March 19, 2008
Songs about literature
After listening to “Saul Bellow” by Sufjan Stevens, a friend and I talked about how many songs we knew based on books and authors. I came up with a short […]
March 18, 2008
Carl Phillips’ Laurels
The last two pieces of the upcoming Spring issue of the Kenyon Review are excellent essays about poetry: one is a roundup review written by David Wojahn about recent selected […]
March 17, 2008
Are You Guilty?
Reading a perspicacious essay on the craft of writing can be a little like stepping on the scale at the doctor’s office: you know that what you’re about to learn […]
March 17, 2008
A Salad Remembered
Galbraith Crump is a distinguished renaissance scholar, the author and editor of multiple volumes, a professor of English for many years at Kenyon College, and a mentor to many an […]
March 16, 2008
Random Notes from the Past Week
Let’s start a Fantasy Novel League: Baseball season’s just around the corner. Though I love baseball, I don’t follow it closely. I’m just a sucker for dime-a-dog nights, double headers, […]
March 14, 2008
Harpo Reads!
I have not, since last week, been able to stop thinking about Harpo Marx. The other night I saw A Night at the Opera, and while it didn’t excite me […]
March 13, 2008
On Monsters
The thing about monsters is they’re never entirely alive or dead. Fans of the recently departed Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, might taxonomize certain of them as undead, […]
March 11, 2008
The Joys of Local Reading #3
This past week I was contacted by some good friends of mine who are pretty serious book collectors. Through a couple they knew, they had been invited to visit a […]
March 10, 2008
Documentary Poetry II: Virgil’s Georgics
A 2000-line farming manual in verse, coming at you from the year 29 B.C. Spenser famously called it “the best poem, by the best poet,” yet the task of copying […]
March 9, 2008
A Sneak Peek!
One of the blessings of being a blogger for The Kenyon Review is getting an advance copy of the newest issue delivered to my in-box a few weeks before it […]
March 8, 2008
The waiting, in the immortal words of Tom Petty, is the hardest part.
Last summer, during a Young Writers session, I discovered a story I needed to tell. (In the same way that teaching and writing are not about us, I strongly believe […]
March 7, 2008
The Marx Brothers Are Remarkably Funny.
It is good to come to wonderful things late in life. I hope this is not late in life. I am twenty-seven. Why have I never watched a Marx Brothers […]