September 30, 2013
The Poetics of Campus Security Alerts
Someone needs to write the book on a new genre of literature gripping the land. It is a short form; its characters are stock; its storylines nearly never begin in […]
September 6, 2013
The Passing of Giants
It’s an old saw that friends and family tend to pass in clusters. But recent days have seen the loss of two dear friends of The Kenyon Review and poets of […]
September 2, 2013
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear!
The magnificent Edward Lear, who described himself as “3 parts crazy—and wholly affectionate,” found his way into the Times’ Arts Beat this past week. The piece begins: “Ever wonder what […]
August 31, 2013
Not Guilty–Of Course
Out of the hurricane of words published in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, I found Robin D.G. Kelley’s essay, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked,” to […]
August 30, 2013
This World: Dig It
All morning, from across the bogs and beyond the whale-road, tributes have been pouring in for Seamus Heaney. It’s a lovely thing to witness: words (by Heaney, by his admirers) […]
August 30, 2013
The Strange Case of the Novelist from Egypt
About mid-way through his Nobel Prize lecture, read by Mohamed Salmawy at the Swedish Academy in 1988, the acknowledged father of the Arabic novel Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) made the point […]
August 26, 2013
This Is Your Writing On Drugs
Many writers would love to use words the way Alex Rodriguez plays baseball. And many have availed themselves of “performance-enhancing drugs” (PEDs), but writers’ culture is such that there will […]
August 20, 2013
Café of the Future
The Long Now Foundation is hiring volunteers to curate their “Manual for Civilization,” a collection of 3500 volumes to be shelved in the Long Now Salon. Founded in “01996,” Long […]
August 16, 2013
The Anthology Blues, or, A Very Modest Proposal
It’s like the long-delayed return of a plague we were sure had taken its last victims: the debate over the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry has risen, zombie-like. Just […]
August 14, 2013
Getting ready for classes
Hard to believe, but summer is drawing toward an end and we are edging closer to a new academic year. As usual in the fall, I’ll be teaching an Advanced […]
July 31, 2013
Life is Like a Comic Book
I was raised on comic books. I never read them, but I did flip through them, since my dad gave me one of those long white boxes full of them. […]
July 17, 2013
But There Are Also Unknown Unknowns
Gabriel Roth’s restaurant reviews, written between 2003 and 2006 for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, are as good as any I’ve ever read. They’re the kind of pieces you go […]