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The late Gilbert Sorrentino once told me that “even Kafka has to write ‘He opened the window.’” It took me some time to feel the force of this remark. But after years of studying modernist literature, and after I found myself pushing further and further back into the 19th century, I began to see what […]
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As Covid-19 spread across Europe in early 2020, my wife and I were in Seville, Spain, where we were spending three months reading, writing, walking, and enjoying the Andalusian cuisine, language, people, and climate. As the infection spread, the WHO declared a pandemic, and lockdown began to look imminent in the USA, we realized that […]
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What is a conversation? And why should conversations matter to poetry? (1) ‘They found you out?’ ‘Not they’. ‘Well—after all– What know we of the secret of a man?” (2) ‘No more wine? Then we’ll push back chairs and talk. A final glass for me, though: cool, i’ faith!’ (3) ‘But do […]
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Alexander Pope thought he was dullness incarnate; Henry Fielding accused him of murdering the English Language; Aaron Hill compared his acting to ‘the heavings of a disjointed caterpillar’. Even one of his editors accused him of ‘inordinate vanity’. Actor, playwright, theatre manager and Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber (pronounced Sibber) is the fall guy of English […]
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At the end of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, the prototype of the analytical detective, offers a disparaging verdict on the Parisian Prefect of Police. The Prefect has “impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, […]
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How Progressive Writers, Anna Jameson to Vernon Lee, Sought and Found An Alternative Germany. LADY BRACKNELL German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed, I believe is so. MISS PRISM.[Calling.] Cecily, Cecily! … intellectual pleasures await you. Your German grammar is on the table. Pray open it at page fifteen. We will repeat yesterday’s lesson.CECILY.[Coming […]
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To the parodyists Sellar and Yeatman, the Norman Conquest of 1066 was one of only two noteworthy dates in English history. The date has loomed large in literary histories too, where it has been considered a ‘solid bookend’, between Beowulf and Old English literature on the one hand, and Chaucer, his precursors and his imitators […]
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I’ve made my name mostly as a Woody Guthrie scholar. Around the time of the Guthrie centenary in 2012, I became increasingly aware of references to Guthrie as ‘the father of American protest music’ and ‘the first singer-songwriter’ etc. That implied something that Woody himself would surely have denied: that he hadn’t an extensive inherited […]
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