Michelle, earlier this month, posted about her disgruntlement with the kind of student whose only frame of reference is his or her own experience, and who is disinclined to consider any other possible frames of reference. As Michelle puts it: It seems that particular mindset just isn’t embracing one of the aspects of literature i […]
About a year ago, back at ye olde blog, I wrote a post about olfactory memory that I well-intentionedly meant to follow up on, making it the beginning of a sequence of mini-essays on the five senses, but then didn’t. I haven’t completely abandoned the idea, but I couldn’t think of anything clever to write […]
Happy centenary Bloomsday to one and all! Reading one page per day sounds rather enjoyable. Especially via RSS. (I just wish there were annotations a la Pepys’ Diary.) Perhaps you’d like a postcard for the occasion? Or some music? And, of course, no Bloomsday is complete without a visit to Ulysses for Dummies. Oh, and […]
There’s a great passage in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler in which the unnamed Reader (always addressed in the second person) enters a bookstore and is confronted by the intimidating legions of Books You Haven’t Read. Calvino arrays them into categories, including: the Books You’ve Been Planning […]
Found at my local library’s big semiannual used book sale today: Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of PoetryPaul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic FormHerbert Liebowitz, ed., Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in ReviewJ. D. McClatchy, ed., The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry All together, they cost a grand total […]
What, though, is that happy cliché of literary criticism, a "minor" work? Surely not, prima facie, a work by a minor writer, since we’re told major writers produce their share. Yet if major writers produce minor works without losing their mark of heaven, doesn’t fairness dictate that minor writers can produce major works without losing […]
Via Maud Newton, I found the Invisible Library, "a collection of books that only appear in other books." At last there’s a library for The Murder of Gonzago (the play-within-a-play in Hamlet), the novels from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the complete monographs of Sherlock Holmes, and all the imaginary books in […]