Tenor Edmundas Seilius sings the Prologue to Britten's ghost opera The Turn of the Screw (with pianist Joyce Fieldsend) in what we're told is the dress rehearsal at the Opéra National du Rhin. I don't suppose any director's going to let the Narrator just stand in front of the curtain and tell what he has to tell about this "curious story," but this performance at least starts surprisingly...
Miranda Seymour enjoys a detailed insight into the daunting life of a Victorian hostess Gertrude Tennant, a centenarian born in 1818, was one of those formidable 19th-century hostesses whose names surface today primarily due to their unremarkable encounters with other, more eminent, Victorians. Heavy-browed and scornful-eyed, her chin supported by one of those lace swaddling bands favoured by dowagers...
More scholar books with Brontë mentions: The Female Gothic New Directions Edited by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith Palgrave Macmillan 12 Nov 2009 9780230222717 240 pages This rich and varied collection of essays makes a timely contribution to critical debates about the Female Gothic, a popular but contested area of literary studies. The contributors revisit key Gothic themes - gender, race, the...
I just woke up. I pulled an all-nighter Sunday Night because I had to read Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and I picked 6:00 last night to crash. I woke up at 5, showered, and checked the box score. The first thing that stands out is our defense. We held the Sycamores to just 30% shooting from the field and 25% from the free throw line. And then there's our own shooting and this really, really ugly...
Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading . These are my finds for the week. (All product descriptions are taken from Amazon.com or the publisher's website.) Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen - Found via an email from a publicist. Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses...
Q.: Why do we continue to read throughout our lives, even after long and intimate familiarity, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Proust? A.: “I think there is no question that, on the whole, the artist we value most is the artist who tells us most about human life.” [Henry James, “The Letters of Eugène Delacroix,” collected in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial...
A poet reads his work to a gathering of children, seven of whom ask questions. That’s the risky set-up in Herbert Morris’ “Reading to the Children” from his 1989 collection The Little Voices of the Pears . “Risky” because Kids + Poetry in the hands of most poets spells self-congratulation and enough cuteness to make Art Linkletter gag. Morris was a great poet and...
"There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson "There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." ~ Henry James "The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose." ~ George Gissing "If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it...
& Far Rockaway "the cure of souls." Henry James The radiant soda of the seashore fashions Fun, foam and freedom. The sea laves The Shaven sand. And the light sways forward On self-destroying waves. The rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes, With business suits and traffic's motion; The lolling man lies with the passionate sun, Or is drunken in the ocean. A socialist health take...
I. A book's title is at least as important as its cover. Certainly that's the case with Sue Kaufman and her legacy. Many many people have at least heard of her Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967). How many can say the same of one of her earlier novels, Green Holly (1961)? First, Green Holly is good, a take on New York society in the tradition of Edith Wharton and Henry James, updated to the 1950s. But...
A recent post by OGIC at About Last Night having convinced me that I'd been away from Henry James too long, I'm currently hip-deep in The Ambassadors (1905), which, knowing my tastes, was where OGIC suggested I dive in--right into the heart of baroque, roundabout late period James. And she was right: I find myself deeply admiring James's odd combination of tenacity and circumspection, his constant...
James Hynes, literary-horror storyteller extraordinaire, writes to second The Aspern Papers love — and reveals that he once wrote a screenplay based on the Henry James novella. “It got kicked around by a few people in the film biz (the way a cat kicks around a piece of prey before he snaps its neck),” he [...]
At this stage in its existence, Richardson & Bluhm book publishers is not doing well enough to allow its principals, or anyone else, to quit the day job. But it's sure fun making books, and fun has something to say for itself. Given a choice of things to do Monday, I spent part of it tinkering with the existing product. I added a couple of introductory essays to our edition of Tom Paine's Letters...
I’m in the minority, I gather, but my favorite of Henry James’ novellas is probably The Aspern Papers, what with all the narrator’s scheming, the old woman’s secrecy, and the delicious melodrama of the finale. (The book centers on a biographer who’s determined to uncover a dead poet’s rumored love letters.) So I got a kick [...]
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