Reviews and News:
Peter Hitchens on the fiction of Oxford: “Oxford grows stories as other places grow apples or mushrooms. It produces more melancholy than it can consume locally…Here is Thomas Hardy’s unhappy Jude Fawley, turned away from the world of learning by insolent snobbery. Here are Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, soaked, dispirited, exhausted and anxious to get back to the modern joys of London. Here is Max Beerbohm’s dangerously beautiful Zuleika Dobson, causing beads of horrified sweat to form on the foreheads of the stone Emperors in Broad Street as she passes, for they know the doom she brings. Here is Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder, looking for the low door in the wall which will take him to Alice’s enchanted garden, or something like it…and here is Alice herself.”
A history of England’s folk songs: “By the early 17th century chapbooks and broadsides containing both the words and music to popular ballads, catches and glees were circulating the countryside courtesy of a busy network of pedlars. This isn’t to deny that oral transmission was key in disseminating folk songs around a community in which few people could read, but the fact remains that the material was just as likely to have first slipped into the village on a piece of paper rather than on the tip of someone’s tongue. The oral tradition, which for the late Victorian collectors was a kind of assay of a song’s authenticity, was actually a much inkier, print-smeared practice than anyone could quite bear to admit.”
Michael Jackson was a Frank O’Hara fan: “In her new book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, the famed editor Tina Brown offers a selection of journal entries she wrote during the ‘roaring ’80s,’…In one entry, Brown describes meeting Michael Jackson at the height of his fame, and being a bit shocked to discover ‘his surprising literary tastes’: ‘I asked him how he comes down to earth after his incredible live performances. “I read,” he said, “in my hotel room. O. Henry sometimes. Frank O’Hara.”’
Robyn Sarah’s “exquisitely untrendy” poetry.
Patrick Kurp rereads Richard Wilbur: “Like his mentor, model, and friend Robert Frost, Wilbur has been routinely misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike. To some among the former, he is safe and wholesome, like oatmeal. To his more emphatic critics, Wilbur commits heresy with every act of elegance, wit, and declaration of faith in the cosmic order. In this sense he was a well-mannered outsider, a fugitive from fashion. If Wilbur, who died October 14 at age 96, ever wrote a mediocre poem — one that is perfunctory, careless, egocentric, or empty — I couldn’t remember having read it. After his death, I resolved to read his Collected Poems 1943–2004 sequentially, cover to cover, wishing to reassess his accomplishment. After all, reading a writer attentively is the truest, most respectful act of criticism… My goal was to avoid the chestnuts and pay attention to the poems less well remembered.”
Essay of the Day:
What does Shakespeare’s Coriolanus tell us today? Daniel Ritchie in Public Discourse:
“Coriolanus has become an increasingly popular play among critics with dual expertise in political philosophy and literary study, from Harry Jaffa and Allan Bloom (Shakespeare’s Politics, 1964) through Paul Cantor (Shakespeare’s Rome,1976) down to Pierre Manent’s recent essay in First Things (‘The Tragedy of the Republic,’ May 2017).
“Unfortunately, many theatrical productions present the play’s main problem as stemming from just one of three alternatives: the class divide between patricians and plebians; the personal drama of Coriolanus’s relation to his mother or his Volscian military nemesis, Aufidius; or finally, Coriolanus’s undeniable pride, which prevents him from putting off his military character in order to speak and act as a republican politician must (think the film version of Patton running for president in 1952 instead of Eisenhower). But none of these alternatives captures Shakespeare’s achievement: something else is rotten in the state of the republic.”
Photo: Gemmipass
Poem: Bruce Bond, “Ex Nihilo”
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