Reviews and News:
Edith Wharton’s Summer revisited: “There are stories, most notably Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, in which the protagonist is undone by reading too many stories. Charity’s problem is that she’s read too few.”
The art of paperbacks.
Rachel Hadas reviews Mary Jo Salter’s The Surveyors: “Most poets these days lack a talent for or even interest in plot. Many poets also lack Salter’s wide range, her patient interest in detail, her easy authority with form, and — what to call it? — her wisdom: the understanding or knowledge that, if you’re lucky, comes with years.”
The Institute of Transportation Engineers Journal publishes an article on road safety by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of Iran. “Soon after the article appeared in print, however, it disappeared from the journal’s web site entirely.”
Memphis theatre will no longer screen Gone with the Wind.
Eudora Welty’s photographs: “Welty’s portraits—of farmers, churchgoers, porch sitters, and sharecroppers—reveal the same quality as her writing: an extraordinary ability to empathize with people from all walks of life.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Adam Kirsch writes about the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa:
“If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for ‘person,’ and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. ‘I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,’ he writes in one poem. ‘I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.’
“In his magnum opus, The Book of Disquiet—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: ‘Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.’
“This might sound like an unpromising basis for a body of creative work that is now considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century. If a writer is nothing, does nothing, and has nothing to say, what can he write about? But, like the big bang, which took next to nothing and turned it into a cosmos, the expansive power of Pessoa’s imagination turned out to need very little raw material to work with. Indeed, he belongs to a distinguished line of European writers, from Giacomo Leopardi, in the early nineteenth century, to Samuel Beckett, in the twentieth, for whom nullity was a muse. The ultimate futility of all accomplishment, the fascination of loneliness, the way sorrow colors our perception of the world: Pessoa’s insight into his favorite themes was purchased at a high price, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. ‘To find one’s personality by losing it—faith itself subscribes to that sense of destiny,’ he wrote.”
Photos: Harvey. You can help with relief efforts by donating to the American Red Cross here.
Poem: James Hamby, “Teutonic Torches”
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