July 7, 2012
On Laurent Binet’s HHhH
I sought out with immense eagerness the English translation of Laurent Binet’s Prix-Goncourt-winning novel, HHhH. This book concerns Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. I had […]
July 7, 2012
Two visions of the city
1. The City and the City by China Miéville. (Be advised: though I would not, some might think this description a tiny bit of a spoiler.) Two distinct city-states, Besźel […]
July 5, 2012
A Humument: the hierarchy of sight
The question is almost too nebulous to ask, and so grows muted in critical consciousness: How does a book’s typography—abstracted as a representative component of its materiality—affect, or effect, anything […]
July 5, 2012
Public Confession: I Covet Terza Rima
Of all the rhyme schemes out there, the one I covet is terza rima, verse’s triple-double, the braided tercet. I suspect I love its interlock, its trinities that couple […]
July 2, 2012
The Jack of All Modes
When you publish a novel, there’s often a flurry of interviews over the ensuing months. The interviewers repeat questions independently of one another. It’s an interesting indicator of what people […]
June 30, 2012
“The real world we think we inhabit”
“We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit” is the old line by Feyerabend, discovered sometime in college, that often […]
June 26, 2012
A Humument: re-vision as vocation
Though unspoken, the po-biz (short for “poetry business,” as it’s jocularly called) has formulas and definitions. And it has schedules. Among them: if you’re a new poet, you publish chapbooks […]
June 24, 2012
Riff on Goethe
Versatility is the least of poetic virtues. It may seem an impressive sign of poetic prowess to be able to turn out a poem on any subject, in any of […]
June 22, 2012
A Humument: a lesson in un-reading (ii)
The adjective boustrophedon in Greek translates to “as an ox turns in plowing”: from right to left, from left to right, and the from right to left again. And so […]
June 18, 2012
Worlds within worlds (or, the regional city)
Last week I had occasion to visit Charleston, West Virginia, for the first time. The occasion: a needed stopping point on a drive from the eastern shore of Maryland to […]
June 12, 2012
Reason Not the Need
I do not need religion. I can plug that hole with anything: family, literature, music, medicine. I can distract myself and go along and never look up and die quite […]
June 11, 2012
A Humument: a lesson in un-reading (i)
(This post is the first segment in a series on Tom Phillips’s A Humument. The others—including an interview with Phillips—will appear later this month.) Though billed as “a treated Victorian […]