Diebenkorn
I just discovered Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes (an Arts Journal blog) & wanted to recommend it to anyone with an interest in contemporary visual arts. I found Green’s blog because I had begun checking out Arts Journal after finding that cultural critic & book reviewer Scott McLemee’s blog Quick Study was hosted there. McLemee, [...]
Tillie Olsen
Tony Christini at A Practical Policy notes there is a new documentary about the American writer Tillie Olsen, by filmmaker Ann Hershey. From the SF Gate story about the film:
In the film, Olsen says she started writing about the lives of the working people she grew up with because “it was nearly impossible to [...]
More on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Finished my read-through of the novel for next term. I’m going to be using Frankenstein to focus several issues — education, which I mentioned previously, will be central, especially as it contributes to our idea of what makes us human. Oddly, the book has hardly anything to do with science, as such, because Shelley glides [...]
Rereading Frankenstein
I’ve been rereading Frankenstein the last couple of days because I’m going to teach it in my Imagining Science course next term. I’ve taught the book before, but never well, I suspect because I never managed to enter into its imaginative universe until now. The book is a bundle of narrative implausibilities & the science, [...]
Rilke’s Birthday
There was a period in my life — my late thirties — when I poured obsessively over Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus & Duino Elegies. I even got a German dictionary & worked word-by-word through some of the sonnets. I collected different translations. Dana Gioia (now Commissar of the NEA, but then just an aparatchik on [...]
Throwing Newsweek Away
I got a subscription to Newsweek as an automatic premium when I contributed to my local public radio station. It has been going straight from my post office box to the trash for two years now, so I am way ahead of the game.
Breaking a Bad Habit
For the last year or so I have been reading the Inside Higher Ed website & contributing occasionally to the discussions, but I’m going to have to stop. Not just stop posting in the forums, but stop reading. It’s sad but necessary, like leaving behind a bar you once loved because it has been taken [...]
An Exemplary Lyric by Jane Cooper
The poet Jane Cooper died in October of this year after a long life in poetry. Her first book came out the year I graduated from high school, I think, but I didn’t become aware of her work until about ten years ago. She was a “poet’s poet,” one supposes, who won prizes but didn’t [...]
Not Sentimental?
Here’s another poem — John Crowe Ransom’s “Dead Boy” — I have loved a long time & though I now find Ransom’s celebration of the “dynastic” families of the Agrarian South pretty offensive, the language of this poem is not sentimental. Ransom does not ask the reader to produce an emotional response for which [...]
Reevaluating James Wright’s “A Blessing”
There is a poem in my second book that channels Wright’s voice so effectively that even someone who knew Wright’s work fairly well might mistake it for the real thing. James Wright’s poetry was once tremendously important to me, but these days, when I go back to it, the work feels sentimental to me. I’m [...]
« go back — keep looking »
