Autobiography
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From the “new non-fiction” shelf of the Boulder Public Libary, I borrowed On Being Jewish Now (2024). It’s an anthology of a hundred or so short pieces written in response to the savagery of October 7, 2023. The essay are repetitively, predictably sorrowful, indignant and nationalistic. I skimmed my way through three hundred emotional pages.…
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After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest…
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Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" — perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say. Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused…
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Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by…
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I first encountered the word "text" — as did everyone else of my cohort — as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual…
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Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter…
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I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but…
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After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so.…
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I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time? Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart…
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I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023). The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean? (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm…