Light reading (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
At the LRB, Michael Wood on T. S. Eliot (with whose poems I was utterly obsessed from ages 11-13 or so - I have just been thinking about it as I spend the evening in a mesmerized trance of reading Jo Walton 's excellent forthcoming novel Among Others , which is appearing too long a time from now even to have an Amazon link but is basically what you would get if you tailored Graham Joyce's The Tooth...
Pen On Fire (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
There just wasn't enough time with these two on the radio. So I sent them each questions and they each generously responded. Jincy Willett.... Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: On the show, you'd mentioned an author you just read and loved. Farrell? Book was...? Jincy Willett: The title is The Siege of Krishnapur , by J.G. Farrell. It won the Booker Prize in 1973. It's about the Sepoy Rebellion, p.o.v. clueless...
the purest of treats (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
He never graduated high school. He laid brick and cinder blocks for a living. Sometimes he pointed out houses and other buildings he had worked on. He used to tell me, "I worked hard, very hard." He started reading seriously as a young boy. He knew a lot about history and geography. When I knew him he read mainly fiction. He liked most kinds of popular novels but especially ones that were...
Books are my only friends (Free subscription) | 10/12/2009
My eldest is becoming more and more interested in myths. He loves the Greek myths, and now thanks to the Avengers and Marvel Comics, he is becoming interested in Nordic myths as well. I wanted to get him some books on other mythos, but I can't think of any to get. Most I have seen are either too simple or way too academic. The only things I can think of are the two D'Aulaire's myth books . Those are...
Waggish (Free subscription) | 10/03/2009
Williams wrote the serious, affecting academic novel Stoner before he wrote this (mostly) epistolary novel about Augustus Caesar. Despite Williams' protestations that both novels are concerned with power, the poor academic Stoner had no power while the characters in this one have nothing but. Augustus himself does not speak until the short, final section. The rest of the novel is told in letters between...
sonnets at 4 a.m. (Free subscription) | 09/24/2009
My thanks to C. Dale Young for posting this link to Daniel Nester's very funny article in The Morning News about life in (and after leaving) the poetry megaplex of NYC. On his site, Nester says he took his title from an essay by Joan Didion, but I suspect she was cribbing from Robert Graves' memoir about his experiences in WWI. .
Brit Lit Blogs (Free subscription) | 09/10/2009
Interesting news via Booksurfer : "Cambridge University Library have launched a fund-raising campaign to aquire the archive of First world War poet Siegried Sassoon's personal papers. These include a draft of the controversial anti-war statement A Soldier's Declaration . The archive is comprised of seven boxes of material, among which are 'Sassoon's journals, pocket notebooks compiled on the...
Gumbo (Free subscription) | 09/05/2009
"Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them." -- Robert Graves “Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use” -- Mark Twain “I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something,...
What's Left in the Church (Free subscription) | 09/03/2009
There are always lists of books purporting to be what one should read. There are also books readers love. A friend of mine sent me along a link that puts them side by side. 1. ULYSSES by James Joyce* 2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald* 3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce* 4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov* 5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley 6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William...
Miami Herald (Free subscription) | 09/01/2009
''Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves' overpowering memoir of trench warfare in World War I. Pervaded by a wry humor even in the midst of the most gruesome scenes, the book brackets the nightmare with an account of Graves' unhappy upper-class childhood and the dreamlike years right after the war when simply being alive was the most unlikely of fairy tales. Ultimately, despite the wealth of shocking...
An Awfully Big Blog Adventure (Free subscription) | 08/26/2009
Many, many years ago I lost count of how many books I have. I only know that I don't have anything like enough bookshelves to keep them on. And of course I keep on acquiring the things. In only the last week, the tally runs somehing like this: A secondhand copy of the Oxford Book of English Prose, which I couldn't resist and looks such a great book to keep in the car, for those little moments when...
The Voyage (Free subscription) | 08/06/2009
Duncan and I took his brother and sister to summer scheme. He asked to look in the charity shop and being in no hurry, I parked the car and off we went. Well talk about hitting pay dirt. Someone must have cleared their book shelves and dropped the boxes off very recently. There were a good few children's book spilling out so I asked if I could dig through the lot and the man working there, a good guy...
Notes on (the Writing) Life (Free subscription) | 08/04/2009
Poems for Shark Week Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water... —from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman In honor of Shark Week, the Discovery Channel's annual weeklong series of television programs devoted to sharks, Poets.org has compiled 35 Poems about Sharks , and examined how the animals have been represented in classic and contemporary poetry. Described...
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