Uncategorized
-
Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks; Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice; William Shakespeare, Pericles; Bill Schutt, Bite; William T. Taylor, Hoof Beats, how horses shaped human history; Laura Brown, The Counterhuman Imaginary; Mary Antin, The Promised Land; Marcia Bjornerud, Turning to Stone; Leonard Cassuto, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter; Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History; Elisha Cohn, Still Life; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; Peter Bogucki, The…
-
I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade. When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air.…
-
When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature. No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it. As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere. If…
-
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…
-
My series of posts called Words of My Life was originally inspired by a Federico Roncoroni's Sillabario della Memoria, viaggio sentimentale tra le parole amate. Roncoroni's book is a unique and I think original kind of autobiography — a history (voyage, he says) of words that have been been loved by him. Words of My…
-
Folks who weren't there can hardly appreciate how thoroughly the nation and neighborhood into which I was born was baseball-saturated. In the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of the fabled Dodgers, baseball was Brooklyn and Brooklyn was the world — of this there was, nor could be, any doubt. Baseball was the all-encompassing medium…
-
Although The Magnificent Ambersons was first published in 1918, it was still admired and almost canonical in the 1950s when I was coming to awareness. It was the sort of unchallenging social realism novel in the Sinclair Lewis or John Marquand tradition that was then school-and-societyy approved. Did I read it then? I can't say…
-
A dvandva compound is a formation in which two individual nouns are joined to form a new word. Wik offers the example "singer-songwriter." I think that "barber-surgeon" is therefore a dvandva, although I am confident that I am the first person ever to denominate it as such. Anaptyxis is a term in linguistics for the…
-
To most readers of this blague, Norman Podhoretz is a nonentity, but for a while there, he was a big deal in certain intellectual circles. His youthful autobiography, Making It (1967), elicited howls of indignation. Nowadays, it's impossible not to read Making It retrospectively, because it's undeniable that the author, who began life as liberal…
-
An "ongon," frequently depicted, it turns out, in Ice Age Mongolian art, is a type of shamanistic spirit. When a shaman dies, he becomes an ongon. My dictionary says that the plural of ongon is ongod, but the prehistoric art book in which I found this word prefers ongones. I doubt I'll have regular occasion…