Not Literature Debate

Start the Not Literature Debate with Anthony

And continue to his source

I haven't fully assimilated the arguments (and I will), but I have said before that arbitrary denigration of a genre or even of a particular work is less about supporting literature than it is about bolstering one's own ego and weltanschauung.

Comments

  1. FredNovember 15, 2010 at 11:33 AM

    Steven,

    chuckle. . .

    Every time I read an article such as this one, I thank whatever deities that exist that I'm only a reader and not a scholar or critic and that I don't have to "grapple" with these issues, but just pick up something that looks interesting and turn the page.

    ReplyDelete
  2. StevenNovember 15, 2010 at 1:31 PM

    Dear Fred,

    It is wonderful, isn't it?

    I used to grapple with them and decided that it is rather like that song in "Song of Music" "How do you solve a problem like lit crit? How do you catch a wave upon the sand?"

    shalom,

    Steven

    ReplyDelete
  3. FredNovember 18, 2010 at 1:46 AM

    Or

    What is the sound of one hand clapping?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take
Read more