May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
April 12, 2015
Compassion in FOX’s King of the Hill and William Wordsworth
Compassion, momentarily, became part of the national conversation in 2013 after novelist George Saunders focused on the term in his popular commencement speech at Syracuse University. Saunders urged the graduating class to […]
December 16, 2014
Patterns of Poetic Revolution
One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have […]
December 10, 2014
Earl Sweatshirt’s Bookshelf, and Time
Bookshelves do funny things to time. In a recent clip, rapper Earl Sweatshirt lets FADER TV tour his Hollywood bachelor pad. In a Cribs send-up, he guides the camera through […]
November 16, 2012
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]