I have no beef against advertising. Both Dave and I are admirers of L.E. Sissman's poetry, and Sissman worked in advertising. Dana Gioia, one of our premier poets, revived the fortunes of Jello when he worked for General Foods. Ad copy done in verse sounds like a promising idea. But I don't want my Coke served with "inclusiveness, identity, individuality," and I don't like my poetry soiled with politics.
“When you review old pieces, you have a double-sided response: On the one hand, it’s ‘Gosh, how was I so smart? How could I write such a beautiful sentence?’ On the other hand, it’s ‘Gosh, what a piece of crap! How I could I be so banal, so jejune, so ignorant?’ The combination of legitimate pride and legitimate embarrassment is a standard one.”
How do you feel about white artists doing black music?
I'd bite off the Beatles, or anybody else. It's all one world, one planet and one groove. You're supposed to learn from each other, blend from each other, and it moves around like that. You see that rocket ship leave yesterday? We can maybe leave this planet. We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think black and white gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers! They could be ready to party, or they could be ready to eat us. We don't know, but we've got to get over this shit of not getting along with each other.
So yes, Lafferty is at last getting his due as a great writer in all but one crucial way: as a Catholic novelist. Most of Lafferty’s elite fans like him despite the fact he was Catholic. They don’t yet grasp what the cranky old man from Tulsa really meant with his electric sentences and blood-drenched tales.
The burning question that was asked at the time, and it is a question that glimmers to this day, was why Wilde had not taken advantage of the chance to flee the country that was tacitly offered to him by the authorities on that fateful day—the adjective is unavoidable—April 5, 1895, when a warrant for his arrest on charges of homosexual crimes was held in abeyance for an hour and a half, time enough for him to take the steamer to Calais and immunity from prosecution. Even his mother had urged him to go, but go he would not. “I decided it was nobler and more beautiful to stay,” he told the love of his life, Lord Alfred Douglas. “I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter.” To the end he connived in and embraced his own downfall.
But the bigger question is this: We have more government, at all levels, than we’ve ever had before. Yet failures like this keep happening. The FBI, after all, missed the Tsarnaevs (who committed the Boston Marathon bombing) despite being warned by the Russian government. It missed the 9/11 attacks even though it was investigating Zacarias Moussaoui — agents investigating Moussaoui hit so many roadblocks that they joked that Osama bin Laden must have had a mole in the Bureau HQ. And, of course, the San Bernardino shooters and Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen escaped the net as well.
If memory serves, a friend of ours told us once that Updike's father once visited one of his classes in high school once and made a very nice impression.
Ian McKellen, in his one-man show Acting Shakespeare did a bit of Macbeth using the original Elizabethan accent. That was a great show, by the way, as you can see.
After sitting next to Robert Lowell at a dinner party, Fainlight said that he had “infuriated” her with his dismissive attitude towards the idea of female poets.
God, I don't know where I'd be without female poets. I fell in love with H.D.'s poetry when I was about 15, having come upon "Pear Tree" one day at the Holmesburg Library. Then I fell in love with Denise Levertov's poetry. Along the way there was Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell (a relative of Robert Lowell), Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Marianne Moore, Gene Derwood … I could go on, but you get the idea. By the way, as I recall, Robert Lowell claimed to have been influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, so maybe he was just putting Fainlight on.
I almost added this in the post below about reusing posts for environmental reasons and Bored of the Rings ... "I was looking for another link to put here for a review (don't click on it, it's a fake link) but couldn't really find one."
Below Frank posted to a list of the 30 Funniest Books. The Funniest Book Ever is Bored of the Rings, a parody of Lord of the Rings by the Harvard (later National) Lampoon people. I can't really find a good review to post here, but one statement in one customer review on Amazon caught my attention: "Probably have to be 55 and older to appreciate it."
The Enlightenment may seem an ambitious topic for a cognitive psychologist to take up from scratch. Numerous historians have dedicated entire careers to it, and there remains a considerable diversity of opinion about what it was and what its impact has been. But from this and previous work we get intimations of why Pinker thinks he is the person for the job. Historians have laboured under the misapprehension that the key figures of the Enlightenment were mostly philosophers of one stripe or another. Pinker has made the anachronistic determination that, in fact, they were all really scientists - indeed, "cognitive neuroscientists" and "evolutionary psychologists."
In short, he thinks that they are people like him and that he is thus possessed of privileged insights into their thought denied to mere historians. The latter must resort to careful reading and fraught interpretation in lieu of being able directly to channel what Enlightenment thinkers really thought.
It doesn’t take much parsing to conclude that protecting all and sundry from the terrible experience of having your feelings hurt is the end of free speech altogether. Since nowadays “you can’t argue with what people feel,” umbrage is freed from rational justification. Given that the better part of the human race is crazy, stupid, or both, there’s nary a thought in the world whose airing won’t offend somebody. Doesn’t Darwin offend creationists? Furthermore, in granting so much power to woundedness, we incentivise hypersensitivity. If we reward umbrage, we will get more of it. We do reward umbrage, and we’re buried in it by the truckload.
The surprises began almost as soon as a camera was lowered into the first borehole, around December 1. The undersides of ice shelves are usually smooth due to gradual melting. But as the camera passed through the bottom of the hole, it showed the underside of the ice adorned with a glittering layer of flat ice crystals—like a jumble of snowflakes—evidence that in this particular place, sea water is actually freezing onto the base of the ice instead of melting it.“It blew our minds,” saysChristina Hulbe, a glaciologist from the University of Otago in New Zealand, who co-led the expedition.
A rather parochial list, it seems to me. No Beerbohm. No Peter Peter De Vries. No Flann O'Brien. How about Waugh's Decline and Fall? Or Anthony Burgess's Inside Mr. Enderby? I didn't find A Confederacy of Dunces even interesting, let alone funny — though I know many other people did. I guess humor is in the individual funny bone.
Like students of today, Greeks who lived within the Roman Empire often toiled under real threats from their schoolmasters as they learned Latin. But unlike today, these ancient Greeks were not drilled in word endings in the hope of being able to translate the most famous works of Latin literature. Quite the opposite, actually: these Greeks memorized bilingual dialogues to learn to speak Latin in the marketplace, in the law courts, in the army, and in their business dealings.
Encountering Princess Shikishi's waka after reading "Heaven-Haven" was purely a matter of coincidence, but I always harbor the notion (an overly romantic notion, no doubt) that, when it comes to reading poetry, such coincidences are placed in our path for a reason.
