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From Hamlet to Sanjuro, duels, we believe, are climactic events in narratives; they are the vivid realization of an inevitable conflict between the participants’ opposing notions of honor or duty. But if you’re watching Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and expect its pivotal duel to include […]
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What was the impact of surveillance on writers? If a writer is under surveillance by secret police agents, and he or she knows it, does that change what he or she wrote? Would the literature be a reply, a repudiation, an angry answer to the surveillance? During the Cold war years, in several Latin American […]
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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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