Benjamin Reiss, responding to Joseph Epstein’s pronouncement on the supposed death of American LIt: “In any kind of serious scholarship, it’s easy to slip so far into analysis that we lose sight of what brought us into this business in the first place: our love of great writing. While our book is not really the place for P.D.A., evidence of this love should not be absent from our teaching for a moment. But love can’t be confining. Sometimes it involves traveling to uncomfortable places, the area outside the fortress. If your love can’t survive that, it’ll never be safe—no matter how high the gates you build around it.”
Have no fear, postmodernism—Jonathan Lethem is here.
Stephen Jay Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” redux? In Salon, Alan Lightman—author of that wonderfully weird book Einstein’s Dreams—takes on the science vs. religion question. Only it’s not quite science vs. religion anymore.
Devin Harner and Alexander Long, on the backlash against Philip Levine’s appointment as the new Poet Laureate: “What’s often left unsaid, or sheepishly implied by Levine’s detractors, is that the nameless, working-class people whom Levine has rendered or imagined for us in precise journalistic detail are not the stuff that poems are made of. William Carlos Williams dispelled that untruth at the turn of the previous century. It may be that those who have never had to pick up a red wheelbarrow are simply incapable of imagining it as something beautiful.”
When Hank Williams died in 1953, the 29-year-old left a hole in the country music scene, not to mention a notebook full of unrecorded songs. A band of artists including Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Norah Jones, and Jack White has set to remedy that, and honor Williams, with a new album of interpretations. Among them, White’s “You Know That I Know.”
On the power of words: French feminists are protesting the fact that women must choose between “madame” and “mademoiselle” when filling out forms.
Why the creator of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Odense, Denmark, wants to submerge the monument in the local harbor but leave “its head still visible from the pier.” (To his credit, though, the man’s plan entails hauling the thing back on Andersen’s birthday.)
Feeling particularly depressed by the state of affairs lately, but don’t want to give up your realist tastes? Well, here’s a (partial) reading list for you.