It came to my attention while skimming the Women’s Review of Books that poet Maxine Kumin had died (nearly a year ago). I know nothing of Kumin’s work but this memorial piece by Robin Becker…
Browsing Category Literature/Arts
The Work of Language
This is from Dan McCall’s preface to the Norton Critical ed. of Melville’s Short Novels. ********* He read voraciously; in Moby-Dick he said, “I have swam through libraries.” When he began to read Shakespeare, for…
Swerve Me Ye Cannot!
From Lecture #6 from John Searle’s 1984 Reith Lectures, “Minds, Brains and Science.” If libertarianism, that is the thesis of free will, were true, it appears we would have to make some really radical changes…
To Fart and Think of Dante
It’s hard not to love this paragraph from an essay on the poet Walter Lowenfels by Jim Burns. Lowenfels was clearly at home in this kind of atmosphere. With a friend, Michael Fraenkel, he started…
Tied to Your Shared Fate
[In which we conclude that Stubb’s version of the monkey-rope is evil.] What is Equality? The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities. What is Equity? The quality of being fair or…
Let No One Be Called (Updated: Audio)
Let No One Be Called (3:11) Perhaps it is better to have no legends. Let there be no letters composed into rigid words. Let no words be graven onto replicating presses. Let the forms be broken…
Law On Her Brow
One would guess that “The Portent” is far and away Herman Melville’s most well-known poem (perhaps the only poem of his remembered or read by anyone other than an academic). It opens his book Battle-Pieces…
The Ungraspable (Extractable) Phantom
“But the list is artful…” (Harold Beaver) Melville opens Moby Dick, often considered the greatest book written by an American, with a list of extracts. That is, our greatest author offers as opening gambit the…
In Silent Misconstrual Walks the Con
Coda to “Briggflatts” (1966) by Basil Bunting. A strong song tows us, long earsick. Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know. Night, float us. Offshore wind, shout, ask the…
The Errant Goes Audible: The Custom House on WFHB
I am hosting a radio show and podcast on WFHB, community radio, in Bloomington, IN, called The Custom House that will air on Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. through August and continue as a podcast. The…