Philadelphia Inquirer (Free subscription) | 12 hours ago
It's hard to imagine that Henry James and Jane Jacobs would have had much in common. But James, the hopelessly aristocratic novelist who retreated to England to escape the chaos of industrial America, and Jacobs, the scrappy urbanist who celebrated the disorder of city life, did share one love: Rittenhouse Square.
georgiasam (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
The sacred festival of Spendgasm is almost upon us again, and with it the need to recycle all my lines about much how I hate it, turkey-murdering arse-end of the year that it is. For me, Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling noted, Christmas was always all about commercialism, but in recent years I see a note of religion creeping in, and I don’t like that. Speaking of the great Sir Arthur, the recent death...
LATICONOMICS (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Nock's Theory of Education Mises Daily: by Jacques Barzun [The Freeman , 1971] One is glad that he left these luminous pages in their pristine form of lectures (he begs indulgence for doing it), because that form shows him off at his best: full of charm, candid in his prejudices, elegant in diction, a natural ironist, and a man in whom thinking is clearly a familiar exercise. I remember picking up...
Aliya Whiteley and Neil Ayres (Free subscription) | 11/30/2009
...and therefore they have gone to a charity shop for rehoming. Sob. - The Yiddish Policeman's Ball by Michael Chabon - Lots of Charles Dickens - The collected plays of Brecht - A biography of Brecht - Anything relating to Brecht. I love him, but life it too damned short. - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre - The Victim by Saul Bellow...
A Boat Against the Current (Free subscription) | 11/30/2009
“The Government majority for their part appeared captivated by Mr. [Stanley] Baldwin's candour. His admission of having been utterly wrong, with all his sources of knowledge, upon a vital matter for which he was responsible was held to be redeemed by the frankness with which he declared his error and shouldered the blame. There was even a strange wave of enthusiasm for a Minister who did not...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/26/2009
Wilkie Collins's novel caused unprecedented excitement when it appeared in 1859, and has not lost its capacity to thrill One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Victorian readers opened Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round to find the concluding instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, and, immediately following it, the opening instalment of a new novel with no author ascribed. They joined a...
Isola di Rifiuti (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
Signal A YEAR CCCXXVII The sheer density of occurrence—mastiff with the inky newspaper in its mouth, two chums pitching snowballs at the red-scarf’d skaters, the reedy- voiced deacon who mulls the cloister tapestry with its precise flowers—requires formal analogy, aleatory flanged plaiting of its signals, its strands. An ant writing its memoirs up the length of a grass- blade, a red-...
Bryan Appleyard (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
As I don't have anything to say today - or, rather, too much - I am relying on the words of others. I picked up Henry James's English Hours at the weekend. It has an essay on the interment of Browning in Westminster Abbey. First it made me laugh:'A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey; but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great
DownWithTyranny! (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
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...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
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...
BrontëBlog (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
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...
And The Valley Shook (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
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...
At Home With Books (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
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...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 11/12/2009
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...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
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...
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