A Momentary Taste of Being

On "Neutral Tones" A masterpiece of a poem and inspiration for one of my earlier poems also inspired by the language of Finnegans Wake.

I have two more zombie books to read--one of which I'll report on shortly, and one that should follow quickly behind after I get an SF I've been dying to read out of the way.  But this is a way station report. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the literature of zombies (as opposed to the vast majority of mash-ups and gore-fests that celebrate the Zombie as an object of terror) is primarily a literature of anger.  Or so it seems on brief exposure.  In each of the two novels (admittedly a very small sample, but what I'm generating right now is a working hypothesis) that take the subject as more that a gore-fest, the primary message has been that zombies act according to nature.  Nature red in tooth and claw, but nature none-the-less.  In each case as well, the acts perpetrated by those who can choose to go against nature are by far and away worse than those that come from beings acting as beings. What do we infer or read from this?  One can app...

Hitchcock's Angles Much of this strikes me as very worked up and not really good interpretive theory.  On the other hand, I am not a scholar nor even a good student of film, so I'll leave it to others who understand the medium better to draw conclusions. Ovaphobia

Some half-formed, less-than-half thought out gropings toward meaning.  To be continued--perhaps. When looking at much modern fiction it often seems that the art of story telling has been lost. One reads through reams of metafictional games and post modern pandering to self.  Ulysses does not really tell a story, but collectively, we seem to have forgotten that meaningful books without story are the exception, not the rule. Literature as game-playing has a long and interesting history--but like modern art and much of classical music in the last 50 years, one begins to feel tired of the avant-garde blather of the modern literary world.  Is Paul Auster really all that?  What about something like The Interrogative Mood--is that really meaningful or powerful or memorable fiction.  Even Jennifer Egan's powerpoint display of text as part of A Visit to the Goon Squad --what is that all about, really--how does it really enhance the story.  I am surprised and a ...

via Books Inq: Influence: An Exercise in Three Wanders

Robert Frost and the post-modernists An article that considers at length Frost's stand on authorship--who is the author?

Banville reads Kafka's The Trial

The Canon, or not?

Fred looks, in some detail, at Quatrain XXXV--very much worth a peek.

Parsing Quashed Quotatoes   for commentary Michael Wood on the Wake

"All of Humanity"

" Who is the Emperor of Ice Cream? Stephen King used lines from the poem as an epigraph to one of his books, and I fell in love with Wallace Stevens's poetry.  Perhaps in high school we had some brief exposure to something like "The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (which, by the way, a junior or senior may enjoy, but cannot under any circumstances understand in a way that has any meaning or reality for them); however, it was encountering this poem in a Stephen King book that pushed me out to the stores to find Wallace Stevens, who has been ever since a life-time companion and a good guide.

Hitchens on the Washington Novel at LOA

Or is it good poets, bad critics?

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 .

"Novels Don't Need to be 'Nice'"

Amy Hungerford lectures on Blood Meridian

Comments both on the phrase and on Franzen's Freedom .

Writers as critics--not a pretty picture

Louise Bogan's "Medusa", a short and lovely poem, analyzed at Poet Tree